Musings of Hal Finney \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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326 sats \ 6 comments \ @TwoLargePizzas 28 Aug 2023 bitcoin

I've been reading through some of the things Hal Finney wrote in the early days. I came across this little gem...

As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world. Then the total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. With 20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million.

So the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million to 1! Even if the odds of Bitcoin succeeding to this degree are slim, are they really 100 million to one against? Something to think about...

It's crazy to think that people saw this and still didn't get some. It's even crazier to think those who did probably sold it all.

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120 sats \ 5 replies \ @nullama 28 Aug 2023

It's crazy to think that people saw this and still didn't get some.

Well, it was posted in a cryptography newsletter.

There are not many people in that list, plus it was one of many messages, so it's not like it was widely published.

Here's something else that Hal wrote, really good read:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0

100 sats \ 4 replies \ @badabing 28 Aug 2023

I know we shouldn't try to guess who Satoshi is/was, but I always appreciated the Len Sassaman story. Reading now how Hal's symptoms worsened in early 2011, exactly when Satoshi retired...

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @nullama 28 Aug 2023

Hal is not SN.

Hal received the first Bitcoin transaction from SN though.

By the way, Len Sassaman lives on in the blockchain:

https://imgprxy.stacker.news/gzbTtcp1EHvsR-TufWIIQot4NwKVQCKgkmgPizXT4ew/rs:fit:600:500:0/g:no/aHR0cHM6Ly91cGxvYWQud2lraW1lZGlhLm9yZy93aWtpcGVkaWEvY29tbW9ucy9hL2EzL0xlblNhc3NhbWFuLUJpdGNvaW4tVHJpYnV0ZS5wbmc

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @badabing 28 Aug 2023

Why can't Hal be SN?

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @nullama 28 Aug 2023

There were many written interactions between the two.

They also were clearly different personalities. You can read the posts from both at Bitcointalk.

And the idea that SN was both just doesn't fit at all with how SN was.

SN mentioned for example that the license of the Bitcoin client should be the most permissive one because if it wasn't then other people would implement it with that license, therefore duplicating work.

SN usually was very efficient and didn't want to waste efforts in anything. Creating a whole different persona makes no sense.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @badabing 28 Aug 2023

Not conclusive, but makes sense I guess.