Re:Design errors Satoshi made
by jonathanyc on Sunday August 19, 2018 @11:54PM
(#17797608)
Yes, the author seems to have confused implementation errors for design errors in a majority of these. I detest worshipping the crypto calf as much as anyone, but there is a big difference between the two.
Agreed, the thread highlights some decent implementation issues but largely misses the design problems, both ones that were present in the whitepaper but fixed and ones that are still with us today.
Would you be willing to expand on some of the errors in the white paper? I’m admittedly not too familiar with the whitepaper (only skimmed it), but some of the other errors mentioned in this thread (for example, not including accumulated work of a chain in consensus calculations and only considering chain length) are pretty interesting.
> Great summary. However all issues you mention are technical ones (mostly coding). I think the people that praise Satoshi or follow his "gospel" are more attached to his concept and design which is, in most cases, the White Paper.
Any software engineer will write buffer overflows, miss a few corner cases that break your model, or write hard-to-maintain code that needs to be refactored. However these issues are ephemeral, do not block the broader vision, and have since been fixed. I would even argue that it’s totally understandable that the initial PoC of Bitcoin was buggy and flawed. It should be expected of any first-try implementation of groundbreaking tech.