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by Strs2FillMyDrms 1588 days ago
Juxtaposing this to Nakamoto's creation of bitcoin and original use cryptography, it makes no sense to me how anyone would have ever paid even an ounce of attention to what some random, supposedly unkown guy on the internet has to say about ... anything. Or how Perelman even got someone to even eant to verify his solution. Maybe not so much Perelman since he had some important figures knowing him already.
3 comments
dfabulich 1588 days ago
Bitcoin received early support from high-reputation folks in the cryptography community, including Hal Finney and Nick Szabo. (As a result, some people thought that one or both of them were Nakamoto.)

Regardless of who Nakamoto actually was, it does appear that Finney and Szabo played a similar role that Sokal did in this story; getting support from high-rep folks was essential to getting Bitcoin off the ground.

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inglor_cz 1588 days ago
Perelman was widely known as a math prodigy (he won gold for the USSR at the International Mathematical Olympiad) and studied at the Leningrad University, so he could approach pretty much any of his former professors to take a look. He was definitely not an outsider in the field. A recluse, yes, but that is different from being a no-name.
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dandelany 1588 days ago
Yeah Bitcoin is such an interesting exception! I think some ideas are viral enough on their own to go from zero to front-page on HN/reddit/etc. even when posted by an anonymous user - but it's rare to go beyond that, they usually run out of momentum.

Bitcoin had a few things going for it - the whitepaper is concise and well-explained, in perfect academic prose and typeset in LaTEX, which lends it an air of credibility. It came with an implementation, so hackers could experiment with it immediately, plus it sort of has implicit libertarian anti-government undertones, both of which encouraged follow-on blog posts.

Once the ball got rolling, another kind of heuristic took over - the money heuristic. People put money into the thing, which made other people go "oh look at how much money they put in, this is a real serious investment thing!" and put in their money, in a sick feedback loop that continues to this day...

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