No. of Recommendations: 6
Sounds like an endorsement of EMT. Nobody could have understood how valuable this was going to be ... just a bunch of degenerate coin flippers who got lucky. Well, a lot of really smart people did understand it the same way other people understood Google, Amazon, Apple and Tesla.
What was it they were understanding that other people missed? The first sentence of the white paper is: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."
Here we are 15 years later, and how many people are using Bitcoin to make purely peer-to-peer payments? Basically none, except for very niche cases (usually criminal). Bitcoin transactions almost always made using centralized exchanges or using the Lightning network, which is also centralized (and introduces a whole host of new problems).
If 15 years ago you studied the white paper and concluded that Bitcoin would never gain traction as a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash, you would have been 100% correct.
Bitcoin's value is because people like to speculate on the price. There's nothing wrong with that, but that was never an implied use case in the white paper. The price speculation component grew organically later. I doubt many people understood that's how it would play out in the beginning.
