On March 30, 2014 at 04:47 johnl@iecc.com (John Levine) wrote:
When people talked of "virtual currency" over the years, often arguing that it's too hard a problem, how many described bitcoin with its cryptographic mining etc?
None, but it shouldn't be hard to look at the way bitcoin works and realize why it'd be phenomenally ill suited for e-postage, just for technical reasons. I told Satoshi so in 2009.
I wasn't suggesting bitcoin was a model for e-postage, only that a lot of papers were written saying systems like bitcoin were more or less impossible (usually based on the double-spending problem.) But bitcoin seems to have gained quite a bit of traction nonetheless though it may well still be a bad idea. The problem is the world is a very sloppy place and tends to function in spite of proofs that "bumblebees can't fly" etc. when there's a need.
R's, John
PS: Sometimes a WKBI really is a WKBI.
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