The Bitcoin white paper is probably one of the top 100 impactful non-literary documents of all time. Makes sense to be used
- Copernic's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium enabled the copernician revolution, which had profound impacts on how people thought about their place in the universe.
- Darwin's On the Origin of Species had more or less the same kind of impact, and provoked a strong reaction in the society, especially within churches.
I'm sure with more research we could find other scientific work that had a profound impact not only on our understanding of ourselves and our surroundings, but also on the way we think about ourselves.
Vannevar Bush‘s essay “As We May Think” in 1945 is a visionary document that describes technologies we take for granted today more than 70 years ago.
It’s possible the Bitcoin white paper will be looked at in similar ways, especially if Bitcoin ends up being one mankind’s most important inventions in addition to being a critically important financial asset.
Even in the very-unlikely world where some sort of decentralized cryptocurrency is used for anything other than scams and drugs, it's not going to be bitcoin, and blockchains existed for decades before bitcoin did.
> blockchains existed for decades before bitcoin did
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto
Satoshi combined them together in a novel form, for sure, but it’s still largely useless.
I think that's revolutionary.
- The KYC of your exchange, and any exchange in the coins path
- The wallet you're using
- The recipient to provide the correct address
- The exchange rate
And you're trusting all of that hasn't been tampered with, which involves even more trusted parties.
It requires an order of magnitude less trust to send cash in the mail. It's cheaper, too.
I’ve bought Bitcoin many times without any KYC. In old days localbitcoins and these days ATMs in many countries.
There aren’t any “exchange in the coins path”. I’ve exchanged paper fiat currency at Starbucks, in a hotel lobby.
The wallets I use are open source 100%. In fact I’ve personally written a python script to manually generate a transaction to broadcast. There is no third party. only your operating system, the internet connection and the source code. In that particular case I was using NixOS linux and so my operating system was also open source. I also broadcast my transaction over the ToR network so my internet provider and the Bitcoin network has no visibility.
Now onto usefulness. By holding Bitcoin I’ve preserved and grown my wealth. But how has it been used practically. Lets see.
- yesterday I bought my lunch for my wife and I, $21 using by Bitpay debit card. I loaded the card 2 mins before with those dollars by sending Litecoin which was auto exchanged by Bitpay at exactly the current exchange rate and with no fee. I exchange Bitcoin for small amounts Litecoin periodically as Litecoin is fast and cheap to send for small payments. Savings vs Checking.
- Years ago I met an artist from Argentina on an internet forum. She was painting what I thought were nice paintings. She was selling professional prints of those. I sent her Bitcoin and she sent me the prints. I’ve framed them and they hang in my home. I get many compliments on them.
- I’ve hired a developer in Crimea to work on a security software and he was paid for his work in Bitcoin
- When my sister in law had a baby shower I bought all the gifts at Buy Buy Baby using a digital gift card purchased 30 mins earlier using Bitcoin.
I could actually go on and on and on. But clearly you don’t have experience or understanding of what you are discussing as you proposed sending cash in the mail, which I don’t know anyone who would do that.
Bitcoin is revolutionary and has a decent shot at bringing fiat government currencies to their knees so they are forced to act responsibly and not brr brr money print.
Oh lord.
> I’ve bought Bitcoin many times without any KYC. In old days localbitcoins and these days ATMs in many countries ... There aren’t any “exchange in the coins path”. I’ve exchanged paper fiat currency at Starbucks, in a hotel lobby.
Sure, ok. Now take just one tiny step forward. Think about what happens next. Those coins have extremely high odds of passing through a KYC system in the near future. That can, will, and frequently has been used to trace users who are dumb enough to think "I paid for bitcoin for cash, I'm now anonymous".
> The wallets I use are open source 100%.
And nothing nefarious has ever slipped into open source software, right? Do you have no idea what a supply chain attack is?
You use NPM, you really ought to.
> There is no third party. only your operating system, the internet connection and the source code.
And, of course, your OS and the internet can be trusted. This is a great example of the level of critical thinking cryptobros achieve.
> I also broadcast my transaction over the ToR network so my internet provider and the Bitcoin network has no visibility.
Ok, so you mitigate the announce IP, which is one of the least useful ways to do analysis. Cool.
> yesterday I bought my lunch for my wife and I, $21 using by Bitpay debit card. I loaded the card 2 mins before with those dollars by sending Litecoin ...
