Gavin Andresen: Money, Fixed

2010 Jun 26 See all posts
Gavin Andresen: Money, Fixed @ Satoshi Nakamoto
Author

Gavin Andresen

Email

Site

https://satoshinakamoto.network

I'm happiest when I'm working on One Big Thing. I think I've found my next Big Thing, and I'm excited!

Bitcoin is a new kind of money that fixes a bunch of bugs in the old-fashioned money you have in your bank account and your wallet.

Getting excited about a new kind of money is kind of crazy. You're probably thinking I've been brainwashed by the loony wing of Tea Party that believes that the Federal Reserve was illegally created and that we should go back to a solid currency backed by gold stored in Fort Knox. Or that I've drunk the Rainbow Sunshine Kool-Aid of the loony wanna-be Socialists who think that local currencies are the answer to everybody's economic problems.

I'm excited because Bitcoin isn't a pie-in-the-sky theoretical idea for how to make a better currency. It is a working system that a few geeks (like me!) are already using and trying to break. It fixes these bugs in our current monetary systems:

Of course, it is possible there's some terrible, fundamental flaw in the Bitcoin system that nobody has thought of yet. I've been thinking about it really hard (and dissecting the C++ source code) for the last month or so and I can't see any flaws, but I know that time and experience are the only true test of any new system.

I'm already putting my Bitcoins where my mouth is, and have created a simple little website to get some experience with handling Bitcoins. The Bitcoin Faucet will give you 5 Bitcoins to play with.

For free.

Maybe I am crazy. What percentage of crazy people think they're sane?


Some comments

10:11 PM

Joe said:

I'm new to yet interested in bitcoin. Freebitcoins didn't work for me. I entered the right address (as far as I know) but did not get any transfer after about an hour. I tried again but my IP has been logged so cannot try again.

Just giving a heads up that either it was sent to another person (which makes me wonder: what happens with a typo when you give somebody your address, say, on paper?) or the program is not working properly. Or I am missing something.

Interesting blog posts, I look forward to reading more during some free time and also seeing where bitcoin goes.

7:58 AM

Joe said:

Update: It worked. Transfer happened sometime since my last comment.

3:17 PM

Gavin Andresen said:

Yeah, Bitcoin needs to get way more user-friendly; you didn't get your 5 free bitcoins right away because it was busy downloading the 66,000 "blocks in the block chain."

Not a good out-of-the-box user experience, but with the interest generated by Sunday's slashdotting, hopefully there will be rapid progress on easier-to-use Bitcoin implementations.

6:00 PM

Joe said:

Thanks for the reply. I agree. Thankfully, I'm not the only one who sees potential here. Which, ironically, is why there's potential at all.

Personally, I'll be waiting to tinker with an API written for .NET, Python, Scala, or via the cmdline (maybe something similar to how Mercurial does it).

There's lots of opportunity for developers. And that translates to the emergence of better usability. (Err, well most of the time.) In the meantime, I suppose I'll hang around the forum and delve more into the other aspects of it.

8:31 PM

noagendamarket said...

Hopefully we are well on our way to ease of use. As Steve Jobs would say-if you need to copy and paste you've already failed o_0