What was it like explaining Bitcoin at the beginning?

One of the pastimes of those interested in Bitcoin is compiling anecdotes and stories about Bitcoin in its early days, when, for example, Satoshi Nakamoto still corresponded on forums and blogs, explaining the project or improving its first versions.

It's very curious to see what different people's first reactions were to something so unprecedented. These reactions reveal valuable things to us. For example, they prove that, unlike the attempted copies that were made later, Bitcoin had organic growth. It was distributed randomly among its early enthusiasts who were still testing the viability of the project, often amateurishly mining the first satoshis using the power of their CPUs or receiving donations from early programmers. Today, when a new project that tries to emulate some of Bitcoin's functions is publicly launched, a large part of its units are previously distributed to people and financing entities who end up, after all, controlling the network - the process of raising funds in this way looks more like as an unregulated public offering of shares, so its units cannot be correctly characterized as “digital currencies” or “cryptocurrencies”.

But Bitcoin's early history is also interesting from a computer science and cryptography perspective. You learn a lot by studying the problems that arose early on and what were the comments of the first programmers who, still skeptically and critically, continued with the project. For example, the issue of scalability, so discussed today, was already there in the first posts on the BitcoinTalk.org forum, a site established in November 2009 by Satoshi himself and which served as Bitcoin's first agora. If you are interested in having direct contact with this material, you can read the BitcoinTalk forum records or read Phil Champagne's book, which didactically compiled all of Satoshi's writings in chronological order.

In addition to this material, Pete Rizzo is a journalist at Bitcoin Maganize who specializes in the history of Bitcoin's early years and published this article about some curious facts from Pizza Day - when the first transaction using bitcoins was carried out. On April 21, 2021, when it was 10 years since Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared, I wrote an article reflecting on his ostracism and this initial material is fundamental to understanding what actually happened. Dov, our friendly bitcoin bear, recently posted a very interesting video in which he reads and explains a post by Satoshi on the P2P Foundation on February 11, 2009, a few days after the first blocks were mined. This post is, in my opinion, one of the best explanations of what Bitcoin is and also why Bitcoin.

Everything I've written so far has been just a preamble to say that new materials keep appearing and just yesterday my friend Otto sent me a gem that I had never seen.

A video from a podcast that was recorded in February 2011, when Bitcoin was priced at 0.93 cents. The podcast is called Security Now and in it Steve Gibson, an already senior programmer, explains very enthusiastically and also with a lot of knowledge how this new currency that already lived on the internet works. It's an exceptional dialogue. It's all there: the fiat problem, the loss of gold backing, how mining works, proof-of-work, Adam Back, how Bitcoin is decentralized, etc.

Starts at 41m55secs: