Bitcoin Forum

So I do think back in 2009 or way before 2009 something like apple fell on his head like Newton happened which made him think of an online Currency years ahead of it's time .
What if the apple was the Morse Code ?
The single most basic encrypted code which was invented back in 1837 could be the inspiration.
Morse code uses bases Dots and Dash Making a normal signal encrypted , which can only be decoded by a special software or even a person who understands it .
How a very simple thing could have helped discovered the Bitcoins , what are your thoughts ? Your take on what was the inspiration behind bitcoins??

I remember having similar post before but couldn't find that. I'll tell you the same which I told in that. There can be multiple possibilities.
1. 2008 Housing market Crash: I personally consider this to be the prime reason. Satoshi might have been someone who lost great sums of money during the crash or would have seen people losing great sums of money this agitated him to create a currency which is not centralised by any bank therefore less prone to any bubbles. However there is a big contradiction to that as 1 year is never thought enough to create a wonder like bitcoin so this might not be the reason.
2. Dot com Bubble: He might have been someone engaged in IT World so might have suffered in the big dot com Bubble which ended in 2002 and 7 years is really enough to create such a currency.
3. General observation: Third reason obviously is a random walk theory. Because deep inside every financially literate person knows how fiat system works. So he might have come to know about this system and might have realised that it's a hoax. So this might have been an important inspiration.

I think that Satoshi got inspired by the earlier "digital money" consepts.

According to Wikipredia:

He might have been inspired by the Friedrich Hayek theory about "competing money"(I don't remember the correct term).Friedrich Hayek wanted money to be out of the control of central banks,because central banks monetary policies were damaging the business cycle and creating inflation.
The concept of a currency,that isn't controlled by any central bank or government in the world is the main idea of Bitcoin.That consept isn't invented by Satoshi itself.

I'm quite curious tho, what is Satoshi Nakamoto gonna do with all the Bitcoin that he has mined during its early time?  ???

It's completely up to him. Heck, he can even freely dump every single one of the coins he mined in the markets and it would be fine. Sure the price would most definitely crash which could be a bummer for a lot of people, but it's his money. He should do whatever he wants with it. Free markets.

there are questions that are very complicated to answer, to answer your question it would be necessary to ask satoshi nakamoto personally and we all know that satoshi nakamoto disappeared years ago. sometimes I think they should create an organization formatted by the greatest geniuses in the world to look for satoshi, if they find satoshi then many questions will be answered and we will no longer need to hear things that Faketoshi speaks every year

He most likely understood how a proper currency should be ran. A major crisis probably pushed him to implement or try out his idea. Lots of people likely have real solutions to alot of things but keep it in their minds (or somewhere) until there is great need to implement the ideas.
Bitcoin (in it's decentralized state) solve alot of difficult challenges only few people are probably aware of.  There is one particular challenge it solved I am very exited about. I think keeping it in the mind until it is needed is probably a good idea.

You can look at the hidden message in the Genesis Block:

https://i.ibb.co/s15gY5Y/Screen-Shot-2020-04-09-at-4-09-54-PM.png (https://ibb.co/5jY1HYH)

"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"

You can also see in the White Paper his references, specially Wei Dai's "b money". So we can clearly see who Satoshi's inspiration is in releasing bitcoin in 2009.

Necessity is the mother of invention, when one has a dare passion for humanity and how they could be free atlest from a brutal financial system that rewards only the strong and the rich, then there is bound to be some critical brain work. For instance, I invested heavily in stock market in 2007 just before returning for my HND, till date the stock are dead and have left that for another generation to inherit. And they are bank shares which always post good profit yearly but never reflect in the price of their shares. This can make one think the system is a fraud and find a way out of the slavery.

Your suggestion is really unrealistic, do you think you know Mr. Satoshi so well? The reason why there's a topic like this is because have no idea about his inspiration about developing btc. Behind this btc, I know that there is something more about the digital currency that we are using now. Maybe my speculation is, he know that as our technology is constantly advancing, he think of something that will never be outdated and can go with the flow of the technology. We all benefit bitcoin as it is very use as a store of value, investment, source of income, and a currency. But after all of this, we still need to find out if Mr. Satoshi did really exist, or is he still alive? His idea of bitcoin really broaden our mind when it comes to understanding and analyzing our market and economy.

