4 ms·

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

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.

Uptrenda 3y ago
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.
dontupvoteme 3y ago
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.
- epolanski 3y ago
  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.
- slily 3y ago
  Why would he be dead? Based on the writing style and Japanese pseudonym he sounds like an American millenial.
  - dontupvoteme 3y ago
    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.
swatcoder 3y ago
> 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.
- organsnyder 3y ago
  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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- ajkjk 3y ago
  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.
t_mann 3y ago
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.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - ChainOfFools 3y ago
    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."
  - nazka 3y ago
    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. And I can go on and on… It’s just greed.
behringer 3y ago
There's nothing wrong with having a centralized bitcoin networks. What's great is that you don't HAVE to use this centralized system.
dboreham 3y ago
Decentralized at the wholesale level.
Ferret7446 3y ago
> 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.
- hiq 3y ago
  > 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.

Uptrenda 3y ago

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.

dontupvoteme 3y ago

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.

epolanski 3y ago
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.
slily 3y ago
Why would he be dead? Based on the writing style and Japanese pseudonym he sounds like an American millenial.
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  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.

swatcoder 3y ago

> 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.

organsnyder 3y ago
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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ajkjk 3y ago
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.

t_mann 3y ago

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.

mvdtnz 3y ago
[flagged]
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  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."
- nazka 3y ago
  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. And I can go on and on… It’s just greed.

behringer 3y ago

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

dboreham 3y ago

Decentralized at the wholesale level.

Ferret7446 3y ago

> 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.

hiq 3y ago
> 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.