Unpopular Opinion: Bitcoin is simple. I could have written it, but I didn't because I was looking in the wrong place. A lot of people could have written it, and source material was public (cryptography mailing list). The author of bitcoin is just like the rest of us. Not a genius
-
Agree. Weren't there other brilliant people working on the same exact problem for several years (even decades?) before Satoshi came up with bitcoin? Like
@adam3us and@NickSzabo4 ? OT seems like a troll-tweet....
There is tons of bizarre fantasy in the OT, but one of the things wrong with it is that a non-official & decentralized currency was politically & economically a very fringe idea. All economists of all stripes, including Austrian, who heard the idea either ignored or rejected it.
-
-
It also required advanced computer science that flew in the face of traditional proofs that said essentially that trust-minimizing a decentralized application was impossible. The vast majority of laypeople and even some computer scientists rejected these ideas on such grounds.
-
The intersection of people who knew the proofs applied only to absolute, not astronomically probable, consensus & people who believed in very unusual economic & political ideas was minutely small. We were on the internet when it was far smaller than today & could find each other.
-
“No amount of investigation of yours would succeed in attaining the proof, and yet, once seen, you immediately believe you would have discovered it; by so smooth and so rapid a path he leads you to the conclusion required.” —Plutarch, on Archimedes http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Archimedes.html …
-
These preposterous displays of 20/20 hindsight are nothing new, alas. I wrote about this back in 2011 https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-ye-so-long.html …
-
That 2011 post is a great read, love it. If you only read one thing in this storm of disagreement read the link above. My motivations are about not deifying people, not really claiming I could have done it. Also Nick Szabo called me preposterous, do I get a cookie?
- 1 more reply
New conversation -
-
-
it's actually one of the BEST things about bitcoin, IMO. If you want to understand it, you first have to understand the legacy monetary system... which almost nobody does.
<enter rabbit-hole here>Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
-
A lot of people could have invented Calculus and derived the Laws of Universal Gravitation too - but the one who did it went by the name of Isaac Newton (and apologies to
@BobMcElrath) he was IN NO WAY “just like the rest of us.”Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.