

Why Bitcoin Doesn't Want a Real Satoshi Nakamoto  - svenkatesh
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/03/bitcoin_satoshi/

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joveian
I was curious about bitcoin's origin (not so much with a name but in how and
why it was developed) and looked into it a bit yesterday. My summary: Satoshi
used one or more of the commerical payment systems of the late 90s/early
2000s, wanted something like that that didn't rely on the trust of a
particular third party, and realized that hashcash + Haber and Stornetta's
public timestamp system could achieve that. Satashi wrote the code first (C++
on Windows), worked out the practical details, then wrote the bitcoin paper to
summarize the key ideas and calculate the properties the system had. While
there was some ideological basis for the idea, Satoshi was much more
interested in writing code and solving a problem then in talking about the
ideology. Possibly imitating the commerical systems, Satoshi did have a bit of
a marketing spin.

My guess is that Satoshi did not actually know about Nick Szabo's bit gold.
There seem to have been several people working on vaguely similar ideas at the
time. It looks like Nick got a sense of the bitcoin way of doing things from
comments on his blog maybe six months before the bitcoin paper was released
(it isn't clear when the comments were made and Satoshi had already been
working on code for at least a year at that point), but a couple of years
after bitcoin was released Nick still seemed to like the bit gold way better.
Bitcoin could be seen as a simplified bit gold, but I think it makes more
sense that bitcoin is hashcash + public timestamps without direct influence
from bit gold. Nick approches the issue from a much more economic theory
perspective (which is really interesting reading IMO):
[http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-
took-y...](http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-ye-so-
long.html) [http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-
markets.ht...](http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.html)

