Hacker News Reader

> This is pretty funny to me. The forum users immediately point out problems that have in retrospect have kept Bitcoin from becoming mainstream, and which always struck me as notable flaws of the design.

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.

The trick is sifting through the predictions to know which ones are prescient and which ones are just alarmist. That's a lot easier in hindsight.

In one of my high school classes, can't remember why, we discussed an article from the 1950s-ish where people were predicting the future: that by 2000 we'd have flying cars and floating cities and robot helpers and stuff. And I remember distinctly that the tone of the class was: "look, people were so wrong about what the future would be like! They really had no idea. So you shouldn't assume you have any idea what the future will be like either."

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.

Then again, we now do have flying cars, floating cities and robot helpers. They just look different and are not (yet?) that common.

Floating cities?

I think you could make a case that the largest cruise ships would be recognized as such by people from the Titanic era.

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.

> 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."

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]

I've read that ACX post, and it is frustratingly close-minded, like many of his posts. I swear, sometimes it seems like Scott is trying to trojan-horse "bad" ideas into his readership on purpose, given his consistency at picking bad ideas and then dressing them up to make them sound palatable. It is really weird. I guess we are ideological opposites in some way.

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.

I think I can say why, also, although it will sound kind of weird:

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.

> 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.

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.

It's usually not about the binary guess of success or failure, though. Or at least that's not the interesting thing to look for.

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.

It's funny, I remembered that exchange pretty much the opposite way - if you'd listened to those internet experts, you'd have been dead sure that a system that's been running for one and a half decades without major hiccups wouldn't work, a product that now has global brand recognition would never see adoption,... There are legitimate reasons to not like the product, eg how it facilitates cyber crime, power consumption, but that's not the focus of the discussion. And it's not like the judgements were all technically sound and they just underestimated the marketing appeal. They ramble on about how the bad guys have more compute power than the good guys, which is more of a distraction than a useful contribution.

Looks more like you're reading your own negative opinion of cryptocurrencies into their answer. The discussion that satoshi had on the mailing lists concerned how consensus would work with people asking questions about that. It wasn't about anything you just listed.

> but doesn't seem to appreciate the extent to which this re-centralizes the network

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.

> the centralization is never monopolistic (e.g., you cannot completely reject transactions even if you control most of the miners)

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.

There's nothing wrong with having a centralized bitcoin networks. What's great is that you don't HAVE to use this centralized system.

Decentralized at the wholesale level.

In the decent chance situation that satoshi was close to death(now well dead) he may have not cared that much about minor criticisms such as adoptability.

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 think you have it the other way around.

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.

Why would he be dead? Based on the writing style and Japanese pseudonym he sounds like an American millenial.

Hal Finney was my guess for Satoshi (RIP)

Others on HN mentioned another person who also died in the 2010s, don't recall the name offhand though.