# Qubic: The Long Version (QC, Qubic Church)

## Qubic: The Long Version — Chapter 1. Murdoch’s Gas

Source: https://qubic.church/books/qubic-the-long-version/01-murdochs-gas
Author: QC · Publisher: Qubic Church · 2026

Useful waste.

There’s a kind of thing you learn to see one day — and then you wonder how you didn’t notice it before. One of those things is the difference between work and its waste.

Take any furnace. Something burns inside it, something gets heated, and the desired product comes out. But besides the product, there’s always something else left over. Smoke. Steam. Smell. Noise. Heat going off into the walls. For centuries people treated those leftovers as garbage — the inevitable companion of useful work, something that had to be disposed of somehow or simply released into the air.

Sometimes a person comes along who looks at this garbage more attentively than the rest. And asks a strange question: what if we don’t release it?

This whole book is about a question of that kind, asked with respect to one particular kind of garbage. But to understand why this question matters, we first have to tell two old stories — about coal, and about the man who figured out how to light cities with it.

Both happened in England.

### 1709. Coalbrookdale

In the west of England, in the county of Shropshire, there is a valley with the river Severn flowing along its floor. The place is green, hilly, not particularly remarkable. In the early eighteenth century, a man named Abraham Darby moved there — he was in his thirty-second year, he was a Quaker, and he already had a notable record in industry behind him.

Quaker — that’s an important detail, even if at first glance not the flashiest. The Society of “Friends” (as the Quakers called themselves) in the England of that time was a community whose members did not wear military uniforms, did not swear oaths in court, avoided ostentatious luxury, and took honesty in their dealings very seriously. Quaker dynasties of craftsmen were famous for the fact that their products weren’t counterfeited and their prices weren’t inflated. Darby was part of such a dynasty — and grew up inside an ethic in which reputation was worth more than momentary profit. This detail is worth remembering: we’ll come back to it when we talk about Bitcoin. Darby had a problem, and it was common to all of English metallurgy at the time. Cast iron was smelted using charcoal — specially charred wood that burns hotter than ordinary firewood. But by 1700 England had cut down most of its forests. Charcoal was getting more expensive, there was less and less of it, and foundries were closing one after another. A country that depended on iron for everything — from plows to cannons — found itself facing what today would be called a resource crisis.

Coal in England did exist. There was plenty of it. But cast iron couldn’t be smelted with it — sulfur and other impurities ruined the metal. Iron made on coal came out brittle, unfit for serious work.

Here it’s worth saying how Darby arrived at his solution, because this wasn’t the feat of a lone genius. Darby had spent several years before that working in the copper industry in Bristol, and before that he had apprenticed with a Quaker who made malt kilns for brewing. In both copper smelting and malt production, the technique of heating coal without access to air had already been used — out came coke, a fuel without sulfur, which burned cleanly and steadily. In copper smelting it worked well. In iron smelting, no one had tried it systematically before Darby.

Darby did two things. The first — he transferred a known technological technique from one industry to another. The second — he came to Coalbrookdale, where at hand he had at the same time low-sulfur coal, deposits of iron ore not far below the surface, and a fast river to power the bellows. By January 1709 he produced his first commercial cast iron, smelted on coke.

No one wrote down Darby’s exact words when he first saw the finished casting from the coke furnace. But the consequences of that moment rewrote the next two hundred years of world history. Bridges. Railways. Steamships. The frames of skyscrapers. Tanks. Engines. All the iron of industrial civilization — from the first cast-iron beam to the last rail of the Trans-Siberian — traces back to the fact that an experienced Quaker copperindustrialist guessed that a technique that works in one production can be transferred to another, where no one had yet tried it.

That’s the first story.

### 1792. Cornwall

More than eighty years after Darby, on the other side of England, an engineer by the name of William Murdoch was at work — a Scotsman, the son of a small farmer, by then thirty-seven years old. He served at the company Boulton & Watt — the very one that built James Watt’s steam engines. Murdoch had been sent to Cornwall to look after the engines installed at the tin mines.

He lived in the small town of Redruth, in a small house. And here’s what Murdoch noticed one day.

When you make coke — that same coke that Darby learned to produce eighty years earlier — a great deal comes out of the coal during heating. The coke stays in the furnace. And outside, into the air, a thick combustible gas escapes. It smells of sulfur and burning, looks like a dirty cloud, and everyone who worked with coke furnaces fought with this gas: it’s poisonous, sometimes it explodes, and it stinks up the whole neighborhood. People tried to dissipate it, lead it away, so it wouldn’t get in the way. Murdoch collected this gas into a pipe.

