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Comment by jlgreco | Hacker News Reader

Are we sure that bitcoin originated in America? Maybe they gave us this gift, and we promptly mishandled it and lost it.

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No, we're not... The default assumption for anything cryptography is American, yes, but Satoshi's original claims of being Japanese (which no one believes given his great English and complete absence of any displayed Japanese phrases, allusions, references, knowledge, or anything) aside, the timing of his posts and some phrasing suggests he may've been in the United Kingdom.

The Genesis block references The Times, too.

The Times is the world's largest financial newspaper. I regularly deliver the FT to individuals here in Denmark when delivering mail on Saturdays. It's an international newspaper.

No, The Times, as in The Times of London, NOT the Financial Times or the New York Times.

> Are we sure that bitcoin originated in America? Maybe they gave us this gift, and we promptly mishandled it and lost it.

Yep we mishandled it certainly... When there is a new technology which is about to change the face of the planet, the usual response is to bring as much of the industry for that tech into your own country.

The US response has been the opposite. I suspect later generations are going to regret it.

I suspect that you are being overly optimistic about Bitcoin's likelihood to change the face of the planet. There are so many economic and technical problems with Bitcoin that it is nothing short of a miracle that it became as popular as it is now -- and that popularity is not even a blip on the radar of global finance.

%s/{Bitcoin,finance}/{Internet,communication}/g . Not to say you're wrong, but the same rhetoric is used for every "game" changing technology.

Most self-proclaimed "game changing" technologies don't end up changing anything.

If a technology could self-proclaim anything then that would be pretty game changing :). Your point is well taken though (most technologies don't change anything). However I think Bitcoin _has_ already changed more than most.

And this reply is used a lot too, despite being just as shaky.

As a wise man once said, they laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Einstein... and they laughed at Bozo the Clown.

> As a wise man once said, they laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Einstein... and they laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Exactly, "they" can't tell the difference between Bozo the Clown and Einstein. It's very hard to predict what ideas or technologies will be adopted in the future. I don't think it's wise to quickly dismiss one that's already progressed this far (the DHS isn't laughing).

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