Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s founder, used to be very active on BitcoinTalk.org in the early days of Bitcoin, before disappearing in 2011. While most of his public posts were focused on the technical development of Bitcoin, I found some interesting and funny quotes.
Here is my list for the best quotes of Satoshi Nakamoto: There will be a link under the quote to the original posts. Enjoy reading them!
Satoshi Nakamoto Quotes
I don’t Have Time to Convince You
If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry.
- Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi Nakamoto was a busy man on a mission. He made this very clear with his direct messages on Bitcointalk, always straight to the point in order to not waste time so that the Bitcoin code could be improved.
Lost coins
Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.
- Satoshi Nakamoto
Researchs shows that more than 4 million Bitcoin are permanently lost forever. Permanently lost Bitcoins means the owner of the wallet have no access to the private key
All or nothing
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.
- Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi was aware of the fact that Bitcoin would either become very big or completely disappear.
Distributing Bitcoins
As computers get faster and the total computing power applied to creating bitcoins increases, the difficulty increases proportionally to keep the total new production constant. Thus, it is known in advance how many new bitcoins will be created every year in the future.
Coins have to get initially distributed somehow, and a constant rate seems like the best formula.
- Satoshi Nakamoto
One of the main dilemmas of the creation of Bitcoin was how to fairly distribute the coins. Satoshi came to the conclusion that an effective method is to distribute them at a constant rate to individuals directing computing power to the Bitcoin network (miners).
Don’t trust third parties
With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless.
- Satoshi Nakamoto
One of Satoshi’s core principles was to never trust third parties like banks or governments. He designed the architecture of Bitcoin with that in mind.
Not for micropayments
Bitcoin isn’t currently practical for very small micropayments. Not for things like pay per search or per page view without an aggregating mechanism, not things needing to pay less than 0.01. The dust spam limit is a first try at intentionally trying to prevent overly small micropayments like that.
- Satoshi Nakamoto
In late 2017, the scaling debate started heating up again after Bitcoin’s fees increased over $10 per transaction, eventually peaking at $55. This resulted in a Bitcoin hard fork which created BCH (Bitcoin Cash). Bitcoin Cash supporters claim that the original vision of Bitcoin was to be used for small day-to-day payments. However, this may not was Satoshi’s actual vision based on the above quote.
Generate all the addresses you want
When you generate a new bitcoin address, it only takes disk space on your own computer (like 500 bytes). It’s like generating a new PGP private key, but less CPU intensive because it’s ECC. The address space is effectively unlimited. It doesn’t hurt anyone, so generate all you want.
– Satoshi Nakamoto
This was the answer to a concerned user asking the bitcoin network could be destroyed by creating endless amounts of Bitcoin wallets. The answer is simple: No.
Central banks
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.
– Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi’s profound distrust towards central banks was his motivation behind creating Bitcoin. In the quote above he makes it very clear that he does not believe in the long-term viability of currencies that are trust-based.
Zero bugs
I keep a list of all unresolved bugs I’ve seen on the forum. In some cases, I’m still thinking about the best design for the fix. This isn’t the kind of software where we can leave so many unresolved bugs that we need a tracker for them.
– Satoshi Nakamoto
Part of the success story behind Bitcoin is the absolute focus of its core developers security and excellent code.
This is also one of the key aspects that differentiate Bitcoin from other altcoin projects, where its founders often prioritize experimenting with new technologies and learning on the go, risking potentially disastrous code bugs.
Alternative to credit cards
Bitcoin would be convenient for people who don't have a credit card or don't want to use the cards they have, either don't want the spouse to see it on the bill or don't trust giving their number to "porn guys", or afraid of recurring billing.
– Satoshi Nakamoto
In this post, Satoshi was making reference to why Bitcoin might become the payment method of reference for people that don’t want to associate their identity to a certain purchase.
Although Bitcoin is not fully anonymous and should not be seen as a “privacy coin”, it is indeed more private than credit cards.
They are coming
WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.
- Satoshi Nakamoto
This was the second to last post that Satoshi Nakamoto did before disappearing.
Did he disappear voluntarily to hide? Or did something worse happen?
Which one is your favourite one?
I tried to gather the best quotes by Satoshi Nakamoto but the list never completes. I hope you will find these quotes as fascinating as I did.
Satoshi Nakamoto is a legend and there are a lot of informative posts on BitcoinTalk and other forums. This one is the original profil of Satoshi in BitcoinTalk forum.
Do you want to share another quote of Satoshi Nakamoto? Comment below and don’t forget to subscribe!
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