Bitcoin Forum

Just wondering what you guys think was this just a project that he made whilst being drunk in univeristy and decided to release it and it caught on fast or did he know that it was going to get this big?

If he did this while drunk, then he must be the most brilliant mind of all times.

I doubt that Satoshi was yet another drunk bloke on a university.

He probably did. I mean the guy used various decentralised services to hide his identify whilst working on the project. Even years after he's gone, we still can not figure out, or confirm his true identity.

Maybe he was soooo drunk that even he forgot his name thus no one can find him


in all serious though he def was drunk whilst doing this this project took years to plan and execute and he def expected it to get to this and beyond.

It gets better and better ... What next? He coded it whilst sitting on the toilet one night?

Well, this is getting more and more interesting. But honestly I am amused by people who are trying to retell others "The Genesis of Bitcoin". And do it in a funny way. I already heard stories that Satoshi is really Kim Jong Un, an Alien, NSA, FBI, CIA agent, genius hacker and many more. But I it is first time I hear this:)

I think Satoshi had a passion and a dream and was in it to actually create something different and unique not to aim for money.

People that do business or invent for the sake of making money often fizz out, fail, or lose drive and move onto something else that can be another 'get rich quick scheme'

Bitcoin is so intricate and well formed that it seems that it is done by someone (or some group) that really had drive, innovation, and in the easiest form of explaining it 'vision' (Whatever that means these days).

He obviously was looking in the long run. Look how the rewards change over time :)

Sure he did.

According to this very early post (http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10162.html) made by Satoshi in the Cryptography Mailing List two weeks after Bitcoin was released, he believed that decentralized electronic currencies such as Bitcoin would be used for many different applications in the future:


Another quote from February 14, 2010:


And another one from July 14, 2010:


One of the last quotes made by Satoshi in late 2010:


Satoshi probably thought that Bitcoin had a fair chance of being successful in the long term but he probably did not expect it to become so successful in such a short period of time. The growth rate Bitcoin experienced in its first 3-4 years would probably have surprised him and I doubt he could have predicted that it would become so mainstream so quickly. Notice how Satoshi talks in terms of decades, not years. Would he have known that Bitcoin would reach $1,200 less than 4 years after its creation and be accepted by major retailers like Overstock and Microsoft in less than 5? I doubt it.

That's a given, I assume the idea came to him in a dream. A ghost appeared and told him what to do and to call his creation "The better internet tender" but since he was still half drunk he scribbled BIT on the piece of paper on his nightstand. Bitcoin was born.

He has knowledge about writing science articles so he wasn't drunk while writing it. It was probably some university professor, that didn't think it will explode like it did.

I agree he probably didn't know it would take off. I would venture to guess that most people who actually create something revolutionary really don't realize it at first. And I could see a professor with a background in computers AND economics!

No, I'm pretty sure, regarding the style of his posts, that he realized what he was doing, and was confident it would be successful.

This post speaks volume about Satoshi's foresightedness...


Hal Finney once said, he felt he was communicating with a highly educated man of Japanese ancestry. Satoshi was no way a drunk kid from university.

Maybe not at the beginning,while he was creating it or the first days, but when the forum was created and people started to get interested in the project I am sure he realised this was a really big project

It's clearly a project that was thought through with incredible thoroughness and designed to sustain itself for a long, long time. Answers were already waiting for questions that didn't exist yet and things were considered that'll happen decades in advance.

Isn't Satoshi cashing out today? April 15th?

Thanks for this

We don't know if he had previously written scientific articles before. The name "Satoshi Nakamoto" appeared out of nowhere in 2008 and is absent in cryptography discussions before Bitcoin was announced. The whitepaper is quite well written and conforms with well-established practices for the most part which points towards some sort of scientific/academic background. However, there is also the possibility that he is more than one person and the Satoshi Nakamoto that devised the idea might not be the same Satoshi Nakamoto that wrote the actual paper.

It's also interesting to note that the paper was written in OpenOffice.org instead of the much more common LaTeX which some people have perceived as a sign that he might not come from a formal programmer/mathematician/physicist background (although this could also have been done on purpose to throw people off his trail):


Source: https://medium.com/@jaycaspiankang/dorian-satoshi-nakamoto-what-do-we-really-know-ec57f44b6a01



Satoshi was around and active for a good 2 years before he began fading away from the forums. 2009 was a pretty lackluster year for Bitcoin adoption but by 2010, things really started to take off. Satoshi probably became more confident in his creation as time went on, especially as interest continued to grow and no major flaws were discovered.

