Fwd: answer to the bitcoin questions

Ok after some more thinking & reading I think I can answer question 1).
The real value of bitcoin is the following:

1. The proof that the Byzantine generals problem can be solved without trust given enough people and the right set of incentives

2. A reminder that "anacyclosis" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis) is a thing and works for all complex systems not just politics. Currencies were 'revolutionized' in the past and eventually will be revolutionized again. This sounds philosophical but it's not - it's a good way to instill fear into the institutions that currently have control over the 'system' and I think bitcoin to a certain extent did well at it

3. The empirical proof that you can combine distributed systems & transparencies (the public ledger) in a system where real value is at stake. This is sort of an enabler, both technologically and in terms of 'mindset', for future application in the same realm.

4. I need to look into this more and technically it's not bitcoin but.. another key factor is that you can use zero-knowledge proofs to tune transparency in a distributed system. Zero knowledge proofs weren't really used for a long time in any practical way, so I guess we have to thank bitcoin for that

This also implies that the currency itself is irrelevant, it might or might not work but that's not where the real value is. Likewise I don't think that the 'crypto' nature of the protocol is the key, that is an obvious consequence - At the end of the day SWIFT (to name one) uses a lot of crypto too and PGP/CA are the proof that crypto can be used for authentication purposes.

Also given the above I'm strongly convinced that the heritage is a bad thing, besides the technical background (given by the fact that they actually worked on the thing) there's nothing of real value there and if anything there's a lot of skepticism given their cyberpunk nature.

Or in pompous terms: they started the 'revolution' now we need 'serious' people to actually make something of it.

I don't have a full answer for the question (3), but I think we can easily say that who 'rules' the financial system is "America" and at the same time is "Not consumers". This implies that there's probably consensus in the fact that all the backoffice compliance work mandated by law/America can/should be made better (both in terms of transparency and also in terms of efficiency for banks), and the fact that is "not consumers" kind of guarantees that banks will not feel too threaten by stuff in that realm because in the worst case scenario (assuming future costs < current costs) they can offset the costs to consumers.

So I think that 'attacking' SWITF/Sepa/ACH is doable, I would love to do the other crazy thing (the currency pegged to oil in the "spaghetti" email - I'd love to discuss that a bit at some point) but if we want to keep things simple we can start with SWIFT.

"Observe everything, endure a lot, fix one thing at a time" quote of some random catholic person I don't remember (can't get away from the Italian heritage I guess)

For the SWIFT stuff, we can have a public ledger (consensus based) of all the transactions, the transactions can be encrypted but we/govts will also have a copy of the private keys to decrypt them when/if needed for legal purposes. Also maybe this level of transparency is good enough to convince govts to subsidize some of costs needed to implement the system on the banks side.

Thoughts?

It's a long email, but if you're still thinking about bitcoin it might provide a couple of useful hints

The questions that I auto-asked myself were

1. What's the real value of bitcoin

2. Is the bitcoin heritage/stamp a good or a bad thing

3. Who 'rules' the financial system (a bit more complicated than this but that was the gist of it)