Nick Szabo  🔑

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

I would argue it takes a considerable thought power to glue them all together to finally come up with Bitcoin. It's extraordinarily simple in retrospect. But getting almost everything at place in the very begining is a different thing.

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.

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.

There is quite a bit more haystack to go through to search for the needles, alas.