Bitcoin Forum

So many posts about "Satoshi Nakamoto", so let's gather them together here. :)

This is an interesting post by Satoshi that should be easier to find:

from: http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09964.html (http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09964.html)
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Re: Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
Satoshi Nakamoto Sun, 02 Nov 2008 17:56:27 -0800

>Satoshi Nakamoto wrote:
>> I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully
>> peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.
>>
>> The paper is available at:
>> http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
>
>We very, very much need such a system, but the way I understand your
>proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size.
>
>For transferable proof of work tokens to have value, they must have
>monetary value.  To have monetary value, they must be transferred within
>a very large network - for example a file trading network akin to
>bittorrent.
>
>To detect and reject a double spending event in a timely manner, one
>must have most past transactions of the coins in the transaction, which,
>  naively implemented, requires each peer to have most past
>transactions, or most past transactions that occurred recently. If
>hundreds of millions of people are doing transactions, that is a lot of
>bandwidth - each must know all, or a substantial part thereof.
>


Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe
for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section 8) to check for
double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or
about 12KB per day.  Only people trying to create new coins would need to run
network nodes.  At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the
network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to
specialists with server farms of specialized hardware.  A server farm would
only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with
that one node.

The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think.  A typical transaction
would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact).  Each transaction has to be
broadcast twice, so lets say 1KB per transaction.  Visa processed 37 billion
transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day. 
That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or
2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.

If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then,
sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal.

Satoshi Nakamoto
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I deeply appreciate his work, I refuse to worship him.

Hi Satoshi. Thank you, I made very good money with Bitcoin.

thanks satoshi for let me control my own money.. Im free!

Shol'va kree!

What makes this Official?  Also, why the need for another Satoshi thread?  There's been plenty of these already.

good point

The funniest part is that while Satoshi was thinking and created a "no trusted third party" cash system, some people are dreaming of bitcoin ... f..ing banks !!!  ::)
God help us all!!

What?

What what?

Not sure of the point you were trying to make in that first post, I am not following that sentence.  Someone else please confirm that I'm not crazy because I can't understand that post.

+1 confirmed no sense.

Thank you, I read it 5 times and couldn't figure it out.

Ok, sorry, I didn't understand what the question was.

At the second post of this thread Satoshi states that he is about to create a cash system where trusted third parties are not needed.
A bank in the fiat world is a trusted third party.
A bank in the bitcoin world would still need to be a trusted third party, only such a party is not needed.
Still, some people are trying to create bitcoin banks. It's illogical, they are not needed.

I hope it's clearer now. Again, I'm sorry.

I have read this post years ago. Read it again today, I still feel good.

I would argue that banks are still going to be needed.  There's no way every single person is going to want to be in charge of their own wallet/funds handling, they will want someone else to do it for them.  What about loans?  There needs to be some sort of system, you can't crowd fund everything.

It's so much harder to steal from people when they don't hand over their money to centralized repositories. We need to nip this "be your own bank" idea in the bud before it starts to catch on.

Yes, but that system can't be fractional reserve banking, unless IOUs come into play!

I imagine that bitcoin banks would have to be so different than today's banks that I don't even know if the word "bank" would apply anymore.