I'm more inclined to him actually wanting to break free of the binds of the government. You know how developments tend to go towards surveillance more, where every move you make is seen and recorded. Yes, it's a prerequisite to a safer society, but nonetheless, it is quite bothering to know that you are being observed, even when you don't actually see anything observing you. Still, without the man himself saying anything, I doubt a good answer would be given. Plus, there may be multiple factors involved right?
Bruh. I think creating an organization to look for a single person is a bit too much. Even if we do say that satoshi is a genius, he isn't one that is largely needed. Especially since his project tended more towards opposing the government.

I wonder when people will stop presupposing Nakamoto's gender till we don't know who this person is. Half of the world's female, you know, and we are past the time when women could not become good at tech and other things, so it might well be a woman. In fact, this would explain why Satoshi remains anonymous since due to many people being sexist, she would not want her creation not to be taken seriously because of her sex. I'm not saying it's the case, I just don't like it when people keep writing Mr. and he when referring to Satoshi. As for the question about inspiration, there's a long pre-history of Bitcoin, and one of the good places to see it is, I think, here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5126554.0

I don't think anybody can have an exact information about that but I guess we can all infer from his whitepaper that he envisioned a world with full financial freedom and privacy. Also, through Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies transaction fees will be reduced for all payments made with Bitcoin as compared to Fiat currencies.

I am quite sure that he would not have got this idea out of a sudden. He would have had this idea in his mind from a long time and implemented it only when after 2008. Also, it took him good amount of time to make bitcoin fully stable. If I were in his place I would have been really frustrated with how the traditional fiat system works. Banks owning our money and bullying us for our money. This must be a good reason why he must have thought of an alternative solution. He would have surely though about it long ago and when the financial crisis occured, it would have triggered him to create bitcoin.

As was stated in some posts about him, it was greatly inspired by Wei Dai and Nick Szabo's work, with some other things in-between that we now call as bitcoin. How he got the idea, that's what we won't be able to answer unless we really come close contact to Satoshi or get an interview with him. His accounts on *why* he devised bitcoin is literally in this forum, and that's mainly for political and economic reasons, especially pertaining to banks and government's continuous oppression to the unbanked majority.

I'm hella sure that he read that before making his own concept since it was out long time ago even at the time he thought of it.

He may be, but I'm also calling Wei Dai (which could be the real Satoshi with some old conspiracies) to be his inspiration since Wei Dai developed cryptography library and created the B-money cryptocurrency system. It was not the recession that happened in 2008, simply the dates will tell you why.

There were a number of other attempts that were not as successful as bitcoin. The most well known of these is perhaps DigiCash. DigiCash, created by David Chaum, was an important undertaking for the 1990s. Even before DigiCash, Chaum had an initiative called Ecash. Satoshi overshadowed them with a completely revolutionary blockchain invention.

Meanwhile, D. Chaum is currently working on several projects on Blockchain. You can find the details if you search.

Satoshi's innovation was to combine several existing technologies and turn them into one system. As far as I know they were all around in one form or the other and had been for quite some time. And of course digital money had been around for years too, it was the centralisation they could never get past.

If I remember rightly hashcash was invented as some sort of anti spam measure. What's double weird is that its inventor didn't seem very moved by Bitcoin and only warmed up to it in 2013.

Only a true computer science obsessive could come up with something like that. I've no idea whether it took off but I'd never have otherwise heard of it if not for BTC. Loads of the best stuff is identified and repurposed by someone with true vision. Satoshi made him, and vice versa of course. I hope they raise a glass to each other every now and then.

It's a bit of a misunderstanding to think that the 2008 crisis made Satoshi create Bitcoin, it is known that Satoshi was working on Bitcoin long before the crisis started. It's true that Satoshi was generally critical of the traditional financial institutions, but the exact event of the 2008 crisis wasn't the reason for creating Bitcoin.

Of course only Satoshi knows the exact reasons, opinions and theories are only assumptions. Well, smart people always have unique and foremost thoughts, initially considered crazy but apparently very useful. That's what makes smart people different from ordinary people.

