Assuming you're Ray Dillinger - is that conversation public anywhere? I don't recall reading it on http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdowd.com/msg10005.html
Uhh, I don't remember ever agreeing to keep it secret, but we didn't talk about it on the list either. At that time Hal was elbows-deep in the transaction scripting code, and I was checking Satoshi's work on the crypto on the blockchain architecture.
Finney had a lot to worry about with the transaction scripting and wound up blocking out about a dozen more opcodes than Satoshi had wanted to, but I found essentially nothing wrong with the block structure. I am still freakin' amazed how tight he got that blockchain design.
And, yeah, I'm Ray Dillinger.
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."
It's a little amusing - if bitcoin continues to grow, economists will no doubt be horrified by the levity (relative to an econ committee mtg) with which these decisions were made. Not saying that's a bad thing, or that they weren't rationally through - it actually shows how strong the system is in that there were many possible "reasonable" initial conditions that could've been selected, since the system is largely self-equilibriating anyway.
Re Finney - if he was blocking bitcoin op-codes, I wonder what he would've thought of Ethereum's scripting lang.
(and I had to ask if you were Ray cuz your early posts on here were signed "Edward")