Re: Hard Currency
Yawn. I've read the Bitcoin paper. I've read maybe a dozen papers on various aspects of cryptocurrency, DeFi, and the like, and probably twice as many summaries of papers. I've read opinion pieces. I've read code.
Bitcoin is not particularly impressive. All of the technology was well-known before "Satoshi" put the pieces together and tickled the tech-bros and libertarians. Economically Bitcoin is stupid; it's deflationary and has an abysmal transaction rate and consumes vast amounts of resources to no good end. Bitcoin's promises of anonymity and resistance to being subverted by network partitioning have been extensively diminished by both research and practice.
Frankly, Ethereum is better for most use cases, and other cryptocurrencies such as Monero for some niche use cases. And they're still pretty dumb, just the best of a bad lot.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
