Wei Dai's regret: the fixed supply might have been stopped

From LessWrong “Bitcoins are not digital greenbacks” comment thread, April 20 and 21, 2013:

Wei Dai — creator of the b-money proposal (1998), cited as reference [1] in the Bitcoin whitepaper — commented on Bitcoin’s monetary design and his own role in its history:

On Bitcoin’s monetary policy, Dai’s verdict was unsparing:

WDWei Dai (LessWrong comment, April 20, 2013, 7:56:08 AM UTC)

I would consider Bitcoin to have failed with regard to its monetary policy (because the policy causes high price volatility which imposes a heavy cost on its users, who have to either take undesirable risks or engage in costly hedging in order to use the currency).

Price stability was not a new worry for him. Fifteen years earlier, replying to Adam Back’s critique of his own b-money proposal, Dai had already raised price stability, business cycles, and the optimal inflation rate as open questions for any monetary system built on his design.

He also flagged a larger risk, that Bitcoin might foreclose a better alternative:

WDWei Dai (LessWrong comment, April 20, 2013)

For example one possible impact of Bitcoin might be that due to its deficient monetary policy and associated price volatility it can’t grow to very large scales, and by taking over the cryptocurrency niche, it has precluded a future where a cryptocurrency does grow to very large scales.

And he took part of the blame himself, for never answering Satoshi’s email:

WDWei Dai

This may have been partially my fault because when Satoshi wrote to me asking for comments on his draft paper, I never got back to him. Otherwise perhaps I could have dissuaded him (or them) from the ‘fixed supply of money’ idea.

Dai’s comment references the email Satoshi sent him on August 22, 2008, which linked to a pre-release draft of the Bitcoin whitepaper. Despite receiving this direct outreach, Dai never replied with feedback on the paper’s design.

Dai returned to this missed-opportunity theme the following year in “Look for the Next Tech Gold Rush?”, recounting how he had also ignored another Satoshi email — the early-2009 announcement of Bitcoin v0.1 — because he was more focused on LessWrong than Cypherpunks at the time.

The flip side of that same non-engagement was something Dai had already said on LessWrong in February 2011: that Satoshi “didn’t even read my article before reinventing the idea himself,” and credited him only after the fact. He came back to b-money and Satoshi in a March 2014 LessWrong Q&A.