So it has objectively worse utility, UX, and more dependencies than fiat?
This is not a good example.
> Years ago I met an artist from Argentina on an internet forum. She was painting what I thought were nice paintings. She was selling professional prints of those. I sent her Bitcoin and she sent me the prints.
Ok. This is still not useful. Western Union, Paypal, SWIFT, all cheaper and in some cases faster.
> I’ve hired a developer in Crimea to work on a security software and he was paid for his work in Bitcoin
Protip: if someone is willing to be paid in bitcoin, they are not worth the bitcoin you're sending.
> When my sister in law had a baby shower I bought all the gifts at Buy Buy Baby using a digital gift card purchased 30 mins earlier using Bitcoin.
As above: "So it has objectively worse utility, UX, and more dependencies than fiat?"
> Bitcoin is revolutionary and has a decent shot at bringing fiat government currencies to their knees so they are forced to act responsibly and not brr brr money print.
You have absolutely no idea what a central bank does, do you? Well, I mean, you obviously think you do. But you really don't. A basic class on economics would do you a world of good.
However it’s seems doubtful you will even be willing to acknowledge your flawed understanding and perhaps even unlikely you will see my response give how HN works.
This is no way to talk to other human beings.
If this poster actually knew how much experience I have with all the topics they profess such knowledge about I’d hope in that case they could be more mature.
Probably one of the must outrageous statements was to try and lecture me on the function of central banks. I’m intimately familiar with the US financial system and the function of central banks. I’ve extensively discussed Bitcoin with a very senior researcher of the Fed and was also directly involved in preparing private presentation to the ECB in Frankfurt. The central banks themselves are very concerned about how competitive Bitcoin is with fiat currency.
Bitcoin has more utility nowadays than dollar funds. It can be converted to almost any currency anywhere almost instantly and can be used by consumers with no friction via instant funded prepaid debit cards worldwide.
This poster brings up legacy payment systems that can’t even remotely compete with Bitcoin on the technical merits.
In 2007 we had Combating Double-Spending Using Cooperative P2P Systems[0]. Prior to both the whitepaper and the genesis block, we had Distributed Double Spending Prevention[1].
These are all particular subsets of distributed consensus problems, which have been studied in the context of CS for at least 30+ years (Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony[2]).
[0] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4268195
Do you have a pet theory on why bitcoin was the first such system to take off? Why not earlier?
The earliest ones I personally recall using were Liberty Reserve and E-Gold, which were basically fine, I guess. It was a good way to send money around with less eyes on it. Before that there were things like DigiCash, but I don't know much about that one. There was a whole bunch of random ones during the 90s, but most of them were ponzis and rugpulls (some things never change).
In my opinion, BTC took off in a way that others didn't for a bunch of reasons:
1) It was the first usable system that was decentralized, AFAIK. This is a pretty desirable characteristic, of course.
2) It had (and has) flaws, but there was no obvious means of it being a rug-pull or complete scam. E.g., it wasn't supposedly backed by gold/silver/whatever that didn't really exist.
3) You were able to get some bitcoin to use for 'free' by mining. Prior systems you had to buy into. The threshold to participate and profit was much lower.
4) The protocol is simple enough for those first few points to be trivial to verify.
5) It entered a sort of 'spiral' relationship with darknet markets and more general cybercrime. As those surged in popularity, the demand for bitcoin surged, which fueled interest in bitcoin, which fueled interested in markets, which.. etc.
> We had DHTs, we had blockchains, and double spending was solved at least 2 years before the bitcoin white paper.
- Bitcoin doesn't use DHTs.
- The term blockchain was coined after the Bitcoin white paper was published, to describe the mechanism used in Bitcoin.
- Bitcoin was the first system to solve the double spending problem in a decentralized way.
> Satoshi combined them together in a novel form, for sure, but it’s still largely useless.
The network is actively used. Just yesterday, there were 345K on chain Bitcoin transactions totaling a value of around 4 billion USD.
If in another 10 years it continues it’s success and we have widespread point of sale usage and micropayments etc, and value is, maybe $200K/coin. Then these people might require some type of specialized psychological therapy to handle their disbelief.
On the other hand, Bitcoiners even if it crashes to zero somehow, will be saying at least we tried, oh well.
Bitcoin opinions are some type of strange personality litmus test. I find it very curious as the test result feels very unpredictable for me when applied to people I know well.
