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RomeoStevens comments on Bitcoins are not digital greenbacks - Less Wrong
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My understanding is that Bitcoin involves one major innovation (approximate solution to the Byzantine Generals problem) and the rest is existing tech. Granted, one probably should consider the precise balancing of incentives in the more arbitrary characteristics of BTC to be an innovation, but I'm not sure to what degree that required active management and changes (I have not examined the first version of the source code).
Presumably FAI still has many innovations to go, and as they are publicly solved the chances of a basement project solving the remainder increases.
On an unrelated note: Do you have an opinion on the fact that BTC does not include a proof of stake system in figuring out who to trust WRT to forks in the blockchain? It seems like the only major flaw in the protocol. The lead dev Andresen has discussed potentially instituting a proof of stake system for weighting votes in case of another emergency like the fork caused by the client update recently. I was surprised such things were not included in the original protocol given how well thought out the rest was. If someone is smart enough to think about proof-of-work systems it seems unlikely they wouldn't have been aware of proof-of-stake as a means of establishing trust.
I guess I was counting the idea of "decentralized pseudonymous money implemented as a distributed ledger" as well as all of the major elements involved in how Satoshi realized this idea to be part of Bitcoin's innovations, since my understanding is that Satoshi was not aware of either b-money or Bit Gold (both of which BTW were also developed outside of academia/government/industry) before he wrote his paper, and had reinvented the idea on his own.
You've previously said that Satoshi was not aware of b-money (incidentally, Adam Back recently took credit for telling Satoshi about b-money), but this is the first I've heard anyone suggest that Satoshi was unaware of Szabo's Bit Gold. What makes you say that?
I think if he had been aware, he would have cited Szabo in his paper, like he did with b-money. And yes, Satoshi learned about b-money from Adam Back. Here's part of Satoshi's email to me: