gwern.net - bitcoin is worse is better
Pontifications
QUOTE
"In short, Bitcoin is a perfect example of Worse is Better (original essay). You can see the tradeoffs that Richard P. Gabriel enumerates: Bitcoin has many edge cases; it lacks many properties one would desire for a cryptocurrency; the whitepaper is badly under-specified; much of the behavior is socially determined by what the miners and clients collectively agree to accept, not by the protocol; etc.
But it seems to work. Just like Unix, there were countless ways to destroy your data or crash the system, which didn’t exist on more "proper" OSs like OpenVMS, and there were countless lacking features compared to systems like ITS or the Lisp machine OSs. But like the proverbial cockroaches, Unix spread, networked, survived - and the rest did not.30 And as it survives and evolves gradually, it slowly becomes what it "should" have been in the first place." **END QUOTE**
- hmmmm :-) read the whole (very long) thing