It's June 2023 and the SEC are going after coins - but not the OG, not Bitcoin.
Thankfully Satoshi always seemed to have the foresight to do the right thing.
- Solving the Double Spend problem
- Not having an Initial Coin Offering
- Being, and remaining, anonymous
- Making Bitcoin ever so slightly inflationary
- Not creating a company to promote it
- Not having a company behind it
- Making the mining of Bitcoin fair for everyone from the beginning
- Not personally mining too much
- Limiting the total amount of Bitcoin
- Dropping out of involvement
- Making the code open source
- Keeping their Bitcoin inactive for years - or intentionally 'losing' it
- Reducing the amount of minable Bitcoin per cycle
- Setting the block size just right
- and being humble:
“It might make sense to get some in case it catches on” Satoshi Nakamoto
These are some of the reasons why Bitcoin remains untouched - but is the success of Bitcoin all necessarily just down to Satoshi?
Satoshi's foresight, pseudonymity and early departure, sure, have been a good thing. But has it unnecessarily given Satoshi a mythic status.
So many are in awe because of this - maybe , not me, but definitely some.
I can see why some of this might make people think Bitcoin as some weird cult - but they've just not done their homework.
I'm pretty sure that if Satoshi were here today, and I'm pretty sure she is, they'd want to explore and explode this myth of perfection and any other funny ideas about them.
For instance, take the interviews of Satoshi's co-coders we see that when Satoshi left the project in the hands of others the code wasn't perfect: there were some security issues in the code - and although Satoshi's code was 'brilliant' - it was said to be 'quirky' too.
In fact just considering that the we know as Bitcoin today is down to teamwork helps erase some of the mystique about Satoshi.
A good team is nothing out of the ordinary, but a great team is a strange, organic and elusive thing. Millionaire sports club owners are confounded when they find that buying a highly prized (and highly priced) player doesn't automatically produce the magic, per dollar, that they paid for. The star player out of their previous situation doesn't shine so well, the magic is no longer there. Like Indra's Net we are reflected in others and they, in turn are reflected in us. The team's 'star' player needed the rest of their old team to shine.
Satoshi stood on the shoulders of others - those who made advancements before - Satoshi perceived this and had the humility to acknowledge it too.
The humility of Satoshi can also be seen on the mailing list after releasing Bitcoin v0.1
“If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Not only did Satoshi bring together Cryptography and Economics, Game Theory and Privacy - but Satoshi also saw that coders and plebs, miners and nodes were vital to the project.
The only thing that Satoshi really left out was themselves and their self-importance.
Okay, now I'm a bit in awe.