Bitcoin Forum

I just spent a couple hours reading through Satoshi's 1,000+ posts and plucked out my four favorites:

    1. (I’ve been working on bitcoin’s design) since 2007. At some point I became convinced there was a way to do this without any trust required at all and couldn’t resist to keep thinking about it.

    2. Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.

    3. Sorry to be a wet blanket. Writing a description for (bitcoin) for general audiences is bloody hard. There’s nothing to relate it to.

    4. I’m sure that in 20 years there will either be very large (bitcoin) transaction volume or no volume.

I've got a couple dozen more here: http://crypt.la/2014/01/06/satoshi-nakamoto-quotes/

Awesome, I'm just reading your extended list.

What a smart man, and look, unlike the Fed, he says deflation doesn't kill us:


Satoshi for Fed President!

You left out the single most famous Satoshi quote:


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


The famous comment on the very first bitcoin transaction, by Satoshi Nakamoto himself.

Seems to indicate the reason why Bitcoin exists in the first place.

The very motivation behind it.

Good stuff!

-B-

Good call! Thanks! I'm going to add that to my blog post...

+1 Good one...

Satoshi is probably* a Brit**.
http://britishisms.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/bloody/

* Yes. Also a master at track covering, but across 1000+ posts, maybe not, especially when focused on software/crypto issues.
** Yes. Yes. Heard it before? Stop reading this then!

Lots of foreigners learn English from.. well the English.  And/or they go to school in England.

Let's not turn this into a "who is Satoshi" thread ..... like @cp1 said, lots of people go to school in England. I very much doubt he was a Brit

Great quotes though, love the one about "writing a description for general audience is bloody hard". It must have been at the start, but I think the bitcoin community is making progress on that one :) still bloody hard though !

I think it would be cool if satoshi reveals himself on his death bed, then again I suppose at that point it might be hard to prove it's even him.

I'm sure he could find lots of ways to prove it :)

But I hope he does it before he reaches that stage .... imagine he was just about to reveal his identity and "went" a bit early.

LOL@ this one:

July 15, 2010: That’s surprising that we’ve never heard of that (error) before now. Maybe you’re the first person to ever run it on Vista :)

Satoshi is likely multiple people, not a single person.

i actually believe its a single person. its hard for a group of people to have the same trend of thought. you see his quotes, you know it comes from one person.

Yeah, those quotes look like they came from one person - he'll turn up one day at a conference and explain all - just hope I'm alive to see it!

Thanks for this. Nice read !

... the Internet. :)

"bloody" or "bollocks" is too typical British so it doesn't point to an English native speaker from UK at all.

Maybe, it depends on when that "bloody" quote was from. My feeling is, the earlier it was posted, the more likely it was simply normal usage and not something dropped in an attempt to throw people off his tail. Im guessing by the time Satoshi realized his anonymity problem, he realized it was better to just stop posting at all rather than change his usage.

My favorite Satoshi quote is the one in my signature.

It's one person writing, but they could have split up the tasks - writing, developing, etc...

nice thread...the oldies are good.

 
Try telling people this. They won't believe you.

I know.

Some Nobel Prize winners said differently, and of course they have to know...

Most great ideas involve more than one person, but usually one person is the main one.

Please listen. He could have been a foreigner going to school / college in UK. People pick up the UK lingo pretty quick you know.

Another reason why I believe its one person because his code is bad. that means he is an architect or strategist rather than a coder. I could code better than him. but his thought is revolutionary, probably the most revolutionary of the century.

I also believe he is not a native japanese. his english is too good unless he is like michio kaku who is a japanese brought up in a strong english speaking community like US or UK.

Let's say he was a Japanese person that went to boarding school in UK. His English would be perfect. Many many Japanese people learn go abroad to learn English. No reason to believe he wasn't born in Japan

That's interesting! I know nothing about coding, so tell me: Why is the system still so secure apparently, although he is bad at coding (wouldn't that mean many people are able to crack to code) - how can he get away with bad coding? And what makes code bad? 

I have always wondered how it's possible so many people are able to create something supposedly so complex as a cryptocurrency (when you look at all the altcoins).



