Bitcoin Forum

He may of made it  as a little side project just to have fun with or show his friends,

Or maybe he developed it to show off to huge multinational companies so he could make a profit.

But... Do you think satoshi expected bitcoin to have this much of a following?

he didnt make it just for fun

he didnt do it to show of a profit.

he did it because he hated th whole government financial status.. (see the quote in the genesis block) thats his inspiraction.

and with less then 0.02% of population using it.. this is not the exiting day to ask such a question, bitcoin is still small.. ask again in a couple years

Yes.

Have you read the white paper (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf) and Satoshi's original thread (http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdowd.com/msg09959.html) on the crypto mailing list?

He worked on it for ten years, released it with a 40-50 year timescale to allow for transaction volume to grow high enough that the fees could support the network.

Did that whitepaper look like it had been somebody getting lucky, or the well planned product of a decades work?

Awap expected for hoped or designed.
Scale up following exponentially from where we are today. This is infancy.

Yes. I suspect she/he/it felt there was a significant likely hood that Bitcoin would grow this big or bigger. This would explain going to great trouble in-order to hide her/his/its identity.

The original thread was 10 years earlier.

Of course you have proof for this claim right?  You just saying something doesn't make it true.

Yes of course. Satoshi first started communicating about the project on cypherpunks around 98-99, discussing with Adam Back (hashcash), Wei Dai (b-money), RAH and others.

Check the archives yourself, look for mails from anonymous at replay

Well... By that rationale, the original thread was probably actually 20-40yrs earlier when researchers first realized that cryptographic value exchange over the internet, assuming consensus could be solved, was the holy-grail of money. Seems likely that Satoshi had been part of the discussion for a while.

I don't know what you're specifically implying with the 10yr thing, though (nor is it important, really).

I'm not implying anything. Satoshi was online and discussing bitcoin ten years earlier, if you're familiar with his more recent mails from a few years ago, the series of mails to cypherpunks/cryptography back in 98-99 will be familiar, for example this (https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@c2.net/msg02011.html). There are plenty more earlier and later. As Adam Back says those were the discussions when he first started speaking to Satoshi over the internet. Of course he was likely around long before that as you say, as his ideas are already maturing by 99.

One of my favorite Satoshi Quotes:

"It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on. If
enough people think the same way, that becomes a self fulfilling
prophecy. Once it gets bootstrapped, there are so many
applications if you could effortlessly pay a few cents to a
website as easily as dropping coins in a vending machine."  - Satoshi Nakamoto

I think he very well knew what he was creating and the possibilities of this protocol.

And it seems that we are indeed bootstrapped at this point. I would not have said that 3 years ago.

It is interesting to speculate for sure. I am not sure he thought it would the the one to go main stream and change the world but I do think he saw a future dominated by crypto currency.

I think Satoshi had high hopes for bitcoin because he knew it works. He believed in it and knew it could be big, but wasn't sure how the public would react. Sometimes innovations fail, not because it was bad design, just bad marketing.

I don't think he could imagine what has come of bitcoin.

Pretty weak conjecture.  Plenty of people have had ideas about digital currencies involving cryptographic systems over the years.   They weren't all Satoshi and there is nothing in that quote that links to Bitcoin.

Wow.

I had no idea it went back that far...
This is really cool to see these nascent forms of Bitcoin concepts.

But how do you know anon is Satoshi?  Did Adam Back say that? or what...


 

Thomas Edison proposed something similar. The idea is not new for sure but combining it with the internet is new and exciting.

He had an idea that this kind of technology would get big. I think if he didn't think the idea would work, he would not spend much time on it.

A quote from 2009:
"I would be surprised if 10 years from now we're not using electronic currency in some way, "

We'll see what happens in 5 years  :)

I think he was pretty sure bticoin would either succeed or fail, there's no in between

his goal was to defeat the banking system, if i recall correctly. Even the genesis block mocks the bankers.

surely the only way to do that is if bitcoin becomes big, very big, much bigger than it is now.

which would make all of us rich, but that's not the goal, that's just a pleasant side-effect.

I have in fact read it.

My question is, if he expected bitcoin to have such a following.

I dont think he expected it to get this big, this quick worldwide. I bet he thought it would be a slower process than the skyrocket we all witnessed

I'm sure he had large aspirations for Bitcoin but would be surprised to see how well it resonated with a diverse set of groups around the world.
That said I do not believe Satoshi is dead but watching and seeing how Bitcoin is growing from the shadows.
His timeline may have been different though in the sense he might not have expected it to grow so quickly after its creation, but he did leave around the wikileaks incident so he was at least aware of its potential.

I think he did; otherwise, why would he just leave cold-turkey.  I think he knew how big it would be and the only way it could get this big is if he took half the share of Bitcoins (which he had, I believe, at the time of his departure) and left.

Just my thoughts tho

Probably not expected but hoped...

read his comments on this forum...

you can say it's small, but it's not.. almost everyone you know probably knows about it in some form. maybe it's still early, or maybe it's not.. you don't know if bitcoin will still even be here in the years to come. it's not for certain.

yes, may be he thought that it would become even more popular and a valid currency throughout the world than it is now

Even with this few of people using it, the bitcoin market cap is still measured in billiions of dollars, the amount invested in ASICs that secure the network is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, several bitcoin related companies have valuations that are measured in the billions of dollars. Where we are now with how big bitcoin has become is no small accomplishment

Which ones?

I think he meant several billion dollar companies use Bitcoin and have valuations worth billions of dollars, don't think there are any yet though that were Bitcoin only and worth billions of dollars
(Cough not including Silk Road ^_^)

Personally, I can't imagine him thinking it would get this big while he was creating it, which would have been somewhat arrogant to think.  I see him as rather humble, but perhaps I need to read more of his posts.  I'm sure he "knew" something (almost) exactly like Bitcoin (easy, lightweight, many applications) would prevail because traditionally fiat sucks compared to Bitcoin, but that's not really a difficult conclusion to land on.  The real question isn't "current fiat vs Bitcoin" though, wherein there's a very obvious better choice; it's "whatever could be next vs Bitcoin."

Then again, he's far more brilliant than I am & perhaps he really did just see the light.

Really, 0.02% only?
Satoshi is in hiding isn't he? so I doubt he expected it to even get to that "small" amount
Time will tell if bitcoin will truly get "big"

I believe he / they had a vision, but whether or not it was this big may be a different story.

I think he would be surprised how quickly it's all happening. I think he thought Bitcoin had this sort of potential though.

Of course they expected Bitcoin to be this big, everything about it is so damn well done, thought-out and planned: mining, trading, altcoins, implementing, it's just amazing...

Satoshi expected crypto currencies to be much bigger than they are now, and he will be right.

I think Satoshi expected Bitcoin to be this small, for now, during this brief transition.

not only satoshi who expect things like that, but me and you also would expect us to know the benefit of this bitcoin. for the initial stage, bitcoin should be acceptable in all circles, especially those who had been refused

Just one question, was Bitcoin designed to be traded for cash at first ?

There are too much factors of today's price of bitcoin so noone could never prognose it at its' rise