You missed my point. That's OK My point was not super clear. But in the very next line (I think) I mention, with less detail, the existence of issues.
Thanks for your courteous response. Due apologies for having misinterpreted you: Your post came right after mine, and I filled in the blanks a bit in trying to figure out what you meant.
I will here reply only to a few points you raised—not to chop up what you said or to take it out of context, but because they are interesting points to discuss.
[...] I think we are somewhat blind to the magnitude of achievement that Satoshi whoever he/she/they are/were. Not with the specifics, but with the broad brush.
I am not blind to it. I view Satoshi’s achievements with a mixture of awe, and kicking myself with “why didn’t I think of that?”—for as so many truly great achievements, the creative idea of repurposing Hashcash to resolve a distributed consensus
separate from a currency token looks obvious in hindsight. Only in hindsight—only when we know the answer. Before that, the question looks impossible—if we even know the right question to ask, as so often we don’t. Someone had to see what nobody did. Every invention that we take for granted started out as one individual’s vision to make the impossible a reality.
It is nowadays fashionable in some quarters to deprecate those achievements. People who couldn’t and didn’t think of it will demand humility, and impose a pretense that everyone is just like everyone else—a mass of precious snowflakes. Petty hatred befalls those who stand apart from the crowd, and worse unto geniuses. Such jealousy is horrifically ugly. I do not want anyone to misinterpret me as belittling or minimizing Satoshi’s achievements.
On the other hand, I balance that against (a) also properly recognizing the achievements of those who have come after Satoshi, and (b) avoiding the type of Satoshi-worship that leads to bad ends—in the worst case, opening the opportunity for imposters to gain instant followers by claiming “Satoshi’s Vision”.
For comparison, in the sciences, I have seen some debate about the proper place of, say, Isaac Newton. I have seen arguments to the effect that Newton wasn’t so great, after all—that physics is just something that emerges from many different minds, without needing an occasional push by a giant. I find that objectionable.
I recognize Newton as having advanced the state of the art in ways that no one else did at the time. I accord him his proper place in history. But I don’t see Newton as some sort of a god. I recognize that his achievements are, by today’s standards, quite rudimentary—they even seem primitive. They seem that way, because he laid new foundations in
classical mechanics on which others later built great edifices. I greatly admire those who came after Newton, too.
So as with Satoshi.
My analogy of Satoshi to Newton probably indicates that I am not blind to the magnitude of his achievements.
[...] I would think there would need to be a lot of testing done even before it got to the point it was before the genesis block. And sometimes I wonder if a team of folks was indeed behind it... And that LOTS of work was done before the initial release... I just find it astonishing what Sartoshi managed to do.
I doubt the widespread theory of a Satoshi team. His work bore too much the imprint of one individual’s hands; and moreover, he made mistakes that a well-resourced professional team would probably avoid. For example, I think that any hypothetical “Team Satoshi” would probably have at least one professional cryptographer onboard. A cryptographer would not have designed a protocol with malleable transactions—yes, I will keep harping on that! It is a known class of vulnerability. If you familiarize yourself with the development of open-source cryptographic protocols, you will find public discussions in which professional cryptographers actively search for malleability of authenticated messages in their own work; where it matters (and it does matter here), they treat it as a serious security flaw. This indicates to me that Satoshi was probably a lone individual who was not himself a professional cryptographer, and who was working in isolation before he announced Bitcoin to the world.
Bitcoin’s design also has some idiosyncrasies—for example, the obsessive use of double-hashing everywhere. It is mostly harmless, and much less annoying than the urban legends about why Bitcoin does that. (I have been intending to rebut that nonsense in the tech forum: It
cannot be to protect against length extension attacks in places where length extension attacks would be impossible.) The simple answer—in my opinion, the most likely answer: Double-hashing is just the type of thing that an amateur cryptographer, even an intelligent one, may do to try to strengthen the system. (I make that judgment while acknowledging my own status as “
not a Real Cryptographer(TM)”: Fools know it all, but wisdom is to know one’s own limitations.)
It
is remarkable that one individual took on a project of this scope, and completed it all the way to a functional alpha release by himself. Remarkable—but not impossible, and not even improbable if we recognize that Satoshi was smart, motivated, self-disciplined, and hardworking. There exist other projects of large scope that were created by one
non-anonymous individual alone. Most people can’t pull that off—some people can.
At that, indeed, I think that assuming it was group work unfairly minimizes Satoshi’s achievement. Of course, I can’t prove it
wasn’t a group effort—but I think it was done by one alone, by one with much higher abilities than most people have. If you assume he was
at least in the top 0.1% of talent, a very low standard for someone who makes an historic achievement, then it is not even surprising that he did it alone.
I am not sure if your point about cult like stuff had anything to do with my odd post.
It came right after
my post on that subject, exuded hostility towards an unspecified party, and said in what seemed to me to be quasi-religious terms that Satoshi’s creation of Bitcoin was “miraculous” (quote-unquote). I looked around at other posts, puzzled over it for awhile, then decided that you must be arguing with me. If I misinterpreted that, my misunderstanding was understandable.
But I would agree that is not helpful. MP was a weirdo. And similarly the various scammers in crypto have leveraged that kind of stuff for their gain. I am not terribly comfortable when people talk about Bitcoin as if it were a new religion...
Agreed. Especially when someone does New Age style pitching the woo about “the Bible, The Vedic Samhitas, The Tao Te Ching”, then turns to preaching that Bitcoin is a blind, irrational leap of faith. (Well, he didn’t put it that way. I am translating the essay to more honest terms.)
But you must make one exception for me.
My esoteric knowledge of divine Bitcoin is the One True Way! Margin-buying sinners, be forewarned of Bitcoin’s wrath!
Bitcoin, please forgive me.
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