Re:Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree
by mike_hearn on Thursday August 31, 2017 @04:48AM
(#15139039)
Bitcoin was originally a Windows only program. We used Wine to run it on Mac/Linux in the early days:
https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/23827020/
I used to be a Wine developer so it didn't put me off when I first found the project, but I'm sure the fact that it was Windows only hurt the projects uptake in the first year. It wasn't until Bitcoin 0.2 that a Linux version was available.
If it helps, Satoshi was also an Outlook user ;)
Most CIA and NSA code that has been leaked has been developed on Windows using Visual Studio IIRC.
The bitcoin code looks and feels a lot like of their projects but could easily be some NSA programmers side project.
Any hacker can tell this was a one person project from looking at the code.
Re:Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree
by the_rosentotter on Thursday August 31, 2017 @09:18AM
(#15140029)
It's mostly posers who malign others for their choice of platform or tools. Show me what you built. Usually guys like that have never built shit, but still ruthlessly criticize others.
Anyone who has tried to do cross-platform development knows it's extremely difficult in C++. You can do it, but it's not a trivial thing. I guess it's no surprise that Satoshi used Visual Studio. If you start out writing code in not-Visual-Studio, it's far harder to go back and make it run on VS.
I vividly remember how maligned Windows programmers were in 2008. I felt like a black sheep getting my start in the gamedev industry, because if you wanted to do Big League Programming in gamedev, that meant one thing: Windows. Microsoft has finally made some inroads in hacker culture. It's far less common now to be dismissed as less talented just because you used Windows. But in 2008 this feeling was very much alive.