In 1792 he began his experiments. By 1794 he had a working system: in an iron retort in his back yard he heated coal, the gas went through a pipe into the house, and at the end of the pipe stood a simple burner. The first pipe for the gas line was an old gun barrel. He lit it — and got a clean bright flame, without smoke, without soot, much brighter than candles or oil lamps. On an evening in 1794, Murdoch sat in his living room in Redruth by the light of what everyone else considered garbage.

What happens next is a curious thing that comes up in the history of technology more often than people tend to think.

Murdoch invented the system. But he was not the one who commercialized it. In 1802, when the Peace of Amiens was being celebrated, Murdoch managed to convince the management of Boulton & Watt to put on a public demonstration — and that evening the facade of the Soho Foundry in Birmingham was lit by gas. The town came running to look. It was a triumph. But Murdoch, as his contemporaries wrote, “by character kept to the shadows,” and his employers were in no hurry to patent the discovery. Meanwhile another man, Frederick Albert Winsor — a German by origin who had moved to London — had read a paper by the Frenchman Lebon on combustible gas, saw the potential, and began giving lectures at the Lyceum Theatre in London. Winsor was a brilliant promoter and a poor engineer. Contemporaries wrote that “he knew almost nothing of chemistry and was so incompetent in mechanics that he could not give instructions for the building of apparatus.” But he knew how to convince investors and how to gather a crowd.

In January 1807 it was Winsor, not Murdoch, who lit the world’s first gas streetlamps — on Pall Mall in London. By the fourth of June that same year, on the birthday of King George III, he put on a whole show: along the wall between Mall street and the gardens of Carlton House, thirty-two gas burners lit up, connected by a thin tin tube. The crowd stood there until midnight.

The first industrial factory lit entirely by gas — the Phillips & Lee mill in Manchester — was put into service by Murdoch’s hand only in 1805–1806. By that time Winsor was already drafting an act to create the world’s first gas company. By the 1820s, forty thousand gas streetlamps were burning in London. By the middle of the century, gas lighting stood across the entire Western world.

Murdoch did not patent his discovery and died in 1839 a respected engineer, known in narrow circles. The name “father of gas lighting” stayed with him in the history of technology, but the commercial empire was built by a man who didn’t invent the technology — he sold it. This split between the inventor and the one who carries the invention to a mass market is a pattern we’ll meet in this book more than once. That’s the second story.

### What they have in common

Pay attention to the structure.

Darby didn’t invent coal. Coal had been mined in England for centuries before him. Darby didn’t invent the technique of coking either — it was already in use in copper smelting and in brewing. Darby transferred a known technology from one industry to another, where no one had tried it systematically before. Before him, coal in metallurgy was useless. After him, coal became the foundation of industry.

Murdoch didn’t invent combustible gas. Gas had been coming out of coke furnaces from the very moment Darby first lit a furnace in 1709. For eighty-three years the gas went up into the sky over England, and nobody paid any attention. Murdoch didn’t create a new resource — he saw value in what everyone else was throwing away. And one more detail, which may seem unimportant for now but later turns out to be key. Neither Darby nor Murdoch destroyed what came before them. Charcoal kept being produced and used long after Darby. Oil lamps and candles kept burning long after gas lighting became available. The new technology didn’t replace the old by decree from above. It simply began to work in parallel — and people gradually crossed over when they saw it was more advantageous for them.

In parallel, not instead.

Remember that phrase.

### How this relates to Bitcoin

Now let’s look at our own time.

In 2008 a person (or group of people) under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published a nine-page document describing a way to create digital money without a bank in the middle. A few months later, in January 2009, he launched a system called Bitcoin. The fundamental difficulty Satoshi solved was known in computer science as “the double-spending problem”: how to make sure that a digital file — money — can’t be copied and spent twice, without a central arbitrator watching the accounts. The solution was elegant. All participants in the network jointly maintain a ledger in which transactions are recorded. Each page of this ledger is protected by a mathematical problem that’s very expensive to solve — you have to spend a colossal amount of electricity and computation. Whoever solves the problem first is rewarded with new bitcoins. And since the solution takes enormous resources, rewriting pages that have already been recorded becomes practically impossible: you’d have to outspend the entire network. This mechanism is called Proof-of-Work.

