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gwern comments on Open thread, July 23-29, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: David_Gerard 22 July 2013 10:34AM

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Comment author: gwern 29 July 2013 10:08:23PM 1 point [-]

This was your message to his list?

Comment author: Wei_Dai 29 July 2013 11:19:20PM *  3 points [-]

I sent a bunch of messages to the list before and after, but yes that was the main one about b-money. BTW, for anyone interested in the history, looking back at the responses in my libtech archive (which I was not supposed to keep, according to the list rules) it seems clear that Nick already had similar ideas when I posted that message and was trying to solve the "Byzantine Agreement" problem in a practical way, whereas I for some reason confidently stated "an ideal broadcast channel [...] can be implemented with existing cryptographic tools", which probably explains why I made my ideas public first and ended up getting a large share of the credit later. There's probably a rationality lesson here, but I'm not sure what.

Comment author: gwern 30 July 2013 01:51:20AM 1 point [-]

Interesting. The story of Bitcoin is increasingly sounding like that parable about the blind men & the elephant plus a cautionary story about priority. :)