/biz/ - Business & Finance

>I spoke to one of the scientists, a shy, unexcitable man in his late fifties, who has been working on this technology for several years. He and Pedersen are old-school IT people, quiet-spoken and completely uninterested in the limelight. Both of them thought Wright was working at a different level from everybody else. The scientist, who spoke to me from the beginning on condition that he wouldn’t be named, worried about Wright’s attention to detail and about his conspiratorial nature, but he had no doubts about Wright’s command of the big picture. The scientist was helping to oversee all the white papers and patent applications and managing a large team of IT specialists and mathematicians. I asked him if he was worried about the R3 consortium’s work on blockchain technology. ‘They are going to fail,’ he said. ‘They don’t have Satoshi. There is a panic out there, a misunderstanding about how the blockchain and bitcoin works. They hire people who know about bitcoin and are attempting to buy into it rather than being left behind. I’ve read some patent applications that are pending, applied for by the Bank of America. What I saw was ultimately unimpressive in comparison to what Craig is trying to do with the blockchain.’

>The scientist described how the staff try to get the ideas out of Wright’s head. ‘You can’t say: “Explain this to me.” If you ask a question like that, he’ll just go off on giant tangents. First, he’ll have difficulty explaining what’s in his head. Often he’s just coming up with ideas on the spot that he’ll throw into conversation. You want to try to get yes and no answers from him.'

>He described moments when everyone in the research team thought what Wright was saying was impossible. It couldn’t be done, the software wasn’t up to it, the blockchain couldn’t scale to the task, and then suddenly everyone would understand what he was saying and appreciate its originality