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Satoshis original code wasn't considered brilliant, though. Not crap, but more in the style of an academic that understood programming than that of an experienced programmer.

The code was written as a basic proof of concept, not with long term maintainability in mind, and the code for the wallet client was not well separated from the code for parsing the blockchain, or from the networking code or from the mining code, etc...

No brilliant programmer would have been willing to publish such a rudimentary proof of concept when interoperability and network effects are such important parts of its main idea.



Brilliant code != beautiful code. Dan Kaminsky called Satoshi's programming alien technology with regard to security.

I haven't looked for similarities but I'm guessing someone has already compared the two using Aylin's CodeStylometry work: https://github.com/calaylin/CodeStylometry


This was a pretty amazing presentation on the above project if you're interested in stylometry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMa04HovKfs


You've never seen a genius half-ass something?




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