Comment by lisper

I can't help but be struck by the similarity between bootstrapping a financial system and bootstrapping a self-hosting compiler. Once confidence in the system has been established, you can get rid of the thing that you used to establish that confidence in the first place (gold) and the system keeps running. Likewise, once you have somehow gotten your first compiler up and running, you can use it to compile itself and then you can get rid of the source code for the original compiler and use the compiled version to compile a new compiler from different source code, and then use that to compile... The original artifact that got the process going is not needed in order to sustain the process once it has been bootstrapped.