Satoshi Nakamoto: Early Emails about his creation, Bitcoin

In August 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto emerged out of the mists in an email sent to the creator of Hashcash, Adam Back. Satoshi wanted Adam to look at a short paper describing something called Bitcoin. 6 weeks later, on Halloween, Satoshi sent a more detailed proposal to a specialized mailing list focusing on cryptography (main successors to the Cypherpunk list, which was now defunct). Satoshi gave no info about his own identity and background, and no one asked. He stated that he was working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted 3rd party.

The 9 page PDF attached to the email made it clear that Satoshi was deeply versed in all the previous efforts to create a self sustaining digital money. He put all of these earlier innovations together to create a system that was quite unlike anything that had come before it. Rather than relying on a central bank or company to issue and keep track of the money, as existing financial systems and Chaum's DigiCash did, this system was set up so that every Bitcoin transaction, and the holdings of every user, would be tracked and recorded by the computers of all the people using the digital money, on a communally maintained database that would come to be known as the Blockchain. The basic elements of the system were sketched out in rough terms and were in Satoshi's paper, which would become known as the Bitcoin White Paper.

The result: a financial network that could create and move money without a central authority. No bank, no credit card company, no regulators. The system was designed so that no one other than the holder of a private key could spend or take the money associated with a particular Bitcoin address. The user just had to trust their own computers running the Bitcoin software, and the code Satoshi wrote, which was open sourced, and therefore available for everyone to review. People who joined the Bitcoin network were both customers and owners of both the bank and the mint.

Well there you have it. The origins of the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. He appeared from an email. To this day his/her/their identity still remains a mystery. Perhaps we will never know who the true Satoshi Nakamoto is. Thanks for stopping by. Please feel free to upvote, comment, and resteem. Until next time...