Plus, if he was Japanese, he would have picked a different name for sure!

Anybody who is British - do you see any non-British words somewhere in the longer quotes?

Satoshi is probably reading this and laughing right now... Hey, thanks for that great idea, man, and have fun watching how this plays out!

Or maybe he's Japanese-Canadian.  That would explain the Japanese name and the perfect English with the British flavour.

Anyways, good quotes.  One day I'll around to reading his posts too.

Within the full context of the original postings the statements are way more interesting.
E.g.: statement number 4:

"Right.  Otherwise we couldn't have a finite limit of 21 million coins, because there would always need to be some minimum reward for generating.  In a few decades when the reward gets too small, the transaction fee will become the main compensation for nodes.  I'm sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume."

...

"I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party." - Nov 1 2008

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09959.html


"Instead of the supply changing to keep the value the same, the supply is predetermined and the value changes. As the number of users grows, the value per coin increases. It has the potential for a positive feedback loop; as users increase, the value goes up" - Feb 11, 2009

http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-source  (in comments)

I've only looked at the original release briefly, but to me:

It looks rushed; a proof of concept and a prototype. So it's more untidy, messy, code than necessarily *bad* code. Imagine the rough scribblings of a genius mathematician. It may not look pretty but it can still be technically sound.

I would imagine if a group had made it there would have been much more effort in maintaining a clean code base so others can work on it easier. Though, it's still possible that multiple people worked on the design but only one single person did the coding.

I personally would never write "good" code for some far out experimental project either. I'd hack together something quick and messy just to test if it works, then clean it up later.

So then the question is why didn't he clean it up at some point at least?

What you are saying for me speaks more for one single person alone, because if he would have been working in a group, there would be not so much reason to rush.

Another issue is that the more people are involved, the more difficult it becomes to keep totally quiet, in the long run. Maybe some ex-girlfriend of Satoshi will tell the press some day.. :)

How much time do you think he would have needed to clean it up and what would have been the advantages of cleaning up (besides it just looking better to the few people who know about coding)?

Can somebody elaborate on what is meant by a positive feedback loop as it relates to Bitcoin?
Or does it literally just mean "as users increase, the value goes up"?

another reason why its not a group is that no one in the group came forward to say anything after he disappeared. Secondly, he would have consistently use "We" instead of I. I think the use of "We" refers to his github contributors.

The more people that there are involved in some way with Bitcoin, the more valuable the system becomes, which gives greater incentive to encourage growth.

Thanks for this.  I love this one:


So true....

I found this interesting...

He let others clean it up afterwards :)

Or perhaps he's a maths and economics genius but not great at programming. It happens .....

Thanks for sharing ;D

Does anyone know who satoshi is?  I know he had communicated with the head bitcoin foundation people. Did he give any indication as to why he's secretive about his identity ?

Never heard that question before? ;) yawn ....

#2 obv !!

It's my sign since i'm here :)

Why is everybody thinking he is still alive ?

He is long gone; back in a random trunk of JP Morgan.  ???

it's unlikely a single personne so no big deal If one of the 3 was hit by a truk or a plane or whatever

Reminds me very much of Feynman on explaining magnetism by analogy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM

Another epic fail by JP Morgan then - bitcoin is alive and kicking and bigger than Satoshi probably ever imagined :)

thank you for that. interesting.

it would be nice to read the mails from gavin to satoshi too...

Well Gavin's definitely still alive. Email and ask him to send them to ya :)

Or he could be bloody Australlian... seriously, Aussies have more a stranglehold over 'bloody' than Brits.

Bloody hell...

He ain't bloody British and he ain't bloody Australian ;)

satoshi could have been a woman

There are no records of Nakamoto's identity or identities prior to the creation of Bitcoin. Satoshi is a male, Japanese name, whose meaning is variously given as "wise", "clear-thinking", "quick-witted"[8][9] or "intelligent history", i.e. a person with intelligent ancestors.[10] "Nakamoto"(中本) is a Japanese family name.

Possible? Yes. Likely? No.

I like this

Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.