Why Bitcoin is Different, in 2 Minutes

https://www.bitcoinbuddy.co/post/why-bitcoin-is-different/

by joelklabo • 3 years ago

3 1 3 years ago

tromp• 3 years ago

Satoshi, even though he created the code and started the Bitcoin project didn’t give himself any. He could have just written it into the code that he gets 10% of all the Bitcoins. He didn’t do that.

Instead he made it so that half of all Bitcoin was mineable in the first 4 years, and due to a lack of initial miners, he ended up mining a sizeable fraction of that (~5% of all bitcoin).

I believe this puts Bitcoin in class of its own. The fairness in how it was distributed will likely never be re-created.

Not only was it re-created, but it was made much more fair by

1) having optimized miners available before launch

2) starting with an insanely high initial difficulty (the first block took hours of mining)

but most of all by

3) having a pure linear emission; one coin per second forever

So even if there was some entity like Satoshi that got 10% of the first 4 years of supply, then they would get diluted down to 1% after 40 years. It's also much fairer across generations; each one getting the same supply, as opposed to each next one getting 32x less with Bitcoin.

While Bitcoin is complicated for sure. It’s design is relatively simple. It has resisted adding complexity over the years in order to make it resilient. When someone tries to compare another cryptocurrency to Bitcoin they usually say it’s faster, cheaper, does more etc. But, there’s a reason Bitcoin doesn’t try and do everything. It’s simplicity is a strength.

The above mentioned coin is noticeably simpler than Bitcoin, mostly by doing away with the complex Bitcoin script, while still retaining most of its functionality through scriptless scripts. It also has simpler emission, simpler design (Mimblewimble), simpler difficulty adjustment, and simpler verification that ignores all spent outputs.

In every other case since Bitcoin, the creator is a known person, usually a company, that can be manipulated into changing the system. Or be forced to manipulate others into changing it.

Both the creator of Mimblewimble and of its first implementation are unknown.

Why Bitcoin is Different, in 2 Minutes

Related Stories