— “I went online and bought one bitcoin last night." — "Really? It's the future." — "I don't know; It didn’t feel real.” — “Real’s gonna change. Just watch.”

The Good Wife episode, back in the good old days of 2012.

Most people don’t believe in bitcoin. They think it can't be real. They think it's some kind of, to use the expression my brother coined, "Farmville Money".

Keynesian/Mainstream/Crackpot economists who love debt also dismiss bitcoin like it's a joke. And these people are considered "experts" by the media and their victims, the Homer-Simpson-braindead-zombies-public.

But perhaps these "experts" screaming "Tulips" are clueless, basically using "experience recognition" [1, 2] as a heuristic and guide.

If you could go back in time and tell general Napoleon about nuclear weapons, how could he understand the magnitude of what you are saying? Having never seen anything so immensely powerful, it seems obvious that Napoleon would dismiss the idea immediately. It would be completely beyond his imagination. Napoleon, after all, came way before Einstein and Perrin proved the existence of atoms.

My point here is: If you don't understand the technology, you should not comment on it — or at least expect not to say very dumb things about it. If you don't understand what RIPEMD160( SHA256( PUB_KEY)) means, you're gonna have a bad time commenting on cryptoassets' future. You're going to be Napoleon talking about nuclear weapons. As of this writing there are 85 wonderful bitcoin obituaries.

The wonderful thing is that one of bitcoin's biggest opponents is a Brazilian Computer Scientist, Dr. Jorge Stolfi from Unicamp — one of the best Brazilian Universities. He understands the technology and is very critical of it. And he's one-hour flight away from Rio.

Having first taught about it to Ph.D. students in late 2010 (dear lord, why didn’t we mine it? Why do you hate us so much?) — I am a vocal proponent of bitcoin. When people tell me to stop talking about bitcoin, I tell them right back, "Ok, I'm grabbing my vuvuzela!", to which they respond "Alright, go on with the bitcoin stuff."

Still, I do want to hear critical arguments against bitcoin from people that actually understand it. Hence, I invite Prof. Jorge Stolfi to a "Does bitcoin have a future?" debate, to be held in Rio. Some proposed rules:

Everything will be taped and goes to youtube…

…which means we'll be speaking in English.

We flip a coin at the beginning, and the winner gets 20 minutes to make his case first, then the opponent gets 20 minutes to make his case.

After this, we respond to each other's initial arguments, and take questions from the audience, and select questions from reddit: /r/bitcoin, /r/btc, /r/bitcoinxt, /r/buttcoin, or from a twitter hashtag.

No questions about "very advanced" topics that the audience can't understand: things like rootstock, replace-by-fee, elliptic curve crypto, LN, etc. We can debate the merits of those, but my proposal is to do something for the audience, not a "let's see who wins the tech-jargon-Bingo". We can say what the tech does and what it means, but not get sidetracked into questions that few people can understand.

We should establish and agree on a max_time_limit for the max_block_size debate. I do agree that this is a serious issue that can harm confidence in bitcoin for a long period of time, but Stolfi has been arguing against bitcoin before this ever became an issue, and both of us are powerless to change anything about it at this point.

I'm also open for new rules to be proposed by Stolfi, or the participants in any bitcoin forum — yes, including /r/buttcoin, if the question is serious.

I think this would be a wonderful opportunity for the community to hear what an actually intelligent, but skeptical, computer scientist like Stolfi has to say. I would take his opinion over any Keynesian any day.

So, Dr. Stolfi, I await for your response. I'll be posting this on reddit and on twitter, and update here with the links. Hopefully the community will propose rules and questions.

It won’t be a big event but it will be a fun experience. Vuvuzelas in hand, a vocal proponent and a vocal opponent of cryptocurrency. One of us is wrong.

I hope, dear sir, that you'll take my offer.

Respectfully,

— Alexandre Linhares