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Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

Equally elucidating are the responses on the Cryptography List from other cryptographers[1], plus the responses a few months later when Bitcoin 0.1 was released[2].

You can pretty easily tell which cryptographers read the whitepaper and which ones did not. :)

[1]: http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October/...

[2]: http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/...

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> I made the proof-of-work difficulty ridiculously easy to start with, so for a little while in the beginning a typical PC will be able to generate coins in just a few hours.

If only I had given up “just a few hours” back in 2009...

...and held the coins until today. Or maybe next year it will be worth 10x more.

Put another way, if you had sold your desktop and invested all the proceeds in Amazon stock in 1997, and held that stock until now, you would have a 66000% return; basically you would have become a millionaire by now. Of course you would have had to held those shares through two big market crashes and the recessions that followed.

On the other hand, how could anyone have known that 20 years ago Amazon was going to be the winner? You might have invested all the proceeds in some company that did not survive the dot-com crash. Likewise, in 2009 most people doubted Bitcoin; even today there is plenty of doubt about the long-term prospects. There is no point in kicking yourself over a failure to invest in a big winner, especially when that winner defies all the wisdom on valuations.

Brin and Page themselves tried to sell Google to excite.com for less than $1MM in 1997. Luckily for them they got turned down. Hal Finney stopped mining coins after it started overheating his PC too often. Would he have done this if he believed each 50 coin block would someday be worth over half a million bucks? I think that would justify buying a second desktop or perhaps a better cooling fan.

Nobody knows what the future fortunes of any venture will be, anyone who claims to have known the future success of Bitcoin all along is lying, or they would have sold their blood and worldly possessions to snag as many coins as humanly possible in anticipation.

Thanks for sharing this. Of all the Sathoshi candidates, Hal Finney seems to be the closest (Not my analysis, but I tend to concur). Although he always denied it. When I read this[1] early reply by him, he seems to totally grok it.

[1] http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/...

This is a genius’s reply to a genius’s idea. Nice to read.

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