Bitcoin seems to be a very promising idea. I like the idea of basing security on the assumption that the CPU power of honest participants outweighs that of the attacker. It is a very modern notion that exploits the power of the long tail. When Wikipedia started I never thought it would work, but it has proven to be a great success for some of the same reasons.
I also do think that there is potential value in a form of unforgeable token whose production rate is predictable and can’t be influenced by corrupt parties. This would be more analogous to gold than to fiat currencies. Nick Szabo wrote many years ago about what he called “bit gold” and this could be an implementation of that concept. There have also been proposals for building light-weight anonymous payment schemes on top of heavy-weight non-anonymous systems, so Bitcoin could be leveraged to allow for anonymization.
It’s important for the network to not be easily overwhelmed or taken over by a well-funded attacker. I’d appreciate it if Satoshi could address some of these questions, or point to where in the paper he already has.
Hal Finney