Who created Bitcoin?A clarification on one point of signal import:
Can a lone individual change the world—change the course of history? Satoshi proved it! (Theories to the contrary notwithstanding, I do believe that Satoshi was one individual.)
I agree with your overall point of one person making a difference, yet I am going to quibble with your framing a wee bit.
It appears that satoshi - and bitcoin built on the works of a large number of predecessor projects, and of course, there were a few innovations in bitcoin that geniusly put ideas together and added a few concepts - such as difficulty adjustment... little things that are put together or added in with other aspects of the design to make a difference.. and really have a whole hell of a lot of innovative geniusness contained therein. Satoshi retained a certain amount of public involvement that lasted around 2 years that seemed to make sure systems were in place in which he could disappear and the project would be able to continue.. so even though arguments could be made that bitcoin just ran itself after satoshi left - there are a quite a few heros in bitcoinlandia.. and maybe some kinds of luck too that people worked separately and together and bitcoin did not come crashing down during various points in which sabotage could have happened (behind the scenes of people saving bitcoin in its more vulnerable times) or uncertainties about how aspects of some of the wars/attacks on bitcoin would turn out (blocksize war/attacks for example).
Make no mistake, I am not one of those Satoshi-worshipers who speaks of him as an infallible superhuman.
In many ways,
his code frankly sucked. It was an idiosyncratic pile of Windows-only hobby-code written by someone who was obviously smart, eccentric, and working very much alone on a project with a very large scope. Besides such foibles as that spectacular integer overflow bug, Satoshi’s code had some deep architectural design flaws; that’s why we later needed Segwit as a clever way to kludge in a fix for transaction malleability without a hardfork, and to fix other major problems. (We are pretty much permanently stuck with a few Satoshi idiosyncrasies I find a bit inelegant, but they are not problems.)
The early Bitcoin community (also before your time) also sucked. I’ll critique it some other time, probably not in WO—the nutshell version is that
I think that defi is now almost analogous to what the Bitcoin community was early on, except that defi is
deliberately corrupted by VCs instead of only having the innocent stupidity of a bunch of kids playing with toy-money. Suffice it here to note, there are reasons why early on, derision of Bitcoin was commonplace in some security and cryptography circles; at that time, unlike the anti-Bitcoin bias in some places now, it was not unjustified. And one of the earliest attempts to fix this was a Trojan Horse that made it worse: The so-called “Bitcoin Foundation”.
Bitcoin became what it is because some brilliant coders spent
years fixing, refactoring, optimizing, and overall transforming Bitcoin from a hobby-quality project, into the absolute gold standard of serious financial software engineering. There are people with genius-level IQs who devoted years of their lives to this, long after Satoshi had disappeared.
It is a process; and although the worst problems were fixed by Segwit and some other softfork cleanups, it is still ongoing to some degree. IMO, one of Satoshi’s worst decisions was to write the wallet and P2P network node as one monolithic unit, with no security separation. That’s a design flaw in the reference implementation. Core has been trying for years to separate these functions, one way or another. It’s not easy—not when they can’t risk wild changes that could break everyone’s money!
Previous efforts stalled, but current efforts look highly promising. Core’s excellent software engineering process is the reason why it moves so slowly—unlike the move-fast-and-break-things attitude in typical defi blockchains. Fortunately, fixing this does not require any consensus changes; if done right, most users won’t even notice the upgrade.
The libbitcoinkernel Project (bitcoin/bitcoin#24303) is at the top of my own wishlist. I salute Carl Dong for his elegant, practical, safe and clean approach. It is progressing beautifully; it will probably take a long time to ship. When it’s done, it will open a whole new world of Bitcoin possibilities—this is a Core cleanup, but it is useful far beyond Core; as a developer, I am eager to use this for other projects. It is one of those things that mere speculators neither know, nor understand, nor care about—no really, this is the kind of effort and talent that makes your Bitcoin valuable!
Bitcoin became what it is because the grown-up adults in the community stamped out scams, shot down stupid ideas, built businesses with sound business models, and showed real leadership. I do not only, or even primarily refer to the Bitcoin Forum community! This forum used to be much more influential than now, but it was only one star in a constellation of online and offline Bitcoin community activism. And on the business side, Blockstream is exemplary of what some genuine old-school cypherpunks can do; several of its key players are or were also highly visible community activists (thus all the conspiracy theories).
So, why did I focus on Satoshi?
Because there is an old saying:
“Cypherpunks write code.”And because all major movements in human events are always begun by
somebody. Ultimately, by very few people.
People have been talking about cryptographic money for
decades. There had already been a high-profile cryptographic-money project that had failed, and failed spectacularly due to centralization (Digicash). The Internet was full of theories and discussions, on obscure sites and in discussion groups that >99% of WO hatters have no idea ever existed. (If I sometimes speak with an air of authority, despite now being almost a nocoiner—yes, I have been around for awhile.)
Satoshi stepped up and
did it. Took action. All by himself. In practice, not in theory.
He didn’t wait for someone else to do it. He did not seek the approval of a committee. He didn’t put it up to a vote. And he didn’t ask for anyone’s permission! He went ahead all by himself, and
did it.
That is what “cypherpunks write code” means. You don’t change the world by chit-chat. You change the world by writing code that has an irresistible effect.
Without that, all the work by others that I described above would never have existed.
Thus, indeed—as I said—one individual changed the world. Zoom out, think on a longer timeline than only 13 years, and you will see that one individual changed the course of history.
(Aside, I must express my supreme contempt for the petty narcissists who think that the
important thing about Bitcoin is for them to throw their weight around on an Internet forum. Ultimately, they don’t matter; in 20 years, it will be as if they never existed. But meanwhile, they are both annoying and disgusting:
They don’t care about Bitcoin.)
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Long post, some good stuff... Will catch up with you and others later!
GREAT!!!!!!
Don't wait too long...
With all due apologies—will still be later. Well, I’ll try. It seems I fall behind WO to the point that I can’t catch up.
Other important things are being ignored, because that one point you said just jumped out at me while I was peeking in here... I dropped all else to address it with a little essay that wound up rambling a bit, because I am in haste, etc., etc. It’s that important.
