Satoshi Nakamoto's identity has always been a hugely controversial topic since the price of bitcoin has exploded the past few years. Prebitcoin Satoshi was very active on forum cyberpunks but later disappeared without leaving any trace of his real identity.
A website surfaced from an anonymous registrant claiming as Satoshi and released an excerpt from the book on Bitcoin and it's pre-story. Though, the excerpt is well written and resembles with a list of actions happened in the creation of Digital Gold(bitcoin), the authenticity of the claim still remains dubious.
Regardless of the real identity, the excerpt caught my attention and I went through all the pages in detail. Here, am sharing all the major elements covered which blockchain fans would love to know in this blog post.
Bitpopsy reading Duality: An Excerpt
Additionally, I tweeted a series of tweets with hashtag #satoshiexcerpt on my twitter profile as well.
Key Takeaways from Duality Excerpt:
1. The excerpt entitled as Duality, started with line published on The Times on 03/Jan/2009
Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.
2. Satoshi acknowledges and accredits that he took many references from people who already worked on the similar idea of echash like: Adam Back, Wei Dai, Hal Finney and David Chum.
He also mentions that the idea of untraceable electronic cash was preceded by almost twenty years by David Cham. Satoshi mentions that the principles of bitcoin originated from a community called cyberpunks.
3. He also mentions, Satoshi Nakamoto was not a real name and mentions that it's an equivalent of John Smith in Japan.
4. Satoshi mentioned that he hasn't thought of a name for the ecash he was working on. Prebitcoin all the terminologies including blockchain were different, it was in the version 2.0 where few major terminologies came into existence like; prebitcion;
blockchain was referred as timechain.
fork was referred as branch point.
5. Satoshi also mentions that initially it was a his idea alone. Though, there were people who worked on Digital Cash, all of them failed for different reasons and majorly failed in integrating all the technologies together that current bitcoin is running on.
Satoshi mentions that bitcoin started as most things do - love, an idea, and a dream.
6. Bitcoin is a success as it is centered around "money"
One of the major reason why satoshi thinks Bitcoin got huge success as it is centered around money. He acknowledges that there are a lot of projects on blockchain prior to the bitcoin. However, only Bitcoin was successful because it is something people care about - "money".
7. Moore's law failure:
During the development of blockchain, in reference to POW (Proof of Work), Satoshi mentioned that he went wrong with Moore's Law.
As per the assumption made, the hardware would be 100 times fasters since the inception of bitcoin. However, that's not the case. Moore's law is officially dead.
8. Few comments on Transaction Fee:
As we all know transaction fee was a heated discussion and there were multiple concerns over the same, past few months. However, satoshi mentions that bitcoin can still be transferred without any transaction fee. Also mentions that he initially wanted to keep the transaction fee to 1 cent, leaving the control to its users starting from zero.
9. Few clues on his identity:
Few members of cyberpunks, dug deep to identify satoshi from his contributions on forum;
- Satoshi, was mostly writing during the Eastern Time Zone, which hints he is located around costal area of US.
- Satoshi, writings were without an error. He accredits his efficacy in writing to his mother who is an author.
- Satoshi, also mentions that his Grandmother ran a book publishing "Company".
Satoshi makes it clear that it was a single person idea, developed through contributions from various people on cyberpunks community. Even for the people who contributed for the development of bitcoin, Satoshi remains a mystery.
10. Bitcoin Supply - says 21 million was an educated guess:
Initially, Satoshi was thinking of 42 million, which was influenced by Adam Douglas famous book Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. But, he later thought it wouldn't be taken seriously and he landed at 21 million, as it also favours various calculations.
42 - answer for everything in life, which of course is not true at all.
11. Block Reward and Bitcoin Difficulty:
Satoshi outlines few calculations he used in calculating bitcoin difficulty.
12. Satoshi explores the possibilities of Safe Contracts and Escrow payments
Satoshi mentioned that he wanted to execute safe contracts between two parties like escrow payments and he also outlined a simple mechanism for the same. However, it was not part of the bitcoin blockchain.
13. Bitcoin - basic properties - prebitcoin:
- Proof of work.
- Rewarding for miners/worker.
- Record-keeping and cryptographic hashes.
- Digital Signatures using public key cryptography.
14. Reason for choosing C++ at it's core:
Satoshi, mentioned that he was not looking at adaptability and resiliency. Instead, due to the nature of blockchain open to all the users on web, he mentioned security was the most concerned area. Discusses, two major attacks that could be invovled;
- People on the network - LAN
- From anyone on the web.
He found C++ could solve both these problems and went with the same.
15. Satoshi - "when I had no support, Hal was the only one who believed and stayed with me for development of Bitcoin for more than an year"
In the excerpt Satoshi shows his gratitude and respect towards Hal Finney for his belief and the person he was. Satoshi, also mentions the back and forth conversations between Hal and him debugging different errors prior to the launch of bitcoin.
Satoshi, ends the excerpt mentioning that he knew bitcoin would be successful, but he was awe-struck at the speed at which the technology being adopted and scaled.
That was an interesting excerpt and am eagerly waiting to read the full book regardless of its authenticity - aka purportedly written by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Do let me know your thoughts on the excerpt in your comments below. Would love to hear them.