Bitcoin Forum

Satoshi,

If you're still reading these forums could you write a brief article on why you created bitcoin for the Bitcoin Education Project's history archive. We can verify your identity with your key from the original paper. Just send it to one of the old vets here and have them relay it to me. Our content has been released under a creative commons license and will be forever free.

 

I think the time has come to exit the closet from which I have hidden for the last 4 years.

I am Satoshi.

In the tradition of my culture, I answer your question with a Koan. Study this deeply and the answer will become clear to you:


Such is the nature of life,
His master is his only adherent.
Underneath the Cherry Tree,
The student ponders the meaning of the the moon.

Teacher before have only positioned
Heaven as their only goal,
Even as the lotus leaf meanders along the stream.


Forget that which you know, said Shidoshi
Use what is now before you.
Can you hear the sound of prosperity?
Kindness is the note of harmony.

Unless you listen intently to that which is in you,
Peace will never blossom under the Cherry Tree.

Satoshi sent me this:

Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as
trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for
most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model.
Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot
avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the
minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions,
and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible
services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must
be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need.
A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties
can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments
over a communications channel without a trusted party.
What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust,
allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted
third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers
from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers. In
this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed
timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions. The
system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any
cooperating group of attacker nodes.


He sent this as his key:
http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Not true

See, I keep telling y'all that if Satoshi returned to the forums under another name people would tell him he didn't "get" Bitcoin and you don't believe me.

 ;D