Who Is the Pseudonymous Bitcoin Creator Known As Satoshi Nakamoto and What Was Their Motivation

Many have spent countless hours trying to unmask Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator(s) of the world’s first cryptocurrency Bitcoin. These efforts have led us to a few potential candidates but as of today there is still doubt about who this person or group is. The focus of this article is not to name names and speculate on who they actually are, but rather to go over some of the intriguing and interesting statements regarding Bitcoin from this mysterious entity.

"It’s very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I’m better with code than with words though." -Satoshi Nakamoto (November 13, 2008)

By now most people have heard of Bitcoin, some have acquired and transacted in it, and fewer have experimented with Bitcoin mining. The growth and adoption of this new technology has swept the globe, grabbing headlines both positive and negative, yet obscured by the hodl memes, the rabid obsession over ICOs, and the uncertainty over its future is perhaps the most fascinating question of why Bitcoin was created in the first place. Satoshi sheds some light on this in a post on a P2P Foundation forum, a month after launching the protocol:

"The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible." -Satoshi Nakamoto (February 11, 2009)

We can clearly see Satoshi is not a fan of the amount of trust that it takes for people to participate in the traditional banking system. One needs only to look at the financial climate of the time in which Satoshi made this statement. The previous year Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers, two large global investment banks and securities firms, became defunct due to their exposure to subprime mortgages. Which had a ripple effect through the economy and triggered a number of political moves, namely the convoluted bailout of some banks and the auto industry, that were viewed as the government favoring Wall Street over Main Street and shifting the burden of the fraud perpetrated by the investment companies away from the stakeholders and onto regular tax payers. Farmers in Iowa and teachers in Oregon were paying for the greed and failures of the Chads and Brads of downtown Manhattan.

The grand achievement of the bitcoin protocol is the elimination through cryptography and the novel blockchain data structure the need for a trusted third party to verify the authenticity of transactions and balances, which all previous attempts at digital currencies could not solve. This idea of a trustless transaction system goes deeper than just validating the transactions, but also encompasses the supply of money and inflation rate. With nationalized fiat currencies, central banks and the federal reserve have control over these facets of the currency. In Bitcoin, the supply and creation rate are hard-coded into the protocol.

Holders of bitcoin need not worry about a government devaluing their savings, financial institutions seizing assets, or effortlessly transmitting value around the world, including to the farthest corners and the unbanked. These attributes of Bitcoin were not by-products of the protocol, but rather a major motivating factor in its conception. Satoshi was once confronted with the viewpoint, “You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography”, to which he responded:

"Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own." -Satoshi Nakamoto (November 7, 2008)

Here is the first block in the Bitcoin blockchain which will forever be immutable and open for all to view, look closely and see the time-stamped message Satoshi has included in it. Coincidence?