If you were around those circles, a lot of the "signals" in the article just look like the shared baseline culture rather than anything uniquely identifying

Also, Szabo's whole reputation comes from bit gold and years of writing about exactly these ideas

I'm almost 100% certain he's the creator of Bitcoin. I didn't need to see his technical chops to suspect it -- all I needed was to read his article from 2002 which discusses the whole concept and key ideas that Bitcoin is currently based on: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/shelling-out/

Coming up with the idea and implementing it in the real world are two different things. You don’t think there’s any chance someone read the paper and used his ideas to create Bitcoin?

There is a chance - yes, but there's a lot of other evidence that he was involved in its creation (not just the 10+ years he talked about bit-gold prior to bitcoin). Bit-gold = bitcoin. My guess is that someone (like Hal Finny) implemented it with him but he was the originator of the idea and wrote the paper on it. Finny most likely had the original keys or he intentionally got rid of them on purpose (which explains why the wallet hasn't been active). Those are my guesses but the language in the paper very much gives me the impression that it was written by Nick Szabo.

E-Gold fulfilled all of these ideas and existed long before bitcoin and this article.

It's technically true, but it's also a very selective framing

Yes, this seems like one of those cases where "the public is curious" and "the public has a right to know" are being blurred together

Back is one of the best candidates, but unless coins move or some cryptographic proof appears, this remains a well-argued theory, not a resolution

But that's also kind of what makes it impressive in a different way. Even if the game was larger on disk/tape, they still had to stream it in tiny chunks and make it run within those constraints

I think you're right about the waste, but I'm not sure it's entirely "accidental"... a lot of it is traded for different kinds of efficiency

At some point, you just stop measuring the thing until the thing becomes a problem again. That lets you work a lot faster and make far more software for far less money.

It's the "fast fashion" of software. In the middle ages, a shirt used to cost about what a car does now, and was just as precious. Now, most people can just throw away clothes they no longer like.

Shirts used to be expensive, but "nice clothes" expensive in today's money, not "1st/2nd most expensive thing most people own" type expensive. $200-$1000 in today's money, scaling to wages.

It usually is. I try to think of these things not as "waste" but as "cost." As in, what does it cost vs. the alternative? You're using 40Gb of some kind of storage. Let's say it's reasonably possible to reduce that to 20Gb. What's the cost of doing so compared to the status quo? That memory reduction effort, both the initial effort, and the ongoing maintenance, isn't free. Unless it costs a lot less to do that than to continue using more memory, we should probably continue to use the memory.

Yeah, there may be other benefits, but as a first order of approximation, that works. And you'll usually find that it's cheaper to just use more memory.

It really puts into perspective how different the constraints were

When companies are spending that much capital, they almost can't help becoming unreliable narrators about what the technology can do right now versus what they hope it will do in two or three years

You still need rhetoric, timing, emotion and narrative. But I'd say the lesson is "good ideas need good communicators" not "good ideas need lies"