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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing is I am pretty sure your hypothesis is very false, but most of the points are true!

1. You haven't worked in government. Their code is worse than Yahoo! or virtually any startup. Bitcoin isn't.

2. Bitcoin is far from the most malevolent possible form for governments. Chaumian blinded money, what I want to build next, with open, non monopolistic exchanges, and protocols designed to be hidden, instant, etc., is the most powerful possible form of anonymous cash.

3. No clue, but probably not, since the concept of a reserve currency is irrelevant. With electronic exchanges, you can separate out the different roles of money.

4. A subset of 3.

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1: There are absolutely pockets of absolute brilliance in government. Not big one, not a lot of them, but they are there. Also, Bitcoin primarily a crypto research project, not a software engineering one. The government absolutely has a lot of brilliant crypto researchers on staff.

2: It might just be because I don't understand it completely, but as I understand it, every single transaction in Bitcoin is public and traceable - so if you compromise the identity of a wallet (from computer seizures, wiretap etc) you can monitor a target's transactions. A more perfect (or malevolent, depending on your POV) system would not have this traceability.

I agree there are good cryptographers, but the bitcoin implementation is surprisingly good as well. On point 2 I think you restated what I said.

This is very interesting, could you comment on what impresses you about bitcoin implementation?

> could you comment on what impresses you about bitcoin implementation?

Obviously I don't speak for rdl, but what impresses me is the level of anticipation of future developments.

Indeed. Mike Hearn's talk at Bitcoin 2012 is a great overview of all that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD4L7xDNCmA

All these goodies just waiting in there to come out and play.

Same reasons as Kaminsky, if nothing else.

There is a lot I hate about BTC but mainly due to it having wrong design goals, vs a wrong implementation.

The essential thing they got wrong was lack of using the market to price risk, and trying to be all or nothing.

1. You haven't worked in government. Their code is worse than Yahoo! or virtually any startup. Bitcoin isn't.

I bet the NSA and NASA both write code that's orders of magnitude better than anything Yahoo does, just to pick two counterexamples.

Sadly not particularly true of the NSA of 2013.

And this wouldn't have been their A team.

I'm curious, are you saying that with some particular examples in mind?

Can we please hear a little more about this, rdl?

Talk to Binney. They contract out everything, and don't even oversee shit well anymore. They have regressed to the USG mean.

Rdl is correct. Smart people often get hired by small firms which do contract work for government organizations. It allows the smart people to live outside of the hierarchy imposed by a large institution.

The motivations are very similar to startups working outside of larger companies. You get more freedom in work choices and pay scale.

I mean I am overstating the case for effect here, and I am sure there are small cliques of competent people hidden within big organizations everywhere, but if this were a government official project, it wouldn't have been done by those people. I knew brilliant people in the military in Iraq, but they weren't brilliant due to their jobs. If we did awesome stuff on the side it wouldn't have been a product of the US government.

Government also discourages small side projects, especially in the classified world, and particularly discourages them from becoming production. They would far prefer to run a program of record, or pay for (well defined) innovation by third parties.

> Their code is worse than Yahoo! or virtually any startup. Bitcoin isn't.

99% of code written by Government is subpar, the other 1% is like Stuxnet

In other words, Government code is no different from anyone else's code.

Stuxnet is not actually "great code" from what I've read, it's just expensive and overkill use of 0-days (which you'd expect from a government with limitless money), and implemented in a fairly heavyweight/inefficient way.

It was exceedingly redundant, resilient, and worked very well at the one thing it was meant to do and was only caught by sheer luck.

So yeah, I am going to call that "great code."

A truly dismal scenario would be something like (hobgoblin)-coins being released where the country known as (hobgoblin) has a really handy exploit to punish the big players later. The dominant economic players have a not so hidden agenda to remain dominant. The best game theory solution for a small player is release a bitcoin like protocol, called (hobgoblin)-coins, then benefit at the expense of the larger players by crashing the whole deal later.

So bitcoin was probably not released by a tiny .gov. Most likely by a big player like .us, .ru, .cn, .uk, .jp, .de. Probably not the .us because its hard to encourage a replacement if you're the reserve currency see above. So it could be from the .gov of one of the five countries above, maybe a couple others.

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