This was a discovery of the Darby class. Before Satoshi, it was thought that digital money without an intermediary was in principle impossible. After Satoshi, it exists, has been working for its sixteenth year, is more strongly protected than any bank vault in the world, and has a market capitalization larger than the GDP of most countries. But this solution has one feature that few people pay attention to. The mathematical problems that Bitcoin’s miners solve are, in themselves, meaningless. A miner takes a list of transactions, adds a random number to it, runs it through a cryptographic function, and looks at whether the result has enough zeros at the beginning. If not — he adds another random number, runs it through again, checks again. And so on, billions of times per second, until he gets lucky. All the energy that gets spent in that moment — and as of 2026 that’s about 170 terawatt-hours a year, roughly as much as Poland or Ukraine consumes — goes into one thing: picking a random number that meets the condition.

There’s no by-product benefit from this picking. No one uses the results of these computations. No one needs them, except the network itself.

Bitcoin is Darby. The first great discovery of its class.

And what comes out into the air around Bitcoin — billions of computational cycles that nobody needs — is Murdoch’s gas of 2009, which no one has yet collected into a pipe.

### What exactly comes out into the air

It’s worth saying more concretely what kind of “gas” is being talked about. The modern Bitcoin network consists of hundreds of thousands of specialized devices — ASIC miners. These are computers sharpened for one single operation: hashing using the SHA-256 algorithm. They can do nothing else, and nothing else is required of them. Each such device makes trillions of attempts per second to pick the necessary number.

If you add up all the work of all the miners in the world, you get computing power comparable to the combined power of all the supercomputers in the planet’s research centers, multiplied by thousands. This is one of the largest computational resources humanity has ever assembled into a single structure.

And this entire resource is spent on one action: picking random numbers to fit a hash condition.

Imagine you have a million highly educated specialists — scientists, engineers, doctors, architects — and you make them spend the whole day flipping a coin and writing down whether it came up heads or tails. They handle the task excellently, the coin really is being flipped, the results really are being written down. But all their education, their experience, their abilities — go unused. Each of them could, in the same time, write a scientific paper, design a bridge, treat ten patients, solve a hard engineering problem. Instead — the coin.

Roughly that’s what’s happening in Bitcoin. Computing power that could be solving real problems — training AI models, modeling the climate, searching for new medicines — is directed at picking random numbers.

Does it protect the network? Yes. Does it work? Yes. Is there a structural flaw in this? Absolutely. And this flaw is not Satoshi’s mistake, just as the abundant gas from the coke furnaces wasn’t Darby’s mistake. It’s simply a consequence of the fact that the first great discovery rarely notices its own by-products.

### Under the hood. GHash.IO, summer 2014

There’s one episode from the early history of Bitcoin that’s useful to break down — because it foreshadows much of what will happen later in this book.

In 2013–2014, the largest mining pool in Bitcoin became GHash.IO. A pool is an association of miners who put their computations together and split the reward in proportion to contribution. GHash.IO grew quickly. In January 2014 its share approached 50 percent, the community panicked, some of the miners voluntarily left, and the share temporarily decreased. But in summer everything repeated in a far more serious form. From eleven o’clock in the morning of June twelfth to ten o’clock in the morning of June thirteenth, 2014 — for nearly twenty-four hours straight — GHash.IO held approximately 55 percent of Bitcoin’s total hashrate. Not 51. Fifty-five.

For Bitcoin, this is a catastrophic figure. If a single participant controls more than half of the network’s computing power, he can theoretically rewrite the history of transactions in his own interests, double-spend the same coins, block someone’s transfers. The network ceases to be decentralized at the moment majority control appears. People expected an attack. They expected exploitation. They expected the end of the decentralized era.

Nothing happened.

Here’s what happened. The pool’s owner, the exchange CEX.IO, published a statement saying it had no intention of attacking the network. The key Bitcoin developers, academic researchers, and large holders simultaneously began a pressure campaign: miners were urged to leave GHash.IO for other pools, CEX.IO’s reputation was publicly dissected in the press, the price of bitcoin sank by about five percent over the course of a few hours. On July ninth, 2014, a roundtable was held in London with representatives of all the major mining pools and equipment manufacturers. At that roundtable it was proposed that GHash.IO voluntarily limit its share with a ceiling of 39.99 percent. On July sixteenth the pool publicly agreed to this restriction and called on the other pools to do the same. GHash.IO’s share began to decline. By the end of summer it had fallen to thirty-five percent. By 2016 the pool had closed.

