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I often write about why I think Bitcoin is disaster. I should mention that in some ways I'm actually quite a fan. First, the design is brilliant. Admittedly it's cool in the way the Teller-Ulam Design is cool: a brilliant, evil insight you wish no one would ever implement. 1/
But it's still brilliant. The proof of work idea is a very very neat idea. But it's also terrible; implementing it dooms the whole system and makes the world worse too. Still, on an intellectual level, it's brilliant. 2/
Second, before Bitcoin, I hadn't believed that a private fiat currency was a feasible thing. I thought that without state power backing such a thing and forcing it into use, it just couldn't happen. But it turns out that's totally wrong. So that was very cool to learn. 3/
Indeed, it should have been obvious to me from the start, given that in some sense, every medium of exchange is a fiat medium of exchange. It isn't like gold coins have value because of physics or the like. But again, one learns through being wrong about things. 4/
The insight that all that's required to have a transaction system is a trustworthy distributed ledger was in itself also a really, really important one. Again, not something I would have grokked on my own without it existing. 5/
And lastly, it's insanely obvious that demand for the thing bitcoin promises to be (private, censorship resistant, resistant to currency manipulation, very low transaction costs) is enormous, and kudos to "Satoshi" for going out and trying something. 6/
Because we weren't going to learn anything without experiments being done. Theory is useful only up to a point when you're dealing with real world systems; implementation is how you learn. So that part has been really important as well. 7/
I clearly have enormous skepticism about this particular design, of course, but no one would be exploring the space with such verve and efficiency if nothing had been tried. And again, I'm interested in the underlying goals, even if bitcoin doesn't satisfy them in practice. 8/8
