Tangential, but a subject of some local interest:
Why Bitcoin will fail by Avery Pennarun. "The sky isn't red." Thesis:
- The gold standard was a bad idea.
- Even if it [Bitcoin] was a good idea, governments will squash it.
- The whole technological basis (cryptosystem) is flawed.
- It doesn't work offline.
I'm not sure I buy these and am not competent to evaluate his claims on 3., but would like others' critique.
L019: Bitcoin P2P Currency: The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen by Jason Calacanis. A rather more enthusiastic viewpoint of the project:
- Bitcoin is a technologically sound project.
- Bitcoin is unstoppable without end-user prosecution.
- Bitcoin is the most dangerous open-source project ever created.
- Bitcoin may be the most dangerous technological project since the internet itself.
- Bitcoin is a political statement by technological libertarians.
- Bitcoins will change the world unless governments ban them with harsh penalties.
The actual text contains many more caveats than the eye-catching selection of points above.
I'm not sure that's always true. For example, in my field, mathematics, there are a lot of results that are much easier to explain and learn then they were to discover.
With any NP problem, it's much easier to verify the result than to come up with it. What you describe probably fits this pattern.
In economics, the problem is not that established results, or even open problems, are easy to explain. The problem is that credentialed experts keep arguing about toy problems that are easily explained to a layman, and are unable to produce any insight beyond w... (read more)