Adam Back doesn't understand Bitcoin. Insane but true.
Discussion
I think he might have been captured by the Feds after creating POW and Hashcash.
If you read the emails, Adam basically tried to “son” Satoshi.
He didn’t read Satoshis whitepaper and brushed him off and told him to check out Wei Dai’s B Money
I like and admire Adam and the work he has done but just listening to him speak almost sounds like he has been castrated
Nobody does tbh.
Nobody fully understands all of the particulars. But some pretend to. The people who understand the best are the ones who understand that they don't understand.
Well if we look at Bitcoin as a physical process from:
a predefined entropy field
energy —> computation
resolved entropy field
an immutable block of information
It’s clear we haven’t even understood the base physics of bitcoin. It’s actually insane we are talking about protocol changes without having a grounded understanding of the physical process beneath the protocol. How can we make grounded logical decisions about protocol changes without understanding Bitcoin and the transformation of resolved entropy as registration in the ledger?
Where are the physicists? Protocol devs certainly aren’t thinking about Bitcoin this way. Everyone has an opinion about the protocol that nobody physically understands, including myself. Is this not a huge problem?
I could say the same of the economics. But they are both basically the same thing. You're dealing with hidden information of individual physical actors as well as rational actors, in a complex chaotic system in empirical reality with many influencing variables that are completely incalculable. Welcome to economics.
You don't start to magically understand everything you need to know about how to dictate actions just by being a physicist.
Agreed, however the definition of Bitcoin remains undefined, it’s broadly “agreed” that every the user defines it. Every single actor has their own definition of Bitcoin, yet the physical transformation constructing every block, utxo and transaction is not subjective, it’s objective.
We don’t actually understand the objective physical transformation of Bitcoin. Every protocol change remains subjective because of this. You don’t engineer systems based on subjectivity, and we risk destroying the thing we seek to preserve forever due to folly over jpegs.
If Bitcoin is something bigger than “money”, the devs ought to know. Such a definition just might humble all of us again.
🤷♂️ just my opinion.
What is this, primacy of the lead developer's consciousness? Answer this one question: is the exchange rate of a loaf of bread to dollars at Store A objective?
No, but the measured “price” of a satoshi in joules is not subjective based on physics; it’s objectively defined each block via the entropy of the search space, current supply and the entropy of the utxo set for each block height.
So what you are getting at is the subjective worth of joules at any instance of time sats are spent.
Thinking in dollars doesn’t help, as it is an unanchored and changing measurement device. Scarcity matters in regard to what Bitcoin measures each block.