I'm sorry about that. I used to like bitcoin, and I used to believe that it could have been good money. It turns out it isn't. But it is a great gambler's token, and it is a great reserve currency for unregulated sleazy big business (but not for the normal user, only for the big sleazy guys). This is why I don't like it. I think Satoshi created a monster, and that, together with a lot of technical clumsiness of the design, makes my have some doubts about him being Nash. But I'm not emotionally invested into this. In other words, when I see the work, I think it cannot be the work of a genius, or at most of a genius in a bad day. Simply because the result doesn't look very well constructed, not because it has something to do with my "world view". Bitcoin turned out to be clunky and quite ugly. If you think that a genius created something clunky and quite ugly, be my guest. I'm just pointing out that for a math genius, things don't add up, and I haven't seen any explanation of why it doesn't add up. Your "you are wrong" are not arguments, but just expressions of your un-argumented opinion.
I can write a letter to Pythagoras, saying "you are wrong, but you are suffering from cognitive dissonance". That doesn't disprove Pythagoras' theorem.
If the elements I bring up WERE truly well-thought over, I'm sure that one could explain them clearly to me, or refer to Satoshi explaining them which would even be better. I haven't looked through all of the documentation, but I have never seen (so maybe I missed it) a convincing analysis countering the indications of clumsy design I mention here *especially on the math and crypto side* which is where we could expect a guy like Nash to be top-level.
The clumsiness and the monster that you describe as a great reserve currency for unregulated sleazy big business (but not for the normal user....is EXACTLY what Nash describes:
In a large state like one of the "great democracies" it is reasonable to say that the people should be able, in principle, to decide on the form of a money (like a "public utility") that they should be served by, even though most of the actual volume of the use of the money would be out of the hands of the great majority of the people.
And then the “integration” or “coordination” of those into a global currency would become just a technical problem. (Here I am thinking of a politically neutral form of a technological utility rather than of a money which might, for example, be used to exert pressures in a conflict situation comparable to “the cold war”.)
Here I think of the possibility that a good sort of international currency might EVOLVE before the time when an official establishment might occur.
if it were too easy to set up a form of “global money” that the version achieved might have characteristics of inferiority which would make it, compar-atively, more like a relatively inferior national currency
You simply do not understand the role of money in this world, and are a perfect example of why Satoshi never explained what bitcoin truly was.
We are mixing different things here. Satoshi clearly stated that he intended to have VISA-like transaction volumes on-chain with bitcoin, but that bitcoin would become a semi-centralized served thing.
I already cited that:
http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think. A typical transaction
would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact). Each transaction has to be
broadcast twice, so lets say 1KB per transaction. Visa processed 37 billion
transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day.
That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or
2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.
If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then,
sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal.
From this, I clearly read that the original aim, as announced by Satoshi, was to have VISA like transaction amounts on chain. 100 GB of extra block chain a day didn't seem to scare him in 2008.
The way I understand what Nash is saying in what you put in bold, is not so much that most people should use another KIND of money, but rather that they would use *the same money* but not determine most VOLUME.
In other words, people pay in dollars - the same dollars - as a few rich entities, but the dollar flow between the few rich entities is much, much bigger than the dollar flow between most people. He's talking about VOLUME, not about KIND.
I read from Satoshi also that he realized that his system would only be viable in the long term in the hands of an oligarchy of miners.
(from the same e-mail):
Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe
for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section
to check for
double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or
about 12KB per day.
Only people trying to create new coins would need to run
network nodes. At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the
network grows beyond a certain point,
it would be left more and more to
specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would
only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with
that one node.
So much for the P2P nature of bitcoin, which was only intended as a bootstrap with useful idiots. He clearly didn't care about a long-term P2P network, and the importance of decentralized nodes: he wanted a few big miner nodes, to which people would connect directly, without them even having the ability to download the block chain. The block chain was just the ledger that a few oligarchs would share amongst them, hopefully keeping one another in check, to serve as the new centralized VISA backbone to which all users would connect.
However, the way bitcoin is evolving, and was actually designed with the 1 MB limit (and other practical limits), is that on chain transactions will be limited to a few big actors and will not reach large scale, but on the other hand, that most people will be able to download a chain with which they cannot do anything apart from contemplating how big guys are filling it with their expensive transactions.
Bitcoin is "rich sleasy business" OWN private money, NOT to be used by normal people, contrary to what Satoshi initially announced. Bitcoin IS downloadable by anybody, but not usable ; Satoshi announced bitcoin to be usable by anybody, but not downloadable except for a few miner oligarchs.
And why did it become a rich sleazy business money and not a VISA administered by a few miners ? Because Satoshi put himself a 1MB limit on the block chain. If he understood the game structure of bitcoin, he would have known that this limit would become immutable because it was needed to generate fees (which he needed for reasons of his diminishing coin creation scheme in the longer term) but then it couldn't turn into a VISA kind of money and he would deny what he had been proposing from the start - and if he didn't understand the consequences of him introducing a "temporary" 1 MB limit, then he couldn't foresee that it was going to become a rich-business-only crypto either.
