Imagine Satoshi was never born. When does "Bitcoin" come into existence?
1121 sats \ 4 comments \ @DiracDelta 13 Jul 2023 bitcoin
It was bound to happen sooner or later so what might the alternative history look like? How long could the world have gone without anyone putting the pieces together?
I would also welcome comments as to how Bitcoin might have been discovered sooner. In asking about the earliest time it could have been viable, most of the answers are right around the year 2000.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 13 Jul 2023
There are so many factors at play, but I'd guess a couple of decades at most. Every financial crisis (5-10 years) creates more motivation which at least yields more prior art which increases the likelihood of it being invented.
It's interesting to think about how its design might've differed and still succeeded.
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Bitcoinfreedom 13 Jul 2023
We will be fucked forever if Satoshi was never born
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @DiracDelta OP 13 Jul 2023
Adam Back had already figured out proof-of-work, and people were repeatedly trying to make new digital currencies. Cryptography was more niche in the 90s, but well established in industry within the 2000s.
Do you mean that totalitarian government would be able to prevent a "Bitcoin" that had emerged in say 2015 from ever getting of the ground (I would not agree with that category of claim), or that to this day and forever going forward, no one would figure out the need for the difficulty adjustment?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @gnilma 14 Jul 2023
Difficulty adjustment was what kept proof of work relevant under Moore’s law. But when you think about it, it’s simply a negative feedback loop that already exist in all of nature and many human systems design. I would hazard to say that someone will eventually add the difficulty adjustment to proof of work because it just makes sense in a systems design perspective and it solves the Moore’s law problem. Satoshi was just the first one to do so.
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