General Discussion

is, shall we say, rather lacking.

But, like most histories, when someone tells a "story" often enough, especially as fact, and enough people repeat it, it becomes "history" ( or maybe theirstory ). Having worked on TCP/IP in the early 1970s I can tell you that the dates and stories ( about Pizzahut, etc ) are simply wrong. Hell, I sold a wine collection consisting of thousands of bottles of wine that my brother-in-law collected in the decades prior... in 1990. Of course I could not take payment over the net. I held the auction via an auction where I would publish a lot description in a news group (rec..wine.
I would list the lot and the current price for the cases included in the lot, wait a day for new bids, put out a "going once" post, wait 1 more day... and gavel the auction closed. Then deliver the wine to whoever bought it and get the money. I had just enough "lots" of wine to make me think about how hard it would be to automate this system. AKA Ebay. But instead I decided to just do it by hand.

Anyway, the rest of his description about cryptography was sort of true as well... sort of. Cryptography is better described as an algorithmic method of creating a coded message. The other method of course is to simply have a "code" where every word or concept has a substituted new code. you memorize or have a code book to decipher the message. the disadvantage is that you can only transmit words or concepts that are pre-arranged with the recipient AND if someone finds a "code book" they can listen in on the conversation. OTOH, without the code book, it is much more difficult to decipher coded messages.

Personally I think Bitcoin and all cryto-currencies are both a "belief based currency" and very likely a Ponzi scheme.
People keep educating me about "well it represents the amount of compute power or floating point operations or FLOPS it takes to break the next "crypto block" and thereby be the lucky winner to add the next block in the block chain or write once log of transactions. And those FLOPS are represented by the cost of the computer plus, fundamentally, the cost of the power to do the calculations. Except that I will point out that the cost in power or electricity is going down all the time. One can imagine the day when you home quantum parallel computer (Nvidia X10000 ) will cost almost nothing to instantly solve the next block chain thus granting you the owner of such ALL the value of ALL the new Bitcoin ( Bitcoin itself is reaching the theoretical last block). Thus making the entire concept nearly worthless. i.e. if we are ALL "newcoin" billionaires... what does it mean?

So, like a Ponzi scheme it will eventually end.

But that could be said of any currency not based on the "value" or perceived value of a commodity like gold or oil or uranium or corn or whatever group of valued commodities you choose. Select diamonds, for example. If we had diamond backed money... and now can fairly cheaply make synthetic diamonds... what is that currency worth?

Or gold. We believe that supernovas are the source of all gold that exists... but it is made by fusion. Someday perhaps we can also make gold from more plentiful elements by simply making it in a fusion reactor ( I know, right now we can barely make helium from hydrogen... but thinking ahead here ). Gold is now worthless.

And so on.