Bitcoin, future money will be virtual -
Again, the system I just described does not involve a third party. I wrestled with the fact that Bitcoin itself is the third party here. Well, by the end of the article, it will become clearer, when I tell you more about the mysterious founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, why Bitcoin Foundation is not a third party. Read on!
A group of geeks calling themselves Cypherpunks, (Cypher = secret messages, Punks = fringe subculture) that comprised Julian Assange, Tim C May, David Chaum, Satoshi Nakamoto, Hal Finney, Phil Zimmermann, Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, John Gilmore and Adam Back started talking about the need to create a system of money that didn’t need centralization. Early on before the financial crisis there were discussions between Hal Finney and Nick Szabo about this but it subsided until after the financial meltdown.
After Satoshi Nakamoto sent the email quoted hitherto to Nick Szabo, he had already programmed 21 million Bitcoins in the system. At that point, what he was looking for where collaborators, people he could work with on the project and leave the system with zero third party. They worked on this project virtually. In my current job, I work with people that I have never met. We usually collaborate over a video and phone system called WebEx, which is similar to Skype. Sometimes when I work with other data scientists they are shy away from using video and opt to use the phone only option and the WebEx equivalent of a whiteboard to collaborate. This is exactly how the individuals that worked with Satoshi Nakamoto described working with him. By the time that Bitcoin Foundation was taking off, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote his last email to his number two who asked Satoshi for permission to give a talk on Bitcoins. He encouraged and gave him permission to give the talk.
Satoshi went on the Foundation website, deleted his email address that was attached to his name and only left his second in command’s email. Thereafter, every communication that was sent to the foundation only went to Satoshi’s second in command. That was the last anyone ever heard of Satoshi Nakamoto. Word started getting around about not hearing from Satoshi within the Cypherpunks mailing group. They then started asking each other if any of them had at any point in time met Satoshi in person and it turned out that none of them ever had. Suspicions started flying around and some within the group were suspected to be Satoshi. Nick Szabo and Hal Finney were both suspected and interviewed by journalists if they were the real Satoshi, which they both denied on numerous occasions. To his dying day in 2015, Hal Finney denied to have known or seen Satoshi Nakamoto. That is the mystery of Satoshi. He is one of a folklore in the community. Almost a cult hero on how he pulled this off without anyone ever knowing who he was and further given that he would be a billionaire of epic proportions. He never owned anything from Bitcoin. The only Bitcoin he is said to have sent to someone was one Bitcoin which was to test the system.
Is Satoshi Nakamoto a person, or an anonymous group working under the pseudonym? This was one of the earliest questions the Bitcoin community grappled with. Security researcher Dan Kaminsky, after reading the Bitcoin code noted, that Nakamoto could either be a "team of people" or a "genius". Similarly, Laszlo Hanyecz, who conducted the first real-world Bitcoin transaction with Nakamoto, suggested that the code was too well designed for one person.
There are several hypotheses that suggest Satoshi Nakamoto might be a rogue group backed by a state such as Russia, China or even North Korea, to disrupt the global dominance of dollar and the US banking system. Theoretically, this could have been for reasons such as to finance their own black operations, or to end dollar domination and gain the upper hand in the future digital currency era. The conspiracy theorists even go as far as suggesting that the US created Bitcoin because it seemed inevitable that the dollar would eventually lose its place as the standard reserve currency and better to have it replaced by Bitcoin than the Chinese Yen.
However, for now, it is safe to assume that no state actors had any role in the creation of Bitcoin as the whole concept of a decentralized currency is against the concept of a state or government, which is essentially centralization of political and economic power. A majority of people associated with the Bitcoin project and journalists who investigate the identity of Nakamoto seem to have a consensus in concluding that Nakamoto is an individual and importantly a remarkable genius, who by eliminating himself from the system eliminated the third party to the system.
So, should you buy Bitcoins? Well, you will have to pay me a consulting fee to give you an answer to that, and you will have to pay in Bitcoins. For your arithmetic appetite, here is an appetizer; the price of a Bitcoin at the beginning in 2009 was $0.0076. Four years later the price of Bitcoin was $1,242. At the finishing of this article the price of a Bitcoin is $14,812.17.
The author is a data scientist, in NC, USA
He is a member of the Chartered Institute of marketing - UK
Can be reached at dereknaminda@gmail.com | https://www.linkedin.com/in/dereknaminda/