[samhw]

Yes, I’m a strong believer in cryptocurrency, but I don’t believe any current cryptocurrency will be the one that changes the world. They deserve praise - some of them - for laying groundwork, but I tend to believe that the world-changing crypto will have to behave more like Moxie Marlinspike described in his recent essay: i.e. truly building on cryptography as the source of trust, not distributed consensus among servers.

The transaction processing mechanism will also have to radically change, and be detached from the mechanism for generating money (even if you believe the two should be proportional, to strictly couple them is an impracticable engineering failure).

As for Bitcoin, aside from the flaws in Satoshi’s scheme itself, the current Bitcoin system has suffered from focussing on its unexpected popularity as a store of value, which popularity has meant it’s incredibly volatile and thus useless as a medium of exchange or unit of account. Of course the slow processing as a result of the mining mechanism is also a major hurdle.

I hope something better will come about soon. I know that it won’t come from the world of people who suddenly idolise Bitcoin because of the cult around it. It’ll come from the people who were capable of reading the original paper and seeing its potential even before it was in the news - that’s a tiny subset of crypto enthusiasts, but I hope they stay motivated.

(Final thing: it’s ‘wither’, not ‘whither’. ‘Whither’ means ‘from where’.)