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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
It works as long as it remains difficult and, more importantly, taboo to point to any particular person or cartel who's pushing for the constant change in the narrative of what "works" means.
That's the real beauty of bitcoin: exploiting the early-ish internet's cultural norm of placing respect for individual privacy and anonymity above all else, in order to defer responsibility for any controversy its core backers want to shirk to an anonymous, impersonal, but somehow always correct "protocol."
People downvoting anybody against it without giving any proper answer…
I agree with everything you said. Even the security it promotes is false advertising. Yes maybe Bitcoin ~itself~ is secured but the rest is not. It has to live on server, network, software, etc… and those are not 100% secured. Look at the money stolen. There has been more money lost through hacks and wallet stolen than any traditional bank…
Security on transaction also is a joke. I have never heard a CEO being so concerned by fraud and Visa and others that they need so much Bitcoin… Unless they do very shady businesses. Tomorrow I do a startup it will use Visa etc and I will sleep just fine. If you run the number with fraud costs etc also included for Bitcoin and traditional ways, from micropayments to $100B money transfer. The traditional is way cheaper and sometimes actually more secured overall.
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.
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'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.
I find it pretty incredible how critical the responses regarding the technical feasibility were and how Satoshi Nakamoto had thought of every one of them already when writing the whitepaper, as it's visible from his answers.
It's also interesting that Bitcoin still works despite said critiques. It still allows people to transfer funds digitally in a censorship resistant way.
The only "failing" is that Bitcoin is not a stable long term investment (which wasn't its design goal to begin with).
It's also failing as a mechanism for efficient p2p small value transactions - as a currency.
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.
Interesting, I didn’t see this but I heard about bitcoin in 2009, and bought my bitcoins in 2010 and 2011 just for the fun of it, worth every bit as I still hold them.
I heard about it when it was about $30 and it looked expensive to me back then and even if I bought some, I wold have sold them long time ago at 2,3,5x as I much prefer the stock market (and even real estate) for investing...
I held on to them for so long because my old laptop’s motherboard died and I had the wallet there. I forgot about them till around 2014, when I looked for them and surprisingly managed to extract them from the hard disk as everything was dead in that laptop not just the motherboard. Then I secured them and forgot about them again until Covid time, when they skyrocketed in value. So I don’t deserve all the credit for holding them, but rather my poor laptop and memory.
Buying bitcoin in 2010 absolutely wasn't inaction, it was a painful process. The problem is identifying when not to do anything. Tell me one thing to do once in 2024 and then forget about it until 2038. Subscription to an AI service? Nah...
if everyone who wish they had bought had bought , the price would have been 50k long ago and crashed to $5 probably equally fast. People missing out is why the price has gone up for as long as it has.
Except at this point, that won't ever happen. I certainly wouldn't ever sell. If it starts heading to zero, I would just start buying as much as I could. I know I'm not the only one.
Hindsight is rough. I wanted to buy some when I was in college living of student loans, they were at $600… I should have use my student loans to buy bitcoin instead of the hobbies I had in college…
True. I have no idea, not even a clue where to start looking for such thing. It seems to me that the best one can do is just diversify, acquire a bunch of stuff that might grow and hold them for 20 years.
Same here, I actually started to buy some at $30 for the heck of it, but the process to buy then was so involved that I gave up and wanted to get back to it later, and never did.
That’s a valid point, but I wouldn’t call it a hazard since not much information is available (as your second question implies). It’s similar to seeing someone with a luxury car on the road, except that one is physically accessible and the other is not.
There are, I would guess, hundreds of people on HN who are millionaires and happily lead public lives without fear of being hit by $5 wrenches until they give up their passwords.
I know a guy who stopped saying how many Bitcoins he had after he mined few thousands (by then Bitcoin was skyrocketing to single digit dollar values!) I know he kept mining for years.
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.
>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.
