Understanding Bitcoin

What Hacker News says

1. SilasXAug 2023
   Oh wow I think I found my intellectual doppelganger! I run into this problem a lot, where I try to learn something simple but it quickly balloons to the point where the answer is in a hundred pieces due to missing context and bad assumptions about the reader. I went through this same process but for Bitcoin, culminating in writing the Understanding Bitcoin book[1].

   I also saw this dynamic in the cryptopals challenges, where I thought the hardest problems were "look up this off-the-shelf cryptosystem and implement it", not "find a flaw in that system you reimplemented with only a few hints.[2]

   Like others, I recommend nand2tetris as having answered a lot of the questions I had. It has you implement the hardware of a computer that can execute the program loaded in its memory, from the logic gates and flip-flops up. Then, you implement a compiler that can translate high-level Java-like code into binary. (First to a virtual machine, then assembly, then binary.)

   Of course, even then it leaves caps: it's a deliberately toy system, it can't handle programs longer than its memory, the machine does only one-shot programs (and thus can't handle a programmer creating a program live and having it be executed). But it answered a lot of my questions, like how to make memory work, and how function call/return work.

   [1] http://understandingbitcoin.us.

   [2] Previous comment about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36398627

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2. jsmthrowawayDec 2017
   > I don't think most reputable proponents have been saying that for years though.

   Define reputable.

   > Announcing the first release of Bitcoin, a new electronic cash system

   http://web.archive.org/web/20090131115053/http://bitcoin.org...

   > Instant transactions for points-of-sale

   http://web.archive.org/web/20130805223235/http://bitcoin.org...

   (That verbiage lasted most of 2013, but was removed a couple days after this capture, presumably because payments were starting to become less "instant.")

   > Bitcoin is a new payment system, independent from the traditional financial sector, and this could provide resilience to the economy in case of a crisis, as it creates a parallel payment system.

   Understanding Bitcoin: Cryptography, Engineering, and Economics by Pedro Franco, 2010, pp. 26.

   > You can purchase video games, gifts, books, servers, and alpaca socks. [...] Bitcoins are a great way for small businesses and freelancers to get noticed. It doesn't cost anything to start accepting them [...] and you'll get additional business from the Bitcoin economy.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um63OQz3bjo

   Bitcoin has literally been presented as a replacement for cash payments since day 1. I could go on, and on. That history is now being rewritten, and I think it’s important to understand why. Bitcoin set out to do one thing, is failing at that one thing, and I’m discouraged to see people rewrite the narrative rather than own it and say it didn’t work for that.

   And you've mixed up your history: the research grants into the Internet were funded for that purpose, but it quickly morphed into an alternative usage once the new abilities were seen. Nobody went out and pulled out full page newspaper ads with that intent for its design, or otherwise heralded the Internet as such.

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