Forum reactions to Satoshi's Bitcoin paper
mail-archive.com
mail-archive.com
But what's interesting is that Satoshi doesn't seem to understand what the problem is. For example, he invokes the "long tail theory" without having any specific probability distribution to work with. And he essentially states there will be a specialist financial sector required to handle the payment transactions:
> At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware.
but doesn't seem to appreciate the extent to which this re-centralizes the network. So it kind of starts off like a peer to peer network, but according to Satoshi even in the early days, the premise that Bitcoins have any value is based in the fact that the peer to peer network converges to a more traditional centralized network.
He was inventing a cryptosystem first and a pragmatic economic thing second(or third, or more).
He does not strike me as a person who thinks that much about money, more about his upcoming death and what legacy he wants to leave.
I'm no crypto fan at all, in fact I despise the lunacy and greed in the sector, but I've read about Satoshi to understand that it was crystal clear from day 1 to him that the cryptography or cryptosystem as you call it was just an implementation detail, in fact he was brilliant at understanding that the critical value of Bitcoin was that it was consensus being the key to the entire dynamic.
And consensus has a crystal clear incentive into holding bad actors out, because if bad actors can take over a network they de facto sink the value of the network and coins themselves.
So even if a government tomorrow could start controlling the network, consensus will simply reject and fork.
Albeit I don't like the crypto industry and such, I can't lie that there are many great economical lessons to learn.
Others on HN mentioned another person who also died in the 2010s, don't recall the name offhand though.
If you like that feeling, you'd love digging through historical magazine, newspaper, and book archives. The Harper's Magazine archive is especially great for this, since it stretches back 150 years and always published analysis on newsworthy happenings.
For almost every trouble in the present, you can cite people loudly anticipating it when whatever new political event/initiative, technological innovation, etc first arrived on the scene. It doesn't mean critics should always be deferred to just because they're often right, but it does mean that you can do a lot of preparing for the future by reading what they warned was coming.
At some point when I was older I realized that there's something really weird about that. Of course the article about people's predictions for the future sounded foolish and absurd. It was selection bias: they picked the foolish predictions and published them. There were countless people alive at the time who knew those predictions were foolish, but they didn't get featured in the article... because being sober and intelligent is less publishable than being stupid and naive.
I think about this a lot, because every time something new shows up (crypto, AI, whatever) there are thousands of articles about what the future is going to look like and how outlandish it's going to be... and I think they're mostly just dumb. And it's sad to think that in fifty years, someone will be presenting those articles to explain how confused 2000s-era technologists were about the future. They'll write: "look, people used to think we'd have blockchain-based economies and that AI was about to take over the world! How silly they were." When in fact it was just the foolish idealists who thought that stuff and wouldn't shut up about it. The rest of us were rolling our eyes, but nobody wrote that up.
E.g., https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/worlds-lar...
People are starting to live onboard these things full-time, because it's apparently cheaper than a retirement/nursing home.
I get the wider point of your comment -- which is that most people don't agree with the wild predictions of futurists -- but I wanted to respond to this quote in particular. I think a lot of people mistake being cynical with being clever. In particular, treating blockchain and AI like they have the same potential as one another is maybe overlooking what each of them does. I'm going to quote from this: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa...
He comments on the latest breathless press releases from tech companies. This will change everything! say the press releases. “No it won’t”, he comments. This is the greatest invention ever to exist! say the press releases. “It’s a scam,” he says.
His the best futurist of all. Everyone else occasionally gets bamboozled by some scam or hype train, but he never does. His heuristic is truly superb.
But - say it with me - he could be profitably replaced with a rock. “NOTHING EVER CHANGES OR IS INTERESTING”, says the rock, in letters chiseled into its surface.
[EDIT: I think my original comment was a bit uncivil and missed your wider point, which remains an interesting one]
Anyway, the obvious response to that strawman of a critic is: nobody is using that heuristic, "disbelieving in everything". They're disbelieving in things by evaluating them. It's these things, the stupid "get rich quick" scams and the "crazy new technology that makes no sense on its fundamentals", that aren't interesting.
Now I would love to know why Bay-Area technologists (or a certain subtype of them) are so attracted to things I evaluate as bad ideas and not attracted to things I evaluate as good ideas. From the perspective of someone in that community it would seem like I shoot down every idea, but that's because their selection of ideas is uniquely bad. Out of the space of "all ideas I see", I see good ideas every day. Out of the space of "ideas they like", I seem to see only bad ones. The group with the strange selection bias is them, not me.
A lot of Silicon-Valley technofuturists seem to me to be specifically attracted to ideas that "toss out the world as we know it". Not a way of making a better financial system on ours -- a new one entirely. Not a way of making better software -- new frameworks entirely. Or replacing it with AI. Or rebuilding everything from scratch. Not a way of cities better -- new cities entirely. Not a way of making government better -- new governments entirely.
It strikes me as a fallacy, every time. They seem to believe that the existing world is hopeless, that human endeavor on it is pointless, and that the only thing that will save us is some kind of brand new far-flung idea, and then, desperate for that to be true, believe in any far-flung idea that sounds plausible, not on its merits but because it matches what they are looking for. Somehow they believe themselves not a member of the current world and they would rather find a new one that they have an important role in, or at least that they can feel "hopeful" about.
But, if you do not have the same insecurity and are instead just evaluating the ideas on their merits... well, they're just really stupid ideas. That's why we always disagree.
It's very frustrating to watch, though. They'll spend years talking about prediction markets in order to predict events, but not talk about actually getting savvier at understanding how the world works through experience. Or they'll, like, invent new ways to find people without going on normal dates where you ask somebody out, but not actually go on dates, or work on being more likeable and attractive, or actually try to meet new kinds of people. They'll talk about designing new cities from scratch but won't even try fix the city they live in by engaging with its actual processes for fixing it.
