Maybe whomever started Bitcoin lost any record of their early mining efforts. It's either that, or they're walking away from several hundred million dollars. Or they're dead.
Might have never stored the private key they mined to in the beginning. (I can see why someone with a specific ethic might start the currency that way---especially if they were still optimizing for bitcoin to take off at all, similar to avoiding pre-mining.)
It would be better to transfer the money publicly later to destroy the key. I think accidentally or non-provably losing the key to this is the worst possible thing -- no one can believe you, so they have to act as if you have the money, but you don't have control of it to do anything with it (including verifiably destroy it.)
Except everyone involved in Bitcoin's creation was aware of about 20 years of precedent and discussion about these kinds of issues -- http://cypherpunks.venona.com/ -- so it wasn't really hindsight
Not everything (hashcash, some of Wei Dai's stuff, etc.) -- but I was more referring to how to do tests/proofs in mutually-distrustful environments, not the protocols themselves.
Bitcoin was exceptional in a lot of ways -- most importantly, getting traction! -- decentralization, the ramping up, etc.
I'm interested in more of your perspective here. I was around back in the Mojo Nation era as something of an observer, but there's lots maybe I didn't see.
The good stuff was always buried deeply on threads, and mainly pre 1996. I should do something better with the archives to pull out the specific good stuff.
