The Reaction Of Bitcoin White Paper Release – Bitcoin Magazine
This is a recording of a recent Twitter Spaces conversation about The Bitcoin White Paper and What It Means for the Bitcoin Community.
Listen to this Twitter Spaces:
Dan Held: Let’s touch on some of your other bullets. The initial reception was kind of – I was always very curious about it. Just seeing people’s first reactions.
Pete Rizzo: I was actually reading through the cypherpunk list as pretty linear recently. And I was actually quite shocked to see how much discussion there was after him [Satoshi Nakamoto] released the white paper. I had kind of thought it was kind of dismissed because that’s how people had framed it for me. But reading the emails sequentially, it actually became like a lot of conversations.
It’s actually one of the most talked about things that month. But it’s also interesting in that the conversation is almost universally negative. But to the credit of the critics at the time, they were actually quite adept at figuring out what the modern problem really is.
As scaling Bitcoin is still something we are actively talking about for more transactions. The initial comments essentially identify that pain point. They were wrong, and there was nothing about that problem that stopped the system from working in practice.
I think this is where you’re going to like – Gwern is one of the cypherpunks writing about Bitcoin pretty early on, and he says that what actually got Bitcoin right is that it was able to work in practice long enough for people to disagree about it and improve it.
But their criticism is essentially something we are still working on today. The blockchain must be distributed among a certain number of users. The blockchain consists of data that everyone must store, and then that is really the design limitation. They weren’t really ignorant. We think of Bitcoin critics today as people who talk about how Bitcoin is boiling the oceans.
They weren’t quite at that level. They were technical enough to understand the proposition and I would argue that their criticism was essentially – that is the current criticism of Bitcoin today to a large extent. I think they were just wrong about how long the system could exist or that it would actually work at all in practice, if that makes sense.
Held: It’s pretty fun to watch a lot of the nuanced conversation. It was quite difficult to grasp the basics. So many people had questions like, “Well, how does stuff have value and how will it be put to use?” That’s where people always forget. When people were mining back then, there wasn’t really a financial incentive; bitcoins were worth nothing. It wasn’t a prize for long. It was more of a curiosity project. “Oh, I’m just going to play with this.”
I think that even Satoshi – so I’m going to extrapolate here quite a bit and you can check me or agree with me – but the issuance schedule for Bitcoin seems to me to be quite aggressive and I think where Satoshi set the decimal to 21 million instead of 21 billion, I think Satoshi was actually a little less sure about Bitcoin than the rest of us are.
Rizzo: Why do you say that?
Held: Well, I think he put the hard cap at 21 million because he felt breaking $1, like breaking a dollar would make it perceived as valuable.
