Hi, I’m not really trolling but also expect very few if any of you to know me. I invented bitcoin back in 2008. I would like to point out I did none of the development work. I have very little training in programming. Moreso, it was based on my research in economics, currency creation, and curiosity at the time.
What a lot of newer people don’t know is that this spawned from the Liberty Movement and more specifically the exciting Ron Paul campaign back in 2008. It spawned from a discussion board much like this one at ronpaulforums.com. At the time, many of us believed as Ron Paul did in his campaign platform that competing currencies should be a reality. We had seen some exciting alternatives like the Liberty Dollar and a digital gold currency (not sure what the company was at this time). Ultimately, the Feds had shut down the Liberty Dollar and through the Patriot Act were going after digital gold currencies for operating without a license.
It just so happened at the time that one of the digital gold currencies were shut down by the feds that a poster had lost money in the process. I then got to thinking, how could you create a competing currencies impervious to the Feds. It seemed any centralized authority issuing a currency made itself an easy target to be shut down. Additionally, at that time this was a grey area because creators of competing currencies were often sent to jail as was the case with the Liberty Dollar.
My thoughts at the time were create a currency that spawned from computers. It would be like a network of computers were minting new currency into existence. My thoughts were to have the computers in the network solve an algorithm with each one in the network working to solve the equations kind of like how decentralized computers send related packets of information in applications like bit torrent. At the time, I guess there were many technologically gifted folks around and I was informed that something like this already existed. There were digital currencies operating like this but there was no way to prevent double spending and fraud in the coins. It was at that time I suggested we have computers in the network not only mint new currency but also verify transactions within the network. At the time I had no idea that this would be possible but one of the more technologically gifted individuals chimed in, “you mean like a peer to peer network”. And that’s how it was born. It was really out of a belief that competing currencies should exist and also how to create a system that is impervious to prosecution by the Feds. Even at that time we were concerned about getting in trouble because we had seen what was happening with competitors to the Federal Reserve’s monopoly.
It was about the time this was conceived that immediately someone said this is patentable and we should pursue it. I strongly argued against this though, because my thoughts were at the time that as soon as intellectual property gets involved we put a target on our backs for litigation or the Feds coming after us to shut it down. With no property holder, my thoughts were it would make it very difficult to legally pursue someone to shut down the mining/minting process. So, my recommendation at the time was to publish a peer reviewed journal article. I had experience as a patent examiner early in my career. My thoughts were that a journal article would serve as prior art over any post patent work done with the concept. I thought it should be written as broad as possible. My hopes were that it would keep things open sourced.
At the time, there were naysayers to the whole idea. Many in the Liberty Movement came from an Austrian Economics background and did not believe the currency had any intrinsic value. It was about that time that I had been very influenced by The Case Against the Federal Reserve by Murray Rothbard. I had also been influenced by the Money Masters movies. Interestingly, I saw times in history where objects served as currency wherein my eyes they had very little if any intrinsic value. Some things that come to mind was colonial script in pre constitutional times, which was a circulating paper currency at that time that competed with the British Pound that had no backing. Another instance was the greenback issued by the US Government during the Civil War. Additionally, there were times in history where things that seemed to have little value served as currency and these included English tallysticks and Native Americans circulating beads/feathers. That was enough in my eyes to argue against intrinsic value. I believe my argument at the time was essentially what would we lose by building it and circulating it. If it failed there was very little investment money wise other than time by some skilled programmers. Luckily, it was enough of an argument at the time for some programmers to take up the initiative to develop the protocol.
At the time the amount of coins and whether or not we would gradually inflate or set an upper threshold to the currency was under debate. Ultimately, I argued to setting an upper threshold with a highly divisible currency. My thoughts were any loss coins would ultimately lead to a higher overall value to the currency. Still to this day I am not certain if this was the right move. I see other currencies like dogecoin with some gradual inflation after the initial lot of coins have been minted and wonder if that would have ultimately have been better. But my thoughts are the upper thresholds serves as incentive for holders of the coin to guarantee no inflation after the initial amount has been mined. Ultimately, that was another reason I pushed to keep it open source. My thoughts were if we made a miscalculation or an alternative idea made itself available that we would not want to block ourselves from rolling out a new alternative coins. I also wanted competition amongst the competing currency (ie I like things like litecoin, dogecoin, and darkcoin etc.). I actually even bought scrypt coin ASIC hardware to mine. I like the care free attitude of the dogecoin community, but lately it seems like the coin has stagnated in growth.
Another area of concern at the time was how to keep miners. Once all the coins were minted, and since the miners served additionally to verify transactions on the network, where would be the incentive to continue to verify transactions? The solution I proposed at the time was to keep the mining process so long, that it would serve to give the currency time to be adopted while still offering incentive to verify transaction. It’s been so long now that I don’t know if it was my idea or one of the other developers. Regardless, it was also suggested at the time that a mild fee would be placed on transactions. This would go to miners. The hope at the time was the currency would be wildly adopted and be amassing large amount of transaction fees to fund miners.
Interestingly, it was more (and still kind of is) an experiment at the time. There were too many unanswered questions. We were getting heavy arguments from Austrian schooled people on intrinsic value. That in my mind was the first hurdle. The argument was made that it was worth a try. After all, nothing would be lost other than some time by the developers if it was a complete flop. I think people are starving for competition in currency as they starve for competition from anything else. I think that has a lot to do with the excitement you see today.
Anyway, that was it. It was conceived on a message board very similar to this. After all the issues were ironed out the developers went to IRC to chat further. I did join them. Unfortunately, because of this I lost touch with a lot of those people. It was not until nearly 3-4 years later that one of them tracked me down. It was during the second Ron Paul campaign and I had come back to the boards out of interest. One of the developers messaged me and asked me where I had been. It was sort of funny at the time because I did not know I really had any friends on that board. He then asked me what I thought about bitcoin. I said it seemed good and my friend told me about it. He said what are you talking about you invented this. He was like don’t you remember such and such a thread. He then said make a wallet I’ll send you coins and you can see how easy it is. I wasn’t sure (about 2011) at the time what I would do with them and urged him to keep the coins. I basically felt he had done all the work and that he should keep them. He agreed and said he’d keep them but never spend them. In retrospect, I feel like an idiot not taking them because he had told me they were “worth a lot”. He asked me to come to this board and join everyone and essentially be a leader back in late 2011. At the time I had just got out of the hospital from psychosis. I have bipolar. I was not really up to leading a movement and feared people would pry into my personal life and I may damage the things more than really help. And that was it. That was the last contact I had with any of the original developers. He asked for my contact info and what not but I have never heard from him. But I’m here now.
Feel free to ask me a question and I will share what I can. I don’t have a whole lot of friends so if any of you would like to skype me my name on there is xeckdr. Take it easy. I also hope to track down some of the original developers posting this.
