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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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.
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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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I wonder when and if another similar era of like-minded folks finding each other would or could happen again. The amount of noise and political posturing makes me think it won't happen for a while, if ever again.
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There is quite a bit more haystack to go through to search for the needles, alas.
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Not to mention the level of expertise needed to access communities in that era automatically brought people together who shared technical ability & curiosity to make it happen. I've learned far more studying old USENET posts & mailing lists than anything on modern social media.
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sincere question: do you guys think bitcoin is still "untamed" -- i.e. hasn't been co-opted / brought under the mighty thumb? I've been putting my faith in the "no hard fork" principle. But why has there not been a lot more state resistance?
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Yes it is still untamed, because they have many more easier targets to go after (Libra, for example).
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hmm. Libra seems cut from the legacy cloth to begin with. [centralized, supported by legacy institutions, tame] Are 'they' really treating it as a threat? Just for show, maybe.
End of conversation
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Nick, thanks for the backstory. Satioshi is so fascinating to me. Im sure you get asked this all the time, but who do you think he is/was?
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I believe in the minutely small intersection theory too. It is very difficult and rare to be such an extremely specialized polymath.
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This is one of the coolest statements. Only an OG can say when the Internet was such a small place they could find each other. Every new breakthrough starts with a select few it’s great to watch this one grow.
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I think the Byzantine General's problem had been solved on a theoretical level, but Bitcoin was the first practical software implementation.
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Sounds like you took it personal.
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Ever wonder if it was the person whose thinking (and “scams”) you used to mock? Dude never gets mentioned in the conversation even though he writes exceptionally intuitive english using double spaces, programs in C++, and was known to you, Hal, Wei Dai et al.
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