Useful thought exercise in crypto design: Rewind back to 2005, but take all your knowledge of primitives with you. Given your problem, would you design a blockchain? Probably not.
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Replying to @tqbf
I disagree. I was trying to license the Merkle Tree patents in 2000-01 for microcurrency project at Certicom, and POW was certainly on the agenda. I also tried to license Schnorr. It was largely patents & prior failures of digital currency startups that stopped many of us.
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Replying to @ChristopherA @tqbf
The key innovation of Satoshi was not code — all existed before. Its success was due to a combination of putting it all together into a well balanced package, a brilliant incentive & meme design, and great timing post 2008 crash & expiring patents.
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Replying to @ChristopherA @tqbf
What about POW? It might be an old concept, but wasn’t it extremely off-putting/heretic for computer scientists to be used on such as scale?
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Replying to @designfactotum @tqbf
I don’t think any of us predicted how fast ASIC hardware based PoW would take off.
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Replying to @ChristopherA @tqbf
Dunno who read this back in the day, but "unless the opponent has a very low budget and is thus limited to standard personal computers, it does not make sense to analyze the security or cost of these schemes without reference to machine architecture." http://nakamotoinstitute.org/intrapolynomial-cryptography/#selection-65.282-65.491 …
2 replies 4 retweets 18 likes
That said, although we certainly did think about scalability, you are right that we seldom imagined anything like the growth rates we have witnessed.
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