The poster of quoted post below made a great point except for the part on changing the whitepaper (without having the immutable copy of the old one?). Rewriting parts of the whitepaper with deviations from Satoshi's Bitcoin principles won't be a good idea though.
Anyway, my trust for the writer below moves some steps up while the other who posted a snapshot that has few words moves down. *The "intention" is the thing for me
The whitepaper is to blame for all these dangerous beliefs. We seriously need to rewrite it, or produce a completely new whitepaper and call that the Bitcoin whitepaper.
The whitepaper is probably the only vaguely "technical" document that many people in positions of power and influence have read, it's what they base their understanding of Bitcoin on. And it's very easy to misunderstand in subtle ways. It's an extremely dangerous document for an ignorant person to read. For example, look at the following quote:
They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of
valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on
them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.When you read this, it's clear to anyone with knowledge of the historical context that Satoshi is talking about regular users as "nodes", as in people that run full nodes, the types of people in 2009 that were mining on CPUs. However someone reading that now would think differently, they would assume that this means that the miners are the ones through which any needed rules and incentives can be enforced. It reads as if the miners are the ones who decide what is and isn't valid.
I like the idea of offering a free basic course. Maybe it could be something as simple as an animated interactive experience that aims to teach Bitcoin users their "civic duty"? Lessons on how miners and developers don't control Bitcoin, and that Bitcoin is controlled by
the users. We could explain that they should be careful about updating their software unless they fully understand what's been changed. Source:
https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/issues/1904.
