[ExI] My personal "intelligence" failure regarding Bitcoin...

[Bryan Bishop]

John:

Although it is true that you were not among the first tens of handfuls of
adopters, I don't think that this should be surprising to you. There are
many assets that you will never be first to investigate before anyone else.
That there exist people who have evaluated something prior to you should
not be a tremendous letdown. I would suggest that your subscription to
these emails should not, under any circumstance, make you think that you
are receiving information about the cutting edge of technology development.
As a very brief example, basically nothing about software culture has ever
intersected this group. Although many here are programmers on their own
time, they don't seem to express it here, and as a consequence there's an
extremely huge gap between, say, the open source software scene and the
extropians. This has happened elsewhere too, a similar problem is the
source of why the cypherpunks keep saying "cypherpunks write code" to each
other.... Extropy-chat has never been about technology development or great
ambition, and once I realized that, I was able to relieve a bunch of my
frustration and perhaps you will find the same. (So instead I participate
in a separate group of fairly-extropic technology doers, and I try to kick
out underperforming sideline wackos.)

As for Bitcoin.... there are many reasons why you should not have expected
yourself to investigate Bitcoin very thoroughly years ago. Even the
cypherpunks didn't take a very good look at the beginning, they shrugged
Bitcoin off because they had seen so many cryptosystem proposals in the
past that never worked. After seeing hundreds or thousands of terrible
proposals, you can see how they would become skeptical and tired. Similar
things happen to everyone else. Bitcoin is quite alien technology, it is
ridiculously esoteric and there are many subtleties regarding how it works
or why it works. A handful of impossibility proofs are one reason why
nobody bothered to try something like Bitcoin before; it is known to be
impossible to have instantaneous communication across an entire network to
achieve time-ordering agreement of transactions, among other problems and
constraints for which Bitcoin proposes novel solutions. Ultimately the
primary contribution that Bitcoin offers is a way to maintain a Byzantine
agreement or verified consensus in the face of malicious adversaries
without the presence of a central authority. The "endless frustration" that
you see everywhere is people being subjected to massive amounts of
(dis/mis)information--- the time to adopt Bitcoin is so much faster than
the time it takes to learn and study Bitcoin. As a result there's a lot of
wrong ideas floating around, such as the famous myth that Bitcoin is
anonymous money-- despite having what is well understood by at least some
Bitcoin users as the most public ledger in the history of never happened. I
suspect that in the absence of having knowledge about Bitcoin's rules and
operation, what has happened is that people have just made up information
or have been unable to fact check just very basic concepts, and then this
gets regurgitated everywhere. Despite this, some choose to adopt, even
without knowing every excruciating detail, which is fine. Similarly, some
choose not to investigate because, frankly, the information they are
receiving gives them no reason to bother, just like the cypherpunks and
cryptographers that were originally shown the concept and code. (Notably,
Hal Finney really dug in deep almost immediately. Very cool.)

[1] Originally everyone that learned anything about Bitcoin did so by
directly reading the source code and the paper. After a brief read of the
original paper, reading and comprehending all of the source code is very
important. Reading code is not something that people often have to do when
evaluating a new concept in economics, so as you can imagine, many people
simply haven't done this, and instead their knowledge is based on arguments
with other people who have also not looked. Besides the source code, there
are now email archives (bitcoin-development), bug reports (github issue
tracker), historical changes (git), forks (thousands...), bitcointalk
posts, IRC logs (bitcoin, bitcoin-dev, bitcoin-wizards), bitcoin wiki, and
a bunch of other papers.

On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 2:04 PM, John Grigg <possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Well, just as governments and military's view intelligence gathering about
> events in the world around them as keenly important, so do individuals.  My
> own personal intelligence gathering failure has been regarding Bitcoin.  I
> think of myself as a person who knows what is going on in the cutting edge
> of technological development, in large part due to my membership in this
> list, but I don't remember reading anything about Bitcoin here, until quite
> recently.  I feel like this has become an "old fogey" list of people who
> are no longer surfing the edge of real world technological progression, at
> least in a way that can really benefit them.  I suppose I should have also
> been hanging out with the hacker/coder/Libertarian crowd.  But I view the
> Extropy-list as "home."
>
>
> How many of you not only learned about Bitcoin in time to buy/mine coins
> at very low cost (and later make a huge profit), but upon learning about
> it, saw an opportunity, and actually seized it?  In my case, a Mormon
> Transhumanist Association friend posted about it to an email list, in early
> July of 2010, but he was restrained about it, and so not sensing enthusiasm
> and an endorsement (I respect his intelligence and viewpoints), I let it
> pass without grasping the opportunity.  I kick myself over it now,
> endlessly, because I have had my financial struggles (to say the least),
> and this could have transformed my life!
>
>
> Bitcoin only reentered my awareness, over the past six months or so, due
> to news about it finally hitting a critical mass in the media.  I finally
> last week bought myself ten little (they do both scrypt and sha-256)
> miners, and will be putting them to work.  This is probably "too little,
> too late," but at least I am trying, and I view it more as a hobby, than
> anything else.  Also, a very bright FB friend has started up his own
> virtual currency, and I will be investing in it, with my fingers crossed,
> that the value will explode sometime down the road.  My basic strategy is
> to buy/mine currently low value virtual coins, hang onto them for 5-10
> years if necessary, and then sell at least some of them, as the prices go
> (hopefully) steadily up.  And I can of course sell the cheap coin brands I
> mine, to turn around and buy tiny fractions of Bitcoin.
>
>
> Anyway, thank you my friends, for letting me rant.  I feel like I will
> still be regretting this botched opportunity thirty years from now! lol
>  This was most likely, a once in a lifetime event, which I blew.  You
> should see all the people on the net, who wrote about their similar
> experiences of frustration!  It's almost endless...
>
>
> John
>
>
> P.S. If anyone here builds or comes across a time machine, please zip over
> to my location in Mesa, Arizona, and then take me back to the year 2009!
> But not until we look at dinosaurs and then assassinate Hitler!!!  ;  )
>


- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20150124/c93e40cf/attachment.html>