Why didn’t a pool that held the technical ability to destroy Bitcoin in its hands use that ability?

The official answer: reputation, trust, long-term interests. Breaking the network you yourself earn from is irrational.

That’s the right answer. But it’s not the full one. Because “breaking the network you yourself earn from is irrational” is not a self-evident truth. It’s the consequence of very specific structural conditions. What exactly has to be set up so that such behavior becomes irrational? Why does it work in some systems and not in others? Why did community pressure in July 2014 work — while in other cases, with other networks, pressure doesn’t work and attacks happen?

These questions were answered in 1980 by a political scientist from Michigan. His name was Robert Axelrod, and what he discovered explains not only the behavior of GHash.IO but almost everything this book is about.

But that’s for the next chapter.

### The promise we begin with

Before we close the chapter, allow me to formulate what awaits us further. The story of coal, which I began to tell, is in fact longer than two scenes — Darby and Murdoch. It consists of five phases, each of which was opened by its own person, and each of which made what had previously been considered waste into the main product of the next industry.

At first, coal was simply burned for heat — and was considered a poor fuel, because it stinks.

Then Darby transferred the coking technique from copper smelting to iron — and everything that came out during the production of coke was considered garbage. Then Murdoch collected the gas — and everything that was left over from the production of gas was considered garbage.

Then in 1856 an eighteen-year-old chemist named William Perkin, trying to synthesize a malaria drug, accidentally discovered that synthetic dyes could be made out of this “garbage” — and on those grew the entire chemical industry of the twentieth century. Aspirin, the first plastics, the first antibiotics, the first polymers — all out of what had been considered the waste of gas production.

And in the end, by the middle of the twentieth century, coal stopped being called fuel. People began to call it feedstock — raw material. From one and the same coal they learned to extract simultaneously coke, gas, tar, sulfur, ammonia, and dozens of chemical compounds. Each output went into its own industry. The heat from burning the leftovers became the cheapest and least valuable result.

What happened to coal is what’s now beginning to happen, with us, to computation. Bitcoin in this story plays the role of Darby’s coke — the first structural breakthrough that showed that compute can be turned into something valuable (the protection of digital money). It was a discovery of historic scale, and we’ll be unpacking its consequences in this book more than once. But just like coke in 1709, Bitcoin uses its resource one-dimensionally: compute turns into hashes, hashes turn into security, all the rest goes off into the air. For three hundred years humanity has been learning to see that around the main operation — coke, iron, hashes — there are streams that are considered garbage only until the person comes along who looks at them. The Murdoch step — when people start collecting what until now they’ve been throwing away — falls, in digital history, on 2022. That is Qubic. And it’s one of those engineering ideas about which people later write “how did no one do this earlier” — it’s that logical in hindsight and that radical at the moment of appearance. Because Qubic doesn’t try to compete with Bitcoin on Bitcoin’s own field. It makes a move that didn’t exist on this field at all. What exactly Qubic “collects into a pipe,” how it’s set up technically, and why it works — is the main subject of this book. We’ll get to it gradually, chapter by chapter, because explaining it fast is impossible: the idea looks simple only after all the layers under it have been broken down.

And then — if everything goes as planned by the people who are building Qubic — what awaits us is the third step. The same one that happened to coal in the twentieth century, when it ceased to be “fuel” and came to be called feedstock, raw material for dozens of industries at once. If Qubic delivers what it promises, computation will pass into the same kind of state: out of one and the same compute cycle, security, artificial intelligence, economic value, and several more things we don’t yet know how to formulate today will be extracted simultaneously. This is an ambition of roughly the same scale as Darby’s in 1709 — and how exactly it’s implemented, we’ll see in this book down to the last screw.

The main thing — this step has not yet been made. It’s planned for April 2027. And we’ll honestly see whether it works.

This book is a map between the phases. It will not move linearly, because the story of Qubic itself didn’t move linearly: it was made by different people, in different places, solving different tasks, and only afterwards did it become visible how those tasks add up into one big task.

But before we move on to the Coalbrookdale of the digital age, we have to deal with one simple truth. This truth Murdoch knew intuitively in 1792, and Abraham Darby — did not. Without it, gas lighting would never have become an industry. Without it, Bitcoin would have stopped at hashes. Without it, Qubic wouldn’t work for a single day. This truth is formulated in four lines of code.

It was proven in 1980, in a tournament that fourteen programs took part in.