At least that would get us some major headlines for a few minutes  :-\

It must have been "Pot" or "crack" ..... Drinking makes you dumb and clueless.  ;)

Seriously... This is not a person, who did something on a whim... This is carefully thought out... Read the whitepaper again... it's specific, and it makes room for future developments. {Processing power increase.. deflationary features... etc.}

Nope... He knew what he was doing and he executed it with perfection.  ;D

Yes I second your post. This was not a child's game. He has planned every step of it. He might be having a vision even more than what we all are thinking right now.

NO!

Only stoners can create something like this.
Drunken people produce fights and car/driving accidents.

And to answer your question: YES, he/she/they knew exactly where this is heading, hence the need for privacy and the need to dissapear after the FBI took notice.
Hope that helps.

You cannot expect this outcome, although s/he probably did plan for longevity. I think not even Satoshi knows if it will succeed and is along for the experimental ride.

As far as I know bitcoin longevity is present in bitcoin general trait. After all Satoshi designed bitcoin in a way it could (and it will be) mined for over 100 years. We won't be able to mine bitcoins before year 2140, no matter how hard we might try. That is just grand scheme Satoshi prepared for us.

i think yes. he knows that there was a need for something like bitcoin where we move around the traditional payment system and have a bank in our pocket. and look now. bitcoin is the reason for many people to start a business and the list of merchants accepting bitcoin is only growing.

Yeah, same here. I guess it was a group of people but I'm not sure.
Moreover, I don't think he thought Bitcoin would last this long

 Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
 (https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09959.html)
This obviously highlights that Satoshi, is an individual.

First off, I think Satoshi did not think it would last that long, but still had that tiny hope that it would become a success, but not this big. He did plan out for it to be able to be mined over 100 years, as many had pointed out. I think he did realise that the world did not have something similar to Bitcoin, and thought that it needed it, so he had some assurance that it would be somewhat popular. But I don't think Satoshi expected Bitcoin to last this long. He would've thought it would fade away.

Well we can only think, and we wouldn't possibly be close to the truth. The thing is we don't know who Satoshi is, nor what kind of person he is. I do however think that he is satisfied on how his life work has turned out. He probably didn't expect it to grow this much.

the answer is only one: yes, and you can tells that, by looking at the block reward structure, and i still think that satoshi is a code name for a group(a group could be only 2 persons) of talented coders

"he" also said that he expected the network to be controlled only by few farms, there is one quote from "him" saying this(i can't find it right now)

Sometimes I just think that how much brain they have put before even initiating it. I think he might be having a banking background as well as some software geek.

Satoshi has been predicting everything that would happen, from the big mining organizations and then mining becoming a thing that these organizations would deal with, to the next gen wifi technology that has literally been anounced ages ago that will solve the problem of the blocksize, so we don't even need to fork:


https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09964.html

http://networks.nokia.com/news-events/press-room/press-releases/nokia-networks-showcases-5g-speed-of-10gbps-with-ni-at-the-brooklyn-5g-summit

If you aren't on this big time for long term you are literally insane, guy was a legitimate genius.

I doubt that he was drunk when he was coding the bitcoin core, he was probably planning each line of code and each single feature carefully so the bitcoin core could work. If he made the project while he was drunk that would really impressive and he would probably be a genius IMO.

I think he didn't cause as you know he is developing bitcoin while he is drunk.
But accidently we make it this far, so why stop when you have something big?

I have the impression that bitcoin grows faster than internet in the first 5-6 years.

I don't think satoshi expected anything. I guess he could see the potential but I'm not sure he would have envisioned what it would have become today. I think he regarded it as an experiment and I guess it still is but it would be nice to know his thoughts on certain things for sure.


I think it will but the internet is a completely different beast to bitcoin and I don't think it will get as a big as the internet.

If we look at the history, we can see nothing BIG came as planned, and occurred by accident. Penicillin. So I think Satoshi himself(if there were ever one) was so much hopeless about bitcoin that he forgot to save his wallet, and now he can't recover his bitcoin.

All he did was make money.  Bitcoin is money, and satoshi made it.

If you read his messages in the forum you will see that he had some hope that this would be a very long project that could revolutionize the world

Of Course!

I read here in the forum that he was talking about years of duration for bitcoin
And he didn't make this drunk,this project must have been done with a huge amount of time before announcement

i do not think he did.

Satoshi was a visonary and he was sure that Bitcoin will last for long time, I can quote one of his quotes

"Aug. 5, 2010: While I don’t think Bitcoin is practical for smaller micropayments right now, it will eventually be as storage and bandwidth costs continue to fall. … Whatever size micropayments you need will eventually be practical. I think in 5 or 10 years, the bandwidth and storage will seem trivial."

