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
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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.
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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.
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“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 …
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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 …
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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?
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Damn right it did. And thank God you did it.
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I think a third intersection would be the even smaller group of those that chose to actually stand up and take the fight on. Knowing the risks would cause most to never start coding in the first place, let alone posting it on a fairly open mailing list.
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