[smackeyacky]

I got an awesome idea. I'm going to burn CPU cycles to make magic numbers that mean nothing to anybody except me and my buddies, based on an erudite sounding white paper that has plausible but nonsensical foundations that feed off conspiracy theories and a pile of libertarian ideals that can't possibly work.

Next, I'm going to find some rubes to read it, and they will give me money to own those nonsensical numbers. Those guys are going out to farm more rubes. We aim to say all sorts of new finance is now possible while enabling nothing but crime and fraud.

Rinse. Repeat.

if it isn't completely obvious, I think the whole thing is unhinged

[redox99]

> an erudite sounding white paper that has plausible but nonsensical foundations

What is nonsensical about the white paper?

It is the first solution to the double spend problem, thus the first decentralized money system. Cryptographers had tried to create such a system for at least a decade, but no solution had been found before.

And it has been proven beyond a doubt that it works, and it's secure. It's kind of insane that the first solution to something is good enough to handle over 10 years later an almost 1 trillion market cap (thus a massive incentive to hack it / break it).

It has of course some big limitations, which is to be expected for the first solution to a problem. Namely, it's kind of a "brute force" solution, with this I mean the inefficient aspect in terms of energy usage. And it has very low throughput (TPS). It still is however, a breakthrough paper. It takes you from having no solution to a problem, to having a working solution.

The shame is how slowly it has progressed from there. It's been over 10 years and the efficiency part is only now being almost solved with ETH PoS. And the throughput part seems quite far away. Also the UX of most software that allows you to interact with cryptocurrency is still awful.

The bitcoin whitepaper is one of my favorite papers in fact. It is very approachable with minimal cryptography knowledge and only 9 pages long. And very simple, unlike more modern cryptocurrency papers.

[smackeyacky]

The crypto part is fine, not that I can claim to understand it.

The trustless model where the paper insists that irreversible transactions are the only acceptable form of financial settlement is hubris and ignorance.

[redox99]

> the paper insists that irreversible transactions are the only acceptable form of financial settlement

The paper never insists that irreversible transactions are the ONLY acceptable form of financial settlement. In fact it says "the system [financial institutions] works well enough for most transactions".

It points out that there is NO electronic system that allows no reversible transactions, as you can with cash. That's why it's titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". The author wanted something similar to cash, but electronic.

Besides that, discrediting a paper just for the introduction, which is just the opinion of the author regarding why they think such paper is interesting, is short sighted in my opinion.

[smackeyacky]

Maybe short sighted. But given the current state of crypto currencies and the culture surrounding them, it seems an entirely fair assessment. That crypto currencies are designed to eschew third parties is a defining feature that attracts people who don't care to be scrutinised.

Mostly, those people are looking to bypass the law.

Crypto currencies encourage illegal activity by design. The paper sets that out, in plain sight in the introduction.

[redox99]

What you're saying boils down to the age old discussion regarding privacy, "nothing to hide", etc that has been discussed a million times. I suggest searching for previous discussions regarding this.

Even then, I don't think a technology should be disregarded just because it has some use cases that you disagree with.

Also you vastly overestimate how much crypto is used for "illegal activities". The reality is that it's almost entirely used as an investment, similar to gold.

> Crypto currencies encourage illegal activity by design.

They definitely don't ENCOURAGE illegal activity. You can argue they can maybe facilitate it. It still is much worse than cash for illegal activity in most cases however.

And by the way, just because something is illegal does not mean it's bad. A lot of things that are legal and accepted now were illegal before. And even if you agree with all current laws in your country, remember that there are a lot of other countries, maybe not entirely democratic, with very different and unfair laws.

[smackeyacky]

> They definitely don't ENCOURAGE illegal activity. You can argue they can maybe facilitate it.

This is what I like to call the "sawn-off shotgun" idea. Sure, there might be a legit use for a sawn-off shotgun, but they are never used for that[0].

I would agree that speculation is the most common use for Bitcoin, although I'd more characterise that as rube farming. If you attempted to launch a security with the characteristics of Bitcoin, you'd be in jail. When the music stops, there simply won't be any chairs.

As for disregarding a technology because I don't agree with the use cases, it's perfectly legit to avoid pyramid schemes and greater fool farms for the same reason. The often-cited-but-always-missing good use cases for crypto currencies are such a tiny proportion of what it actually gets used for they become a novelty.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawed-off_shotgun#:~:text=guns....