He was certainly not an accurate visionary on the 5-year timescale. The storage and bandwidth requirements needed to use Bitcoin for micropayments do not seem trivial. Even in 10 years (4 from now) that seems doubtful.

Maybe 10-15 years from now, storage and bandwidth will be trivial. However, bitcoin will be so popular then, it needs more storage and bandwidth.

Yes he was very close to being accurate and he still has 5 more years for that saying of his to come true which imo is possible with wide adoption of bitcoin, that being said, i will not be able to buy a gift card online in 2010 with 0.02BTC with all the transaction costs, but now it is totally possible as the costs of bandwidth and storage have gone down significantly and the value of bitcoin has grown from few cents to hundreds of dollars.

Well said. I agree a person who create something for money wont hold long. A person who create for society will hold very long.

I think Satoshi know Bitcoin will get so popular.

What do you say? Do you think that he will wait for couple of years and the withdraw every coin? It would be disastrous for bitcoin economy if he do that. Beside I think early adopters had slight  advantage over everyone else and Satoshi is aware of that. He will let people believe in BTC this is the reason he won't touch these coins.

Satoshi saw it as a potential experiment. The idea came from playing MMORPGs.

Im not sure if he will ever be able to use his coins.

He said storage and bandwidth would "seem trivial." They don't. You still have reasonably intelligent people arguing that the block size should not be raised or should only be raised very slowly and carefully because it would make it too hard to run full nodes. That's not something that seems trivial at all. And that says nothing about the storage and bandwidth requirements to widely use it for microtransactions which would far exceed the current 5-7 tx/sec volume nothing (by factors of thousands at least). I will acknowledge that in 5 more years things may be different.

I bet when he laid out the plan, he has carefully thought of on what to expect and then put everything in the best consideration. If you notice the timing when bitcoin came about, it was in 2009 just close to almost 2 years after the subprime mortgage crisis and economic recession. I bet he envisioned with the aim to create the ideal perfect money that would solve the mess from our current financial system.

I read he expected digital currencies to play some role in the next decade.  Bitcoin was an experiment at the time and there were lots of critics. Satoshi had the idea that the more people will accept it the more valuable it will be.

I think satoshi was like any inventor, passionate about what he did. Did he think that Bitcoin would last this long? That's under consideration, but he certainly hoped so. I can't imagine someone inventing something and interacting with it the way he did and just giving up.

Im sure he expected it to last this long. I bet he was a bit surprised when it went from a couple bucks to over 1k in just a few months.

I strongly believe, that he at least invested quite some time into the project. Writing software like this isn't something you do it in a day or two. I do believe though, that he didn't anticipate the success it eventually achieved. I believe he just did it as some kind of experiment he hoped would get some traction.

Where is the logic in that? I think he was well aware that what he created was an experiment and still is. Nobody, not even satoshi, could have predicted what would or will happen in the future. I'm sure he's probably both surprised and proud how far bitcoin has come. 

Read the whitepaper. He mentioned some of his expectations in there I believe (or mentioned them elsewhere for sure regarding who would be interested in bitcoin etc).

Predictions and expectations are not the same thing. Satoshi did expect Bitcoin to be successful. You can perceive that in the whitepaper and in his messages to public groups.

I think he knew it will be a successful someday of his creation that he made. A man just threw a billion of  dollars in the internet.

Proof or it never happened, how'd you come to that conclusion that he was drunk when he released one of the best inventions since 2000? Also what would it even matter if he was it is just you say it in a fuddy way and that is the actions of a ().. I am sure he never dreamt it would get as big as it is now and especially how big it will get in the future.

bartender I'll have some of what hes drinking

he may have a dream that bitcoin will become so famous but not to predict with certainty the extent to which bitcoin will succeed.

Fascinating post.

Thanks for this.

Unbelievable how intelligent Satoshi is/was.
I can't even begin to try & imagine the IQ a man like that posesses.
Incredible, maybe one day he'll be looked back on as one of the geniuses of the last 500 years.

He is dedicated.

Yes, he did. He knows what he is doing and I am sure he had confidence about that.

Did you see any of his coins moving?
Nope.

Why is that?
Because there will be a time where he is going to need them  ;)

I guess he have never thought about the potency of his project. It is like facebook, at the very beginning it started like a stupid project, just to spot someone or to have a faster comunication inside the colleges. I strongly belive that satoshi was like that, he invented somenthing just to make a dream become real, as like when you build somenthing for the unic aim to do it. What happened after was amazing and unpredictable

Satoshi was a scientist at a major power company looking for ways to artificially increase the world's power demand. The POW (POwer Waste) technology he invented earned him an early retirement along with numerous bonuses and stock options.

