# Last edited on 2014-12-23 23:30:20 by stolfilocal # For the /r/bitcoin subreddit, in reply to /u/Rassah The internet was only one of many experiments in network design that were undertaken in the 1970s. I first used it in 1979, when it had already been in use for several years, only by a few universities and tech companies. That was some 13 years before it was released to the public; and after that, more years of development were neded before it was minimally safe to use for critical things like home banking and e-payments. Indeed, the latter is viable at all only because there are daily withdrawal limits, the banks and payment processors watch for suspicious activities, and fraudulent transfers can be reversed. So, that is one big difference between the internet and bitcoin: the internet did not (and does not) have to deliver every packet safely and timely to be tremendously useful; whereas every bitcoin operation is critical, and every error or fraud has permanent and potentially expensive consequences. Another big difference is that the internet is merely a passive data conduit, so data can be easily exchanged between it and any other network protocol (such as Ethernet, WiFi, telephone, TV cable, ...). Whereas bitcoin is a closed system: one cannot move coins (or the value they represent) to another completely different crypto protocol -- or even another independent blockchain with exactly the same protcol. Thus, while the internet can and does integrate naturally with other networks, bitcoin cannot integrate with other cryptocoins. Indeed, in order to "go to the moon", must crowd them out of the market. Yet another important difference is that the internet did not need any special mechanisms to be decentralized -- except the DNS and (much later) the certificate system, that had to be substantially centralized order to work at all. Whereas bitcoin, in order to be totally decentralized, needs the extremely expensive PoW mining protocol, which may have a fatal flaw (it leads to concentration of the mining power into a few hands). Bitcoin may be able to incorporate *some* good features of a competing protocol, but not all. Consider: what prevents Linux from incorporating all good features of Windows and MacOS? Even a small change to the bitcoin protocol, like increasing the block size, is being resisted by many developers, and will be a non-trivial hassle to all clients. Bitcoin will not be able to incorporate more radical features, that change the semantics of the protocol, or are incompatible with features that are believed to be essential to it. Moreover, it takes a long time for developers and users of some software X to recognize that a certain feature of competing software Y is worth adopting. Usually, that happens only after Y takes a big slice out of X's market; but, by then, it is usually too late to adapt. Suppose that BetterCoin uses a block tree instead of a block chain, for example, or works with address balances instead of UTXOs: how could bitcoin transition to those features in mid-flight? Think of all the bitcoin services and applications that are now totally dependent on the current block chain structure... As for bitcoin's original goal: where has Satoshi written that the blockchain that he started in 2009-01-03 was **not** just an experiment, but was THE blockchain that would one day contain all the money in the world? Opening the internet to the general public, after ~15 yeears of experience in a limited, computer-savy public, was an explicit decision, much debated and publicly announced. Was there a similar decision and announcement to open bitcoin to the general public, inviting non-computer people to put their money into it? Instead of the internet, I believe that a more fitting analogy to bitcoin is the first plane fown by the Wright brothers. People had long been working on the problem of building a heavier-than-air flying machine, and the brothers believed that they had a viable solution. Their goal, when building that first plane, was merely to prove that their solution was indeed capable of flying -- and nothing more. They surely did not set out to build a vehicle that could carry passengers across the oceans and drop bombs on artillery squadrons. All the other early aviation pioneers who tried to do the same in the following years, with variously different designs, did not intend to do that, either. I don't know whether they bothered to say "this is just an experiment", but obviously they did not have to. I see bitcoin as a computer experiment because it looks, smells, walks and quacks like one. Its basic parameters (such as block size, block frequency, reward halving schedule, etc.) and some structural features (such as the bounded supply, use of a block chain instead of a tree or some other efficient data structure, etc.) are fine for an experiment, because they were the simplest choices that worked; but they are not adequate for THE global e-payment & investment system. Again, some of those choices may be patched, others can't. I wasn't even aware of bitcoin in 2009, but from what I have read I believe that it was, for most of that year, a thing of computer nerds, who were interested in it precisely for its value as a technical experiment. Only later, in 2010 or so, other non-computer people (such as libertarians