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No, it did not take a genius to realize that a natural extension of Bitcoin is to make it Turing complete. In fact, as soon as an engineer sees any language his next question is "how powerful is it?" In fact, Satoshi's restraint is interesting in that context, especially his restraint on allowing the definition of other currencies. I wonder if he felt that that feature would attract the eye of too many three letter agencies...
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No, it did not take a genius to realize that a natural extension of Bitcoin is to make it Turing complete. In fact, as soon as an engineer sees any language his next question is "how powerful is it?" In fact, Satoshi's restraint is interesting in that context, especially his restraint on allowing the definition of other currencies. I wonder if he felt that that feature would attract the eye of too many three letter agencies...
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Interesting - thanks for posting. I always assumed that all of those initial-state decisions had been made *before* Satoshi posted the whitepaper. I guess because of that comment he made in that list thread to the effect of "I'm almost ready to post the code."
He *was* just about ready to post the code. This was a debate about what value an already-defined constant ought to have. In fact I've already posted an archive of his code from just a few *days* later in another thread here for historical interest.
Hal and I were essentially giving it a last-minute looking over to see if we thought there was any way to attack it. I have the impression that Hal communicated with Satoshi a lot more than I did, but he was looking at a much tougher problem. The blockchain structure is essentially a mathematical proof -- very straightforward, you follow it and you can say with reasonable certainty that it's right or not. But a scripting language is generative. And generative structures present exponentially more attack surfaces.
Re Finney - if he was blocking bitcoin op-codes, I wonder what he would've thought of Ethereum's scripting lang. 
You're kidding right? Ethereum's scripting language is limited only by the amount of steps it will run a calculation. Hal would have pitched a fit about the Denial-of-Service possibilities.
(and I had to ask if you were Ray cuz your early posts on here were signed "Edward")
Yeah, I made up a fake person because at first I didn't want people here to know who I was. I was kind of afraid they'd get freaky about it.