THINGS I LEARN FROM MOVIES

THINGS I LEARN FROM MOVIES

Beautiful minds

“What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.”- Soren Kierkegaard

The 2001 movie, Beautiful Mind, tells the story of mathematician John Forbes Nash’s seminal work on game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma problem, but I had not connected the dots with regards to the centrality of his multi-player equilibrium theory (Nash Equilibrium) to the blockchain architecture until just recently.

Beyond game theory, the other discipline required for trustless blockchain-based value transfer is cryptography, which was significantly advanced by mathematician Alan Turing during WWII as told in the 2014 movie, The Imitation Game.

Sobering to think of the suffering these two gentlemen endured so that we might benefit from their amazingly creative minds.

But it required the efforts of a still unknown person, working under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto, to mashup: game theory, cryptography, and replicated-site database mechanics in his 2009 whitepaper: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, to lay the foundation for what many believe will be nothing less than the future of money.

One can only wonder what forms of poetic torment were the catalysts for Nakamoto’s ingenious and monumental contribution.