So this picture is showing someone installing a DIY telephone system using barbed wire. You have a pair of farmers connecting themselves before the phone company would do it. How is this relevant to Bitcoin? Well what was happening here is that it was the start of the movement that was rejecting the top-down centralist planned telephone system of the Bell telephone company. This was a DIY open decentralized movement. Initially it was pairs of farmers, and then it was little groups of small towns and farmers. This coalesced into small companies that provided services to specific areas, which later turned into bigger companies.

Looking at the history of these technologies has a lot to teach us. I would recommend this book to any Bitcoin entrepreneur. How does one paradigm come to dominate over another? That's an interesting historical question, and I would point to that book.

Over and over again we see that decentralization doesn't work. This is similar to how the Internet disrupted newspapers. The Internet was initially dismissed as a toy. It would have no made sense for Internet pioneers to say buy a computer in the 70s because one day you would read a newsletter. The product initially starts as unrecognizable as what it would eventually become. You don't set out trying to destroy newspapers, it would have made no sense at all. Disruption has a specific meaning. Clay Shirky talked about this, a product starts as a toy, then evolves into something you couldn't have predicted at the time. Disruption is a word that we are using as a proxy for competition. It also has a specific technical meaning which I have pointed out.

It's a really cool idea where Alice has some secret, it's some information of economic value. And Bob wants to purchase this information. Bob doesn't want Alice to put it up publicly on the web. Bob wants Alice to send him this information and then pay her for it. Here's the magic. The magic that Bitcoin enables is that you can make sure that Bob's payment to Alice goes through if and only if Bob correctly receives that secret from Alice. So what you have achieved through that simple technological protocol is an information market without a trusted mediator. As gmaxwell explains, it's like a movie style briefcase swap except you can do it safely securely over the internet with anonymous parties and total anonymity and total decentralization. Is there a user story here? I don't know, I think we need people thinking about this.

A lot of academic papers from a few years ago were crap, they didn't understand Bitcoin. But lately there's a much higher quality. There's a more vibrant interexchange between academic and the broader Bitcoin community. I realized there is a reason for the academic discourse going up. I realized that academia scales better. The scaling of knowledge production works better in academia. I have read about the history of academia, and the reason for why we do this the way we do with papers, the reason for writing papers is that you end up with this knowledge craft consisting of millions of papers, but because of the rigor of this, the citation graph is a good way to maintain pointers between all this information and build one piece of knowledge on another. It gives us a way to stand on the shoulders of giant. I saw this in the work that Bryan Bishop did, leading up to the Scaling Bitcoin post. He said there has already been 400 posts on scaling bitcoin. They were talking over each other. So he as an individual read all of them and extracted what turned out to be 6 ideas that were the common threads on that. These clusters of ideas fall out of the citation graph, there's an automatic error process. Three's an automatic process of tracing ideas back to their roots. So anyway, the summary of that is that I think academia has a lot of things to contribute to the exchange here, and I would look forward to deeper ties between Bitcoin and academia.