Man, I REALLY wish he was still here. He would be such a clear voice of reason, I believe.
As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and
becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world. Then the
total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all
the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household
wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. With
20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million.
So the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute
time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million
to 1! Even if the odds of Bitcoin succeeding to this degree are slim,
are they really 100 million to one against? Something to think about...
Hal
https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10152.htmlSince I have been here I have tried to document myself with everything related to Finney, this quote is from Jan-2009 (satoshi/hal), the vision of the future that this person had for Bitcoin is amazing.
He had a priviledged logical mind. Maybe he was not the best businessman or the best vapourseller, but all of them wanted him. Ie: Phil Zimmerman when he founded PGP software.
Sometimes being too much logical doesn't compute with real life.... but I surely hope he was a visionaire too. We will see.