No because whether he owns a bitcoin at $30 or at $30k a bitcoin is a bitcoin and at this point every wallet is indexed, tracked and any wallet with significant value (regardless of cost basis) is being mined for potential vulnerabilities.
>at this point every wallet is indexed, tracked and any wallet with significant value (regardless of cost basis) is being mined for potential vulnerabilities.
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 do, because people online tend to flex about things that seem like really tall tales. Someone who held on this long is exceptionally rare in the first place, and I like when someone makes a claim, they back it up with evidence.
Even if they were lying and have now been outed as lying, who cares? I could see a point if they somehow used this claim to enrich themselves at the cost of others but I don't anything of the sort happening here. The only enrichment is the internet points they can get from a popular comment.
One of the reasons why I doubt Satoshi is Hal is apparent from these forum posts: if my goal was to stay anonymous, I would not immediately associate my real identity with my anonymous one. Hal is one of the first people to reply to this Bitcoin forum post.
I know it's wrong to call it a total failure, but can we at least agree that Bitcoin has reverted from changing the world to being an exotic investment thing?
I usually pay about the equivalent of a few dollars to send Bitcoin transactions.
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.
Bank transfers are free in my country even cross country.
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.
> Bank transfers are free in my country even cross country.
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.
> Bank transfers are free in my country even cross country.
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.
This got me thinking as I do not remember Satoshi having a bitcoin.org domain for the announcement... There must be someone who knows who Satoshi is right? The domain registrar? Or at least they know someone who knows who Satoshi is. Also to whom did Satoshi transfer the domain and when?
I looked in to it a while back and IIRC the domain provider accepted cash payments via mail so Satoshi's real identity likely wasn't tied to it in any way.
I think it's easy.
Tech people like to think they're very smart, and yet most of them have missed bitcoin, being arrogant (though many of them heard about it and could have it since the beginning)
People who think they're smart then spend 5 minutes to think about a problem and then think they've got it all figured out.
And it's not just about Bitcoin, it happens again and again. It would be amusing, but I'm painfully aware that I fall into the trap myself from time to time.
Of course most people missed BTC. Just like most people missed ETH, AMD, META, NVDA... the list goes on. Hell, I'm sure there are a few boats leaving right now that you & I are in the process of missing. I don't know why crypto people think that everyone else obsesses about missing BTC in particular.
>... they're not doing it as a valid part of discussion.
As I highlighted in another comment, you're not helping things by simply attacking a generic body of HN users rather than coming in here and calmly trying to explain things in a constructive manner. See something that is lacking proper information and context? Great - provide it!
You literally feel like a pseudo-intellectual troll who doesn't realize what they're doing.
I think they’re looking at the total amount of money stored/flowing through crypto (or Bitcoin) by taking the strike price and multiplying it by all the coins on the blockchain. Of course that’s not a great measure of value but it is a measure.
This kind of response is exactly what I would expect of someone who is totally clueless about the industry. Being completely unaware of what dapps exist, what fintech startups there are, what protocols have been created, the research that has been funded due to blockchain technology, and more. As I said: completely ignorant with all criticism based on the news headlines you've read.
Care to embody the spirit of what HN tries to put forth by expanding on those points in a constructive, educational manner that may actually help us to better understand, or do you just want to flippantly say that everyone's stupid and you're the only person who gets it?
Well, my brother joined a fintech startup in Europe that started with blockchain but pivoted back to boring software building. That particular niche they're in is seeing all the blockchain startups failing because they're not actually solving the use-case. So sure, there's maybe been a lot of research value created in terms of ideas explored and protocols built, but it's not clear any of that actually has practical value outside of building more blockchains.
Merkle trees are probably the main cryptocurrency tech I've seen outside of cryptocurrency (& even then in limited use), and that's not even from cryptocurrency but a pretty old data structure concept from 1979. If you're familiar with R&D ideas generated by the blockchain researches that have been applied successfully outside of the blockchain, please enlighten me as I'm eager to fill the gaps in my knowledge and go down a reading rabbit hole.
