I’m just kind of curious how many people around here have been around long enough to have spoken to Satoshi, and what your experience was like. I am just fascinated about the whole thing. It’s beyond amazing Satoshi is still anonymous, so it makes me wonder what he was like when speaking with them. I’m guessing not too many people here were around for those days. This is one thing I’ve always wanted to hear Theymos talk about. Imagine having helped Satoshi build bitcoin, having private messages etc…what an experience!
Over the years, I have had countless Satoshi impersonators try to con me into something or other. Almost always, they are immediately recognizable just because they act like they imagine a demigod would act. The Satoshi everyone has in their heads is a
symbol, a character in a story where a superhuman mysteriously appears, does magic, and then mysteriously disappears. This symbol is not reflective of any real person who has ever existed, so impersonators' attempts are usually laughably bad.
Before and after Satoshi uploaded code or posted or sent PMs, he ate, drank, slept, worried, paid bills, etc. I'm sure at some point he got sick and puked his guts out. I'm sure he had fears and regrets. He was the same sort of flesh as you and I. But the Satoshi people know is not this real person, and is instead a "historical figure", which is to say that a small handful of things that the real person did and said have been diluted into the cultural milieu to produce an imaginary character whose existence aligns with what we
want or
expect of such a character in the context of the broader narrative. If someone condensed a few of your most notable quotes and accomplishments into a few paragraphs in a history book, selected and worded to align with the overall themes of that book, how much of
"you" would that represent?
I didn't know Satoshi on any sort of personal level, so I'm not particularly saying that people "have him all wrong": I'm just generally very dismissive of the idea that
anyone is superhuman. See my
Satoshi's Lesson article, which has the same theme. It's important to recognize that there is no wall separating people like you and "notable" people. If you believe that there is, then you
create that wall, and thereby imprison yourself.
I liked dealing with Satoshi when I did (which wasn't all that often), and I respected him a great deal. He had an incredible amount of "arrogance" in the sense that he saw seemingly-impossible challenges and believed (correctly) that he could conquer them, but yet he had zero arrogance in the commonly-understood sense. He was willing to give help to and accept help from people who knew and accomplished far less than him on the whole. He treated even
me with respect, even though I was a 19-year-old excessively-individualistic idiot in 2010. I tend to remember Satoshi as a person who figured out what needed to be done, used all of his aptitude to get it done, and rarely got distracted by human failings like pride or fear. (Of course, this perception may well be more of a symbol in
my head than an accurate image of a real person.)