More than naive cryptobros?
> Bitcoin triggers a deep psychological anxiety in some people and their reaction is to construct these defensive arguments in their heads about why Bitcoin is stupid, a scam, useless, etc.
It is obviously stupid, slow, and wasteful. Ignoring all the other problems with cryptocurrencies, just on those three axes ETH is superior.
> If in another 10 years it continues it’s success and we have widespread point of sale usage and micropayments etc, and value is, maybe $200K/coin. Then these people might require some type of specialized psychological therapy to handle their disbelief.
You love to monologue, huh?
> On the other hand, Bitcoiners even if it crashes to zero somehow, will be saying at least we tried, oh well.
A great sign of a moron is that they attach themselves to non-falsifiable ideas so they can't be wrong.
> Bitcoin opinions are some type of strange personality litmus test. I find it very curious as the test result feels very unpredictable for me when applied to people I know well.
It's very predictable. Is someone naive to the point of being borderline childlike? Wants to get-rich-quick? Hates the government? Bitcoin fan.
This is the level of discourse adults experience from cryptobros, and it's why no-one except other cryptobros actually take you seriously.
I didn't say it did. But the idea of distributing data in a P2P fashion is not novel.
> - The term blockchain was coined after the Bitcoin white paper was published, to describe the mechanism used in Bitcoin.
I'm not very interested in the particular etymology. The fundamental ideas of a blockchain, regardless of what you call it, had been laid out by multiple people years before the bitcoin whitepaper[0].
> - Bitcoin was the first system to solve the double spending problem in a decentralized way.
No, it wasn't[1][2].
> The network is actively used. Just yesterday, there were 345K on chain Bitcoin transactions totaling a value of around 4 billion USD.
..Ok? That's about the level of activity I would expect between speculation, scams, and drugs, sure.
[0]https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.06130.pdf
That seems unlikely.
You're going to claim you're certain that a solution to the Byzantine generals problem will have no useful consequences?
Yes.
> one mankind’s most important inventions
to merely
> useful consequences
Sure, maybe there are useful consequences, especially if you need to defy governments or whatever. But surely not something in the same league of importance as, say, fire, the wheel, writing, powered flight, the hammer, steel, math, or even Quicksort.
Absolute embittered curmudgeons.
For absolutely everything else, blockchain is a worse solution than technology that already existed before.
The interesting part of bitcoin was the “permission-less BFT algorithm” (because other algorithm at the time required to know the list of nodes up-front) through proof of work and game theory”.
The game theory part is only applicable to Austrian-style (scarce money) crypto-“currencies”, not to other cases of byzantine generals problem (it only works because everybody has financial incentives in the robustness of the system), and even in that specific niche, the proof of work scheme has been abandoned by pretty much everybody else in favor of proof of stakes (which isn't really a permission-less system anymore).
Based on the simple reality that bitcoin wouldn't exist without them, we can find a couple seminal papers of cryptography that had way more impact than this white paper. To name a few :
Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication: https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno...
Rivest, Shamir and Adelman's Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Rsapaper.pdf
Diffie and Hellman's New Direction in Cryptography: https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/publications/24.pdf
And that's the first three that come to my mind.
It's like building a bridge that can withstand the earth being swallowed by the sun. Sure the bridge will survive but that's pointless, and the energy and material being spent on that bridge has a billion better uses.
The vast majority of cryptocurrencies are undeniably "malinvestments".
the thing that lets us communicate like this :)
And really, the RFC comment is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. The idea that the bitcoin whitepaper is some holy document, or even anywhere near the "top 100 non-literary" documents created by humans is profoundly stupid.
If someone genuinely believes that, I need to talk with them synchronously to try and figure out where, exactly, it ranks. Obviously ahead of the Rosetta Stone and the Treaty of Versailles, but does it beat out the Magna Carta?
Do we really think the Bitcoin white paper is more impactful than, say, the Magna Carta or Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses? I think you might be inadvertently succumbing to recency bias.
2. Bitcoin white paper
3. US Constitution
I think you're underestimating the colossal, compounding effect that these have had over the centuries. It would be very surprising to me if, say, Germans did not learn about the Ninety-Five Theses, considering that it was a seminal event in German history. Just because it's not obviously affecting your life right now does not mean it was not impactful in dramatically changing the course of history.