ONly Satoshi (or probably his or its team) knows about it.
However, we may only be able to guess and give our opinion.
In my opinion, there may be some conditions:
1. The development of the technology at that time
2. The global economy (especially the thought and technology about digital money) that may be growing at that time
3. His willingness to make a new era of money and financial system in worldwide.
4. He might also have bad experiences about abroad transaction and he decided to make a way to ease the transaction worldwide.
5. He is antimainstream, someone who might indeed like something new and create something new.

People think differently. Our thoughts can be triggered in lots of ways, there might have been something that triggered the thought of cryptocurrency coming to his mind. It might even be due to a kind of situation he had with his friends and then went home and thought of having a currency that will give him freedom to do transactions or whatever he wants without having any restrictions.

Or he might be someone that has always been worried about economy and a lot of things. It is also possible that it might have been just a random thought that came to his mind and he decided to take it seriously and work on it. Because, most innovations had happened this way only like what struck in your mind repeatedly may become real some day regardless of what you are doing currently yes things will change in your favor so that you may find supporting people and situations to achieve one day. All you need is a strong will :).

Seriously? He will choose to do with the stash what he choose to do because  they're rightly his|her. To me, that's the reward for the good work done by this persons who put upon themselves the new errand of digital currency.

To me something always lead to another, possibly Satoshi Nakamoto thought much about the cashless policy which they worked together to achieved and is commendable and also many information are available on wiki and Google.

No, Bitcoin is simply the implementation that brilliantly utilizes HashCash. 8)

I believe, if there was an inspiration, it would be from the contributions developed by Nick Szabo, Wei Dai, and the other CypherPunks.


To stay away from suspicion? 8)

All due respect to Nakamoto, whomever he/they are, but it's more likely that they got burnt and Bitcoin's development was a reaction to that. The genesis block message suggests that, to me, anyway.

Had the message been more about, say, regular people losing their entire life savings, or getting their money stolen out from under them, I might have thought differently.

I'm not saying it's more right, or more worthy, to be a downtrodden peasant, than a ruined banker. Just saying Bitcoin may have been less inspiration and more rage against the machine.


I think the very best do. I imagine rivals in every industry privately toast their foes, for pushing them so hard.

Bitcoin wasn't a brand new idea as we may know. Researches on digital currencies began with David Chaum. And I think it inspired Satoshi the most.

We can only share our opinions with regards to his inspiration why he developed a coin like this.

My theory is that, Satoshi is a cryptographer and he started creating Bitcoin long time ago already. Its just coincidence when the Bitcoin has been released, there is a financial problem during the year 2009 where the Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy and there is no correlation between what happened and the Bitcoin. He also wants to create a coin where there are no banks involved because he has a bad experience with banks. Maybe he created Bitcoin so that there is another currency that will be widely used worldwide aside from the current currency which is fiat and be transferred digitally.

In the end, it will be Satoshi who will know what are his inspirations.

An apple falling on Newton's head is probably a good allegory, to illustrate how unexpected the invention was.

Also in these 11 years there has not really been any digital currency invention that beat Bitcoin. No new fundamentals have been discovered or established that would be so big as to replace Bitcoin.

For instance, there has been research in algorithms for private transactions. This research has been helpful but the added value of the privacy that any of those projects added over Bitcoin, has not been felt as decisive by users enough to change, also given that that research itself is undergoing constant changes, which algorithm is the most private has changed about once per year or so, recent years. This is unlike Bitcoin which has been stable these 11 years, even while with some drama that culminated 2017.

There may have been a lot of systematic research behind Bitcoin's invention. However, Bitcoin as an invention is unique, it could not be anticipated, so you cannot say that Satoshi must have invented Bitcoin because of a particular personal reason such as that he was happy or sad or upset. Satoshi may have been that, however that was not what caused the invention, just like the invention of the refrigerator did not happen because of someone's mood.

Actually, bitcoin concept is pretty simple. I think that its possible to create without any special inspiration.
But 2008 crisis could give a idea, yes

We always thought that Satoshi was inspired by Adam Back's hash cash and Wei Dai's b-money. So I'm linking it here so that everyone can read it:

[1] http://www.hashcash.org/papers/announce.txt
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20061202010422/http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt

So decide for yourself, how heavy Satoshi is influenced by those two pre-cursors.