All of frizzers's Comments + Replies

Points noted. All well made. Mine was a heated rebuttal to the Like IN A Mirror post.

I could only find one spelling mistake in all Satoshi's work and a few punctuation quibbles. It's a word that is commonly spelt wrong - but that Szabo spells right. I don't want to share it here because I'm keeping it for the book

I've been working hard on this in my book. (Nearly there by the way). I posted this on Like In A Mirror but put it here as well in case it doesn't get approved.

Yes, the writing styles of Szabo and Satoshi are the same.

Apart from the British spelling.

And the different punctuation habits.

And the use of British expressions like mobile phone and flat and bloody.

And Szabo’s much longer sentences.

And the fact that Szabo doesn’t make the same spelling mistakes that Satoshi does.

Ooh and the fact that Szabo’s writing has a lot more humour to it than Satoshi’s.

Szabo... (read more)

1gwern
Szabo has extensively studied British history for his legal and monetary theories (it's hard to miss this if you've read his essays), so I do not regard the Britishisms as a point against Szabo. It's perfectly easy to pick up Britishisms if you watch BBC programs or read The Economist or Financial Times (I do all three and as it happens, I use 'bloody' all the time in colloquial speech - a check of my IRC logs shows me using it 72 times, and at least once in my more formal writings on gwern.net, and 'mobile phone' pops up 3 or 4 times in my chat logs; yet I have spent perhaps 3 days in the UK in my life). And Satoshi is a very narrow, special-purpose pseudonymic identity which has one and only one purpose: to promote and work on Bitcoin - Bitcoin is not a very humorous subject, nor does it really lend itself to long essays (or long sentences). And I'm not sure how you could make any confident claims about spelling mistakes without having done any stylometrics, given that both Szabo and Satoshi write well and you would expect spelling mistakes to be rare by definition.

The correct pronunciation of your name.

Wei - is it pronounced as in 'way' or 'why'?

And Dai - as in 'dye' or 'day'?

Thank you.

Wei Dai150

It's Chinese Pinyin romanization, so pronounced "way dye".

ETA: Since Pinyin is a many to one mapping, and as a result most Chinese articles about Bitcoin put the wrong name down for me, I'll take this opportunity to mention that my name is written logographically as 戴维.

Do you mean the ones on the cryptography mailing list or the ones to Wei Dai?

I've read them both.

Not the ones to Adam Back though

about 70 million times.

Even more times than I've read the Lord of the Rings

0gwern
I was asking a serious question.

What do you make of the decision to use C++?

Do you have any opinions of the original coding beyond the 'inelegant but amazingly resilient' meme? Was there anything that stood out about it?

2Wei Dai
It seems like a pretty standard choice for anyone wanting to build such a piece of software... No I haven't read any of it.

Thanks Wei. You efforts here is much appreciated and your place in heaven is assured.

In reply to your 5.

My suspicion is not based on any significant evidence. It's just a thought that emerged in my head as I've followed the story. It's a psychological thing, almost macho - people like to solve a problem that nobody else has been able to prove something to themselves (and others).

Also from his comment 'we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years' I infer that he didn't think it would last foreever .

Anyway THANK YOU WEI for taking the time to do this.

Dominic

Good morning Wei,

Thank you for doing this. It seems like an excellent solution.

My name's Dominic Frisby. I'm an author from the UK, currently working on a book on Bitcoin (http://unbound.co.uk/books/bitcoin).

Here are some questions I'd like to ask.

  1. What steps, if any, did you take to coding up your b-money idea? If none, or very few, why did you go no further with it?

  2. You had some early correspondence with Satoshi. What do you think his motivation behind Bitcoin was? Was it, simply, the challenge of making something work that nobody had made work before

... (read more)
0gwern
Have you read Satoshi's original emails?
6Wei Dai
1 - I didn't take any steps to code up b-money. Part of it was because b-money wasn't a complete practical design yet, but I didn't continue to work on the design because I had actually grown somewhat disillusioned with cryptoanarchy by the time I finished writing up b-money, and I didn't foresee that a system like it, once implemented, could attract so much attention and use beyond a small group of hardcore cypherpunks. 2 - It's hard for me to tell, but I'd guess that it was probably a mixture of technical challenge and wanting to change the world. 3 and 4 - Don't have much to say on these. Others have probably thought much more about these questions over the past months and years and are more qualified than I am to answer. 5 - I haven't seen any indication of this. What makes you suspect it?