Have you ever wondered what you’d do if you were Satoshi Nakamoto?
Obviously, I have no idea who Satoshi is, or if he’s even alive anymore, but I thought it would be fun to imagine what I would do in his shoes. What would I do if I controlled the private keys to Satoshi’s giant stash and could speak with his authority?
I decided I would start with the following assumptions:
- I am financially independent without the need to sell any of the coins that have been identified as Satoshi’s coins.
- I have no intention of revealing my identity or doing anything to risk the preservation of the Satoshi myth.
- My desire is to see the creation of a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that removes the need for trusted financial intermediaries, especially central banks.
So given these assumptions, what’s the best course of action?
One of Satoshi’s greatest strengths is his invisibility, and the mystery of Satoshi is part of Bitcoin’s power: it has no leader, no CEO, no face to target. I believe Satoshi would never reveal his identity, because doing so would risk centralizing the system around him and painting a target on his back.
This is why I would act through cryptographic proofs and anonymous communications. Signing messages with the private keys to the earliest blocks would be enough to prove authenticity without compromising identity. I would also consider providing some explanations to early design decisions that only Satoshi would know to remove any doubt that the author of these new messages isn’t someone who just got access to Satoshi’s keys.
I believe that after more than a decade of silence, a carefully crafted statement that reminded the community of the original mission of Bitcoin as peer-to-peer electronic cash would cut through the noise. It could galvanize the community to return to fighting for the original mission as laid out in the Bitcoin white paper.
But what would that statement say? Pay 1000 XEC to read one person’s imagining of what Satoshi might say.
Hello World,
I know it’s been a long time since I last communicated with any of you, but I wanted to come back and say a few words in the hopes of helping the mission of creating peer-to-peer electronic cash.
First, do not panic. I have no intention of selling my coins and creating turmoil in the markets. All I hope to achieve with this letter is to speed up adoption without hurting the cause.
When I last spoke to you, this industry was only getting started. Now we have a million different coins and tokens trying to do a million different things. It’s been interesting to see how the space has evolved, and I would never have guessed some of the detours and the details of how things have unfolded.
But what matters isn’t what happened, but what’s to come. I wrote more than a decade ago that we wouldn’t find a solution to political problems in cryptography. However, I did believe cryptography could help us win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom.
Unfortunately, this has not happened to the degree that I had hoped.
With that said, I am relieved to see that the Bitcoin experiment continues. It has more than survived, it has grown into a multi-trillion-dollar asset that is recognized by people all around the planet, even if it isn’t recognized in the way that I had originally intended.
My intention in writing this letter isn’t to single out any specific networks, but I do want to say that it pleases me to see so many different chains that are running their own experiments and competing to become the future of money.
I wrote in 2009 that Bitcoin is an experimental new currency that will be useful if it becomes popular. If I didn’t want there to be competing experiments, and competing currencies, all trying to become popular as money, I would not have released the Bitcoin code under the MIT license.
The goal has always been to create a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would “allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution”.
While I continue to believe blockchain can change civilization as we know it, it can only happen if we focus on strengthening the software and making it scale much larger as opposed to focusing our efforts on onboarding the very financial institutions Bitcoin was created to free ourselves from. We need to focus on onboarding our peers and making the system more robust and unstructured so there is no head that can be cut off.
What I hope for is that those who build in this space never lose sight of the original mission. The temptation to give in to existing power structures is strong. Governments, banks, and corporations will always want to co-opt what threatens their control. But Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will only matter if they have the ability to stand on their own by giving individuals the ability to transact freely with one another.
Do not measure success merely by prices and market caps. Measure it by how many people in the world can use this technology in their daily lives, especially those who are excluded from using existing financial systems. Every improvement that makes crypto more usable, more secure, more private, and more resilient brings us closer to the vision of global peer-to-peer electronic cash.
Scalability and privacy remain the two greatest challenges. Solving them requires discipline and cooperation, not just speculation. If you are a developer, continue to strengthen the base layers. If you are a user, seek tools that honor your sovereignty. If you are an educator, focus not on hype, but on helping people understand why this technology matters.
The system is only as good as its peers. If power concentrates in custodians, miners, or governments, the experiment will fail. The system will only endure if individuals continue to run nodes, verify their own transactions, and refuse to trust intermediaries.
The work is not done, but it is now more important than ever. The path remains open. I will be watching, and waiting, and may the future belong to those who build and use the tools that preserve our freedom.
—Satoshi