and drug dealers) thought that bitcoin, as it was, would serve their needs; and retroactively defined those needs as being bitcoin's goals. And only after that, when that demand pushed the price up, its goal was redefined again -- as a secure investment, and as a get-rich-quick-with-no-work schema. Is my reading of the history incorrect? It seems that each one imagines Satoshi to be like himself: the libertarians believe he is a champion of their cause, drug users see him as a cross between Saint Ulbricht and Einstein, to scammers he is the cleverest Ponzi, to businessmen he is a finacial genius... Needless to say, I believe he is a computer scientist. I suppose that he is thrilled that his experiment has worked this long, and he must be glad that it is being abused (since the goal is precisely to check that the protocol withstands severe abuse). On the other hand, he should be a bit concerned about the harm that the abuse has already caused, and may cause if the price does crash. And he must be worried about the concentration of mining power: this development was apparently unexpected, and may mean that the protocol does not quite work yet. To me, the attempt to promote bitcoin as investment and payment medium to the general public are misguided at best. It is as if libertarians in 1908 had started buying copies of the Wright Flyer One because they hoped it would let them escape the tyranny and taxes of governments, and the exorbitant prices of railroad tickets (and claimed that the Flyer had been designed for those purposes). Or if smugglers had adopted it to carry contraband across the Mexican border. Or if some speculator bought thousands of Flyer Ones, then tried to sell them to the general public for ten times the original price, claiming that the plane would become extremely valuable because people would soon use them instead of horses and trains. Or if another entrepreneur launched an IPO for an intercontinental airline with a fleet of 100 Flyer Ones, while another opened a personalized paint & upholstery shop for Flyer Ones. Bitcoin is not a "beta version", not even "alpha version". Those terms refer to stages in the definitive implementation of a product, the one that is meant to be delivered to clients; and bitcoin is not that. It is not even a "prototype", which is a crude implementation that is meant to give an idea of what the real implementation will look and feel like. It is only an experiment, that aims to test a particular solution to a particular sub-problem. The distance from it to a real product is like the distance from the Flyer One to the first usable planes: to cross that distance, we still need many incremental improvements, and a couple of genial inventions. I do not say that "bitcoin should not be used because it is just an experiment". I hate it when I see bitcoin being marketed as an investment, but because its price is totally unpredictable, in the short or long term. It is a lottery with unknown odds and prizes. "Selling" it to pensioners and non-computer types as a hedge against inflation, or claiming that its value will continue to increase as it has done in the past -- that is scamming, pure and simple. There is a video on YouTube, from May 2014, where a few dozen bitcoin professionals and gurus are asked to predict the BTC price by the end of this year. The best shot was by a woman who guessed 600$ (The price then was ~450$). All the others "experts" guessed much higher -- 2000, 5000, 10000 dollars or more. What is more upsetting is not that they got it wrong, but that (a) their guesses were so disparate, (b) they could not justify their numbers by any logical argument, and (c) they still cannot explain why the price dropped to 330$ instead. If they were making such unfounded predicitions in public for an ordinary stock, they would probably be prosecuted by the SEC... (Actually, I know why the price has been mostly falling since January, and I know that they know too; but they cannot say it, because it would ruin their businesses.) If people want to use bitcoin as a replacement for credit cards (or for day-trading at the exchanges, which I see as a weird kind of gambling), it is their problem, I have not right or interest to criticize. Apart from illegal payments and tax evasion, I suppose that bitcoin may even have advantages in certain cases, such as pre-paying hotels and plane tickets overseas. For other uses, the advantages do not seem to be worth the disadvantages, such as the lack of consumer protection. Anyway, it is not surprising that bitcoin is not being widely adopted as the premier e-payment method: it was not designed for that. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Since I have joined bitcointalk, and now /r/bitcoin, I have been called every nasty word you can imagine -- from buttcoiner to retarded, parasite, fascist and what not. But I am only a skeptic, like 7 billion others out there. The only difference is that I have continued to study "the bitcoin phenomenon", and even tried to help bitcoiners see what I saw; whereas most of my fellow skeptics lost any interest once they understood the basics. Whenever I try to get below the surface of news and statistics, I invariably find more reasons to be skeptic -- about bitcoin's long term future, and about the honesty of those bitcoin gurus.