I don't belive it. For a lot of times btc was related to DarkMarkets, washing money and all crime-actions you can think. Just becaouse it is a decentralized, anonymous, and fast wway to send big amount of money whitout any issue.

I think he was expecting for years that the BTC will be a successful and useful to the economy.

I think so too. Maybe even decades.

I think yes, Satoshi expects that this project will be a good project. Because, a great successful project come with a great idea too. So If he didn't serious with this project or just like you said "he made this when he drunk", Bitcoin will not last this long ;)

Or he is one of us, pretending to be someone else. Maybe a big exchange admin...impossible to say

in my opinion, i think he expected this because you wouldn't make a currency if you are just planning to use it just for a year right?

Bitcoin could have been just a problem he had solved; an experiment he had unleashed.
He would definitely liked his creation to succeed, but we won't know whether he expected it to.

This statement got me. The Proof Of Work method of minting new coins is actually a bit of a stretch to the world's ever increasing power consumption. As difficulty goes up, more and more machines need to solve complex mathematical equations so as to mint new coins, which I think isn't feasible in terms of power consumption. It will require more and more power, and that means we could easily deplete our resources faster than ever. I don't know but as I view it, the demands for power to produce new bitcoins is kinda alarming.

no it isn't, he was talking precisely about big farms in the future, so he was expecting something, he was expecting that bitcoin would last many years, this mean a partial success at the very least

also he was talking about the 10 min confirmation, what that thing could have caused, and he say that it would not be a problem, because of node propagation ecc..

every word he wrote makes you immediately think how he foreseen everything about bitcoin in the future

Funny how almost everything he wrote on the whitepaper and on forums actually came true. I wonder how he did it, but I honestly believe that a single person couldn't achieve such a feat alone. It is possible that bitcoin's concept and code is made by a group and not only an individual.

He designed Bitcoin in a way that the supply would keep being filled with new coins until year 2140... so yes, he expected it to change finances forever and to last more than we'll ever live and beyond.

He also probably designed it to consume more and more power over time and cause much larger problems other than solving the problems in the economic and finance sector. The PoW method, over time, will consume a large portion of power of the world if bitcoin continues to go mainstream. If PoW remains to be the method of acquiring bitcoins, then we'll probably need another project to at least use those wasted power into something other than mining digital gold.

it is a big understatement to assume that bitcoin was a drunken university overnight project which caught on fast by chance. and it didn't cought on fast either, the idea and the work done on it is more than that

Yes, because the mining process was purposely designed to take a long time. Though, what is surprising is the adoption and buzz already. I expected it to be out of Star Wars....like a rebel alliance type currency.

I guess it was only a prototype designed for funny. He did not expected anything from it!

If he was Nick Sbazo and had played around with some previous models, then this might have been something he expected to become widespread few years down.

Well, not a joke. The Star Wars reference was a metaphor. Though not quite the same. I envisioned it circulating like Colonial Scrip did during the days of the Revolution. Instead of being forced to use the pound though you can replace it in todays terms in relation to legal tender laws and the debt backed US Dollar.

https://21stcenturycicero.wordpress.com/fraud/colonial-scrip/

"Each Colony had its own currency and some were better managed than others. It was banned by English Parliament in the Currency Act after Benjamin Franklin had explained the benefits of this currency to the British Board of Trade. Outlawing the circulating medium caused a depression in the Colonies, and Franklin and many others believed it to be the true cause of the American Revolution"

"After Franklin had explained…to the British Government as the real cause of prosperity, they immediately passed laws, forbidding the payment of taxes in that money. This produced such great inconvenience and misery to the people, that it was the principal cause of the Revolution. A far greater reason for a general uprising, than the Tea and Stamp Act, was the taking away of the paper money."

Anyway, when I came up with cryptocurrency I had envisioned a similar system as that of Colonial Scrip that would circulate alongside the Imperial US Dollar (the empire...Alex Jones like lol).

I feel like Satoshi put more time and effort than described in the scenario you put in the original post, but, I feel like the acceptance of Bitcoin was very unexpected. When someone from the general public were to hear about it, the idea seemed so far-fetched to have a decentralized currency. Mere speculation at this point, but to answer your question, no.

One of his famous posts states "I’m sure that in 20 years there will either be very large (bitcoin) transaction volume or no volume.".

That quote suggests he expected it to either be massive, or a flop. He made no allowance for a middle ground where Bitcoin is popular, but not massively popular.

Obviously it was not a drunk idea.

Considering coin generation will end some time around 2140, it's safe to assume Bitcoin was expected to be around for a long, long time.