Kyle Torpey is really the only known name I have that has read the simpler set/version and he seems to have found the insights quite agreeable (he’s thus a reasonable persons to ask questions to about the series). The series ends by showing the mathematical equivalence between Szabo’s re-arrangement of his earlier bitgold paper, Nash’s proposal for an ICPI based global economy, and Satoshi’s implementation of Szabo’s bitgold.
I think it’s interesting that the essay titled “The Theory of Bitcoin Backed Central Banks” is surprisingly quite relevant to today’s spam debate. Here is the intro:
A Not So Secret History of Bitcoin
We will explore the origins of a certain source of contention surrounding Bitcoin and the relevant ramifications of how Bitcoin will unfold with respect to our global financial system. This contention refers to the introduction of a transactional throughput limitation that Satoshi committed to bitcoin’s source code:
Originally, Bitcoin’s block size was limited by the number of database locks required to process it (at most 10000). This limit was effectively around 500-750k in serialized bytes, and was forgotten until 2013 March. In 2010, an explicit block size limit of 1 MB was introduced into Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto. He added it hidden in two commits[1][2][3] in secret. This limit was effectively a no-op due to the aforementioned forgotten limit.
In 2013 March, the original lock limit was discovered by accident (Bitcoin Core v0.8.0 failed to enforce it, leading to upgraded nodes splitting off the network). After resolving the crisis, it was determined that since nobody knew of the limit, it was safe to assume there was consensus to remove it, and a hardfork removing the limit was scheduled and cleanly activated in 2013 May. From this point forward, the 1 MB limit became the effective limiting factor of the block size for the first time.~Block size limit controversy - Bitcoin Wiki