Satoshi was wrong
&gt; 1. A cap at 21M. It made the currency deflationary by nature. Ask an economist, no one thinks it’s a good idea long term <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.investopedia.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;personal-finance&#x2F;030915&#x2F;why-deflation-bad-economy.asp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.investopedia.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;personal-finance&#x2F;030915...</a><p>Most economists thought that &quot;Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks&quot; The Times 03&#x2F;Jan&#x2F;2009 was a good thing, but many, including Satoshi, disagree on this.<p>As for Bitcoin being deflationary, that&#x27;s a more subtle point.  Nobody (to a reasonable approximation) thinks that there is a direct link between  monetary base and inflation&#x2F;deflation.  There is a relationship, but total money supply is generally considered more important, and that includes liquid monetary instruments (like demand deposits, etc.) that are not reflected in the monetary base.<p>The notion that Bitcoin is worthless because it is deflationary is self-contradictory -- if it increases in value it cannot decrease in value.  The contradiction here is that the price of Bitcoin will fluctuate with market forces just like everything else, but if supply chains begin to materialize denominated in Bitcoin, then by necessity the output and intermediate products of that supply chain will be stable in value relative to Bitcoin itself.<p>&gt; 2. He offered a system where the inputs&#x2F;outputs blockchain is the state itself, and in order to prune your chain you need to store UTXO set.<p>Agreed here; this was definitely a design flaw.  I&#x27;m not totally sold on the ETH solution, which depends strongly on transactions being ordered properly, and has some odd race conditions that are a pain to deal with (that is, a transaction which is not currently valid may &quot;become&quot; valid, either by advancing the nonce or increasing the momentary balance at an address).  One problem with the UTXO solution is that offline (air-gapped) signing solutions are very complex, because you need to locate UTXOs, rather than just signing &quot;send X bitcoins from this address to this address&quot;.<p>&gt; 3. He didn’t oversee the idea of Root of Trust<p>Eh; this seems like an independent problem to me.  If you want to trust someone, by all means trust them, and use whatever web of trust primitives you want to expand that trust into trusting their software.  But putting it in the blockchain means that the chain of custody becomes suspect; what if an individual (or their key) is compromised?  That extends the surface area of any attack significantly.  That&#x27;s not to say that it wouldn&#x27;t be nice to have some notion of trust, but so far I haven&#x27;t seen any ideas that seem even a little attractive for solving this problem.  Satoshi didn&#x27;t cure cancer either.<p>&gt; 4. He offered “new payment — new address” as a rule<p>This rule still makes sense for a lot of situations just because there&#x27;s no &quot;receipt&quot; mechanism.  I sell widgets, and a customer buys a widget -- did they send the money or not?  If I have a single payment address, all I see are hundreds of payments for .01 BTC.<p>On an individual level, using a new address for the change from a transaction doesn&#x27;t seem to add a lot of value, but since Bitcoin tracks UTXO, not address balances, there&#x27;s relatively little bloat associated with this.<p>&gt; 5. He never defined clearly threat model of Bitcoin. Who’s the attacker? ... The one and only real attacker ... is ... governments.<p>The threat model, on the contrary, was extremely well defined.  The only threat that Satoshi took seriously is the threat of double spend attacks.<p>The nation-state threat model is more subtle -- currency controls and police actions against users and miners.  That&#x27;s a little out of scope of a software project.<p>If a nation-state chooses to take over mining, then all they do is increase the security of the network by adding hash power.  If they try to use their hash power to facilitate double-spending (for some reason?) then that&#x27;s easily detectable by humans.  But mainly it just doesn&#x27;t make sense as an attack, especially for a nation-state with a police force and a justice system, which can be used to enforce arbitrary rules much more cheaply than building a huge mining farm can.<p>&gt; 6. Complete lack of governance was sold to us as a good thing. What we got now? There’s nothing Bitcoin can do that Ethereum can’t, there’s no clear strategy or way of resolution of conflicts when one side whats 2x of blocks and another wants to keep it 1 Mb.<p>Better to have the debate, and have the forking and contention, than just sticking with a bad policy set by a bad policy maker.  This is just inefficient democracy vs. efficient totalitarianism -- your mileage may vary, but I side pretty hard with the inefficient here.<p>As for Ethereum, I love a lot of what it brings to the table, but in the end, it brings too much, at the cost of a huge amount of complexity that makes trust decisions, already complex, exponentially worse.  Also, I don&#x27;t understand what Ethereum has to do with a governance failure of Bitcoin.  Ethereum has not yet taken over from Bitcoin in the space that Bitcoin was designed for, so I don&#x27;t think we can count it as proof of Satoshi&#x27;s mistakes.<p>&gt; 7. Lack of vision what Bitcoin would do when transactions reach maximum of capacity. In fact Satoshi himself envisioned it as a constantly growing onchain without any second layers. It’s only now when people realized that increasing onchain further is ridiculously stupid idea since it’s already way too hard to be a full node. And utopian hot-patches with completely broken incentives models like Lightning Network are another proof Satoshi had no idea how to fit all people onchain.<p>The whitepaper says nothing about block sizes or off-chain settlement.  Satoshi went away before block sizes became a contentious issue, so we&#x27;ll never know if whatever he thought was right or wrong.  And frankly, although I&#x27;m a &quot;big-blocker&quot; myself, I don&#x27;t think the answer here is settled.  Whether on-chain can scale as storage costs drop and light-weight payment verification becomes more common and full nodes rarer, or whether we need a formal off-chain solution like LN or an informal off-chain solution like &quot;some company maintains a ledger&quot;, the jury is still out.