Look, I'm not discounting out of hand that there's maybe been some research and market value created. What I tried to communicate is I'm not convinced it's been a net positive vs all the costs that came with it (investments lost, pollution, opportunity cost lost). That's why I said market value is a measure, but humans in general struggle to figure out holistic ways of computing value, especially when looking at it as a hypothetical opportunity cost vs what else we could be spending our time on.
If you're wondering why you got downvoted, I suspect it's because you wrote an emotional response attacking me and calling me ignorant without actually engaging in a thoughtful discussion.
When the world wide web was new, everyone could see that the idea of it was appealing, the skepticism came from the fact that people weren't at all certain that online commerce would be financially viable... and it wasn't! At the time of the dot com crash huge numbers of companies collapsed. Sure companies like Amazon seems to have been around since time immemorial but its just one of the ones that survived, it could just as easily have disappeared.
For crypto, the criticisms are well founded. Crypto generates enormous amounts of pollution, facilitates money laundering, the sale of illegal goods and all manner of scams and for what? The shittiest database you could imagine.
> facilitates money laundering, the sale of illegal goods
Some illegal goods should perhaps be legal. The cost in time and money of certain diagnoses and drug prescriptions is too high at the moment, and some of us can't put our lives on hold.
> They hand wave away the fact that it created a billion dollar scam industry
FTFY
It's a currency barely, it has value mostly, as long as people keep believing. But the only "industry" there is is Bitcoin exchanges, and we've seen time and time again how they're run by what kind of people.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that too, there are so many code proposals and votes and pull requests happening which - if held to the same standard as the rest of the open source community here - would be interesting front page discussions on HN all the time
there are two things that could help fix that:
1. dang and the moderators should heavily flag "unsubstantial" comments on crypto-related posts. many HN users use any post about crypto assets to talk about an irrelevant philosophical view on the entire sector's existence, many of those users of course work for a democracy destabilizing adtech conglomerate and don't see the irony in their focus on "no utility, scams, money laundering" when there are other things going on but even then those users just want to move the goalpost about why those other things aren't useful instead of how it could be. those comments should all be flagged and users should be requested to talk about the article in question.
2. HN users interested in particular discussions can post them more, and ensure engagement occurs on those posts. For example, deep discussions about Taproot and the organizations building on that should have been here, and should be. Code based solutions should be born here and carried back to repositories and other forums. A network's "improvement proposal" should be discussed here, and the implementation details, or updates on network consensus. Libraries that developers use should be talked about here ad nauseam.
they all have deficiencies and there are active pull requests and things to improve in all of them
an additional part of the stack would be the node software itself, how do you run a client that connects to any particular blockchain. the node software is all pretty pathetic and there is often a project in a programming language of choice, as well as for each blockchain
additionally there are improvement proposals on each blockchain, and many times each DAO (projects on a blockchain). think about the blockchain networks as states and each improvement proposal is a referendum. while a DAO would be like any corporation or trust or non profit within that state, having its own community board altering things
you can propose an improvement proposal in any, or get involved in a certain one
You can find them by using the acronym, current bitcoin improvement proposals are called BIPs, ethereum’s EIP, solana SIP… at one project level you have Helium which is very active and uses HIP and so on
basically you have a bifurcation of the population here: there is a group of people that see something wrong with blockchains and dismiss it for that reason, while there is another group that see something wrong with blockchains and go to improve it. most of the confidence in blockchains comes from its ratification process and ability to change. one long necessary and outstanding change gets ratified and opens up a new market, a new sector for the crypto concept to touch, then irrational exuberance comes, then it fades, an additional ratification finishes, the same thing occurs from people too excited about it. Ultimately each advance adds to the resilience and more people find the development and proposals as a meaningful way to contribute.
Yeah but the WWW saw widespread adoption, like retail, social networking, ads, etc. The same cannot be said for crypto even 15 years later. Crypto is still a niche or mostly gambling.
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.