It is all tinged by a sort of... "loss of hope that anything can be better", and a general fear of engaging with the world because it's too scary. Or maybe they feel too much outsiders who don't belong in it. Or maybe it's too scary to try to do something new in the real world because of the risk of failure. Whatever the reason, they obsess over changing the world/their lives with ideas because changing the world/their lives with actions risks failure and shame and disappointment.
It is, I think, the Shakespearean-grade tragedy of our age, and it hasn't finished playing out yet.
I feel the problem is that there is always somebody claiming <new thing> will fail, and there's also always someone else claiming <new thing> will succeed. You just end up looking back with hindsight to see those who were right.
There are always critics who are right. But there are also always critics who were wrong.
Initial criticism often helps see the future silhouette of a happening even in its success. You can see that American racial tension won't immediately end with emancipation or even with reconstruction, that Europe will remain tense and unstable after the Treaty of Versailles, that Bitcoin will struggle against genuine societal concerns around accountability or dispute resolution, etc and people almost always call these things out at the time.
Keeping an eye on those original critiques, even when something proves generally desirable or successful or inevitable, helps make the challenges of today and tomorrow something to one might prepare for rather than be surprised by.
The difference is that anyone or any group of people can challenge that centralization at any time, and the centralization is never monopolistic (e.g., you cannot completely reject transactions even if you control most of the miners). You'd have to control near 100% of the miners and somehow prevent everyone from booting up a new miner forever.
Why not? If you control 51%+ of the mining power, you can decide not to accept any mined block that would contain a banned transaction, and ignore it in your own blocks. Your fork would just be that for a while, but since you have more mining power, you'd catch up and end up with the longest chain eventually.
Over time, the other miners would have to follow your rules if they still want to be able to mine profitably, so they wouldn't even try to mine such a banned transaction.
The only "failing" is that Bitcoin is not a stable long term investment (which wasn't its design goal to begin with).
Consider, from the white paper (with regards to mediated digital transfers): ` The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non- reversible services. `
Nobody is doing 'small casual transactions' with Bitcoin, which was evidently one of the goals.
That is not true and can be easily proven looking at the transactions on the blockchain.
However, layer 2 solutions like Lightning are good for small value transactions since fees are low and fast.
I presume that bitcoin is now worth millions of dollars (at the very least)?
The point being made is that once a wallet is connected to a real identity (as opposed to just knowing that wallet X has Y amount of BTC), the attack surface for that wallet is increased by magnitudes and entire vectors of attack are opened up (e.g. phishing).
I know for a fact he only sold 2 of those since then.
Now here's the interesting fact: he wasn't early into Bitcoin because of the technology, but because he was a full blown lunatic crypto anarchist. The guy literally works at some low paying job and has a normal life and lives dreaming about a world where Bitcoin's a common way to trade goods.
Seriously, he's easily worth hundreds of millions since years and he lives like a normal dude and spends his time just blogging and being a bitcoin evangelist.
Maybe I'm just reading it this way, but it seems like you are implying that this is a negative and I'm really not sure why a millionaire living like a normal dude could possibly be considered negative.
I actually like him for that.
What I inherently dislike is anarcho-capitalism of which he's a huge supporter.
…shame I didn’t invest my entire life’s savings.
The question is: what’s worth very little now that will be worth millions in ten years? Presumably at any given point in time there exist such things.
Emperors, clothes, and all.
I didn't much buy the coding style comparison, as I myself often switch around the styles being compared in the article.
This system works cross borders, any time of day all days of the year.
Bitcoin may not be useful for everyone, but it is available for everyone in a way that traditional banks are not. And this is a far greater strength than a lot of people realize.
So cost is more convenient for normal bank accounts.
Yes, speed is a factor if there's a weekend in the middle, but this is a non issue. I literally never ever had a need to pay someone or send someone money they needed in the very moment as I was sending it. It's really a non-issue.
Another few bonuses for bank transfers:
- are reversible in many cases
- you can't lose any money if you misdigit a single character or send the money to the wrong account you have still time to revert or contact your bank and sort it out
- they are simple to use. You can go in person and tell the cashier of the operation. You can use your application or website
- as with your bank account is tied to your person, not to whoever holds some cryptographic key. Nobody can really point a gun at me and tell me I ahve to give him what I have in my bank, we all know it doesn't work. But a secret key to a wallet? Good luck holding it.
- if I die my family will get the money. This is much more complex to handle with Bitcoin if not borderline impossible. Whoever holds his password can do what he wants with that.
Try any fancy private bank or a bank on the other side of the world and you'll see.
Even national interbank transfer are generally complicated and slow and the complexity of the system is just well hidden mostly by low rate lending guaranteed by central banks.
All I care for is that it works fine and it's cheap.
On top of that the number of times in my 36 years of life I had to send money beyond the EU is literally 0. Not once.
This is an edge case that maybe some split families have, but it's just a non issue for 99.9% of bank transfers.
So why do people pay so much money for wires?
Your entire post basically boils down to "Bitcoin does not provide any advantages for me". Hey, good for you then! Recognize that there are billions of humans that are not you and move on.
Perhaps one day, you will need to make a one time transfer with Bitcoin and you'll be glad that there's no way to censor you for your past Bitcoin-doubting ways, by design.
Indeed zombie farms had been diverted to generating coins, but in some sense it achieved the opposite of the former objective.
It's fun to see that the “Bitcoin will fix everything” genre started with Satoshi himself!
Like the dude who found cfcs