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Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

It think one of the issues at the core is that all these copy cats have a company or group of people behind them who stand to benefit if their block-chain gets traction. Because there is a lot of value if someone can control the block chain you see all these people trying. Bitcoin's creator on the other hand released their idea into the world and then disappeared. If it is eventually successful they don't stand to benefit any more than any other early adopter.

It kind of reminds me of the early days of the Internet when you didn't get "Internet" you got AOL, or CompuServe, or whatever. All these companies wanted to control the network you connected into with their own branding. Eventually those companies all died and everyone realized that an open Internet with no one company controlling it at the core was the way things would go.

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>It kind of reminds me of the early days of the Internet when you didn't get "Internet" you got AOL, or CompuServe, or whatever. All these companies wanted to control the network you connected into with their own branding. Eventually those companies all died and everyone realized that an open Internet with no one company controlling it at the core was the way things would go.

But aren't we moving back that direction? Now your local business doesn't have a website, they have a facebook.

Turns out? people like walled gardens just fine, it's just that it's not as easy as it looks to build a walled garden and a last mile transport network.

I think there's a distinction. Facebook/Google/etc are built on top of the Internet, which is an open platform.

These companies we're talking about are basically trying to "become the Internet" (not something that builds on top of the Internet)

That's what I was saying about the last mile transport network; I mean, companies today still try; see what several parties keep trying to do with streaming. but they lose over and over.

My point, though, is that people really do like the walled garden idea, even if none of the transport providers alone could have pulled it off.

AOL, Compuserve &c. were built on top of the CCITT standards (V.21 &c.), and the PSTN, which was a fairly open platform post 1968.

I think you misunderstood what i said.

Possibly. Where you trying to indicate a difference between AOL/Compuserve/etc and Facebook/Google/etc? If so, what was it?

I think that most people think that starting a walled garden is easier when it's connected to an internet that everyone is always connected to.

The internet is different from the PSTN network that connected you to CompuServe because if Facebook controlled your last mile the way AOL did, you'd need to coordinate with Facebook when you wanted to upgrade to the latest DSL or cable or what have you. The idea here is that once we got DSL and other "run gigabit ethernet over a series of rusty coat hangers that we have twisted together" level technologies, (I think it's fucking amazing that DSL works at all) in one location, one technology is going to work way better than others, and those other technologies might work way better in other locations. In walla walla you might get twice the speed on compuserve, while in San Jose, AOL might give you 4x the speed, if AOL and CompuServe ran their own networks. (to torture the metaphor)

Of course, if you made the last mile technologies like DSL and Cable switch the endpoints of their connections as quickly as you can switch endpoints on a PSTN, sure, that would have solved the problem, too. But... really, that's kind of what the internet does.

I think this is why walled gardens that include the last mile keep failing; the last mile is largely hard based on physical geography, and the walled gardens are hard based on your preferences, which often don't match up with your geography.

I think that's why walled gardens are doing so much better now than they were in the '90s; these days, one set of companies focuses on the last mile, (and everyone has, comparatively speaking, astoundingly good last-mile access) and then a completely different set of companies can set up walled gardens to cater to various preferences, and the people that like that walled garden don't have to share a geography.

Are you kidding? IIRC satoshi mined huge amounts of Bitcoin before anyone else knew or cared about it.

Not true at all. Satoshi released his paper publicly in Oct. 31st 2008 and the first Bitcoin block was mined Jan. 3rd 2009. The first Bitcoin related submission that I could find on HN was Feb. 2009. [0]

I actually remember seeing a post about it here in 2009 and initially dismissing it because I didn't think it would gain enough traction and didn't take the time to understand how it was different than previous digital cash schemes.

Bitcoin price didn't even hit $1 USD until the spring of 2011. It's true that Satoshi has a lot of Bitcoin but so does anyone who was there in Jan 2009 and had the vision to realize that Bitcoin was something fundamentally different and put effort into mining it.

Compared to the way a lot of these other blockchains are being launch Bitcoin was by far the most egalitarian in the way coins were/are distributed. Most other coins retain a huge share of coins for the founding organizations through pre-mining schemes and other shenanigans.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463793

I'm going to have to solidly disagree. Satoshi owns an estimated 1 million coins, 5% of the entire currency. If bitcoin were to become the global reserve currency, Satoshi would be the richest man in history by orders of magnitude.

There's nothing egalitarian about that. Even if he told the world and tried to be fair, that's more money than any person should ever own.

Only because he was an early adopter of his own product. He released it to the world and kept on mining to keep the project going. He didn't pre-mine and then release it. There is a big difference there.

It just happened that it took time for people to catch on and join his mining efforts.

He could have cashed out a long time ago for a large profit but those early coins attributed to him have never moved.

Hal Finney is dead.

> Satoshi would be the richest man in history by orders of magnitude

If he still have the keys. I don't think he does, but who knows. I would have at least spend some of the btc by now if I was in control of 1 million coins with a current value of more than $700 million...

Compare that to Etherum which is probably the second place competitor to BTC right now. The founders of that project took 12.5% for themselves and assigned another amount to the project organization. They didn't even go through the pre-tense of mining they just said we get 12.5% and wrote it into the code. In Bitcoin on the other hand anyone who wanted to could have started mining on day one with Satoshi. 5% isn't a huge sum for inventing the most revolutionary thing in currency and economics since physical money replaced barter. He didn't just give it to himself either he worked for it the same as anyone else had to.

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