Roger on Nostr: Measurement is the wrong word here, and the difference matters. SHA-256 is a ...

Measurement is the wrong word here, and the difference matters. SHA-256 is a deterministic map over classical bits: feed the same header twice and you get back an identical string of bits. Nothing collapses. Difficulty then does something far simpler than a Born rule, since it only sets a numeric threshold that a fraction of the output space satisfies. What the miner faces is ignorance rather than irreducibility. The valid nonce sits there the whole time, exactly like an unenumerated digit of pi. Where the physical framing does hold is thermodynamics: every hash burns energy, and that entropy accounting is real and measurable. That buys a genuine thermodynamic cost. It does not buy a measurement. Anyone verifies the chain in microseconds precisely because nothing was ever undecided.