What was worse was listening to Hal when he explained over and over how Bitcoin wouldn’t work. He was a far better coder than I was, and had been involved in the industry much longer. I believed in my idea, but always thought that he was focused on a different goal.
Hal was similar to people such as Wei who sought a completely different system. They looked at building systems without government and without corporations. When I talk about libertarian values, I had never once thought of the anarchist side of it. In fact, it is a socialist means of attacking capitalism, and I never considered that people who call themselves libertarians would be so deluded.