93 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re: They want to delete the Wikipedia article,’ BitcoinTalk, July 20, 2010, accessed May 15, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBcha.
94 Nick Szabo, ‘Bitcoin, what took ye so long?’, Unenumerated, May 28, 2011, accessed March 25, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFbde.
95 Gwern Branwen, ‘Happy birthday, Satoshi Nakamoto,’ Reddit/bitcoin, April 5, 2014, accessed May 20, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru7ND.
96 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re: Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper,’ Cryptography Mailing List, November 7, 2008, accessed February 19, 2013, http://bit.ly/1truasJ.
97 Ibid.
98 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re: Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper,’ Cryptography Mailing List, November 14, 2008, accessed February 19, 2013, http://bit.ly/1tru7NC.
99 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘[bitcoin-list] Bitcoin 0.3 released!,’ Sourceforge, July 6, 2010, accessed May 22, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru7NE.
100 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper,’ Cryptography Mailing List, November 8, 2008, accessed May 20, 2014, http://bit.ly/1truasP.
101 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper,’ Cryptography Mailing List, November 8, 2008, accessed May 20, 2014, http://bit.ly/1truasP.
102 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency,’ P2P Foundation, February 11, 2009, accessed January 28, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFaWL.
103 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘tcatm’s 4-way SSE2 for Linux 32/64-bit is in 0.3.10,’ BitcoinTalk, August 19, 2010, accessed March 5, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBchb.
104 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘tcatm’s 4-way SSE2 for Linux 32/64-bit is in 0.3.10,’ BitcoinTalk, August 15, 2010, accessed March 5, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBfts.
105 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘tcatm’s 4-way SSE2 for Linux 32/64-bit is in 0.3.10’, BitcoinTalk, August 15, 2010, accessed March 5, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBchd.
106 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘tcatm’s 4-way SSE2 for Linux 32/64-bit is in 0.3.10,’ BitcoinTalk, August 15, 2010, accessed March 5, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBftu.
107 MoonShadow, ‘re. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?,’ April 18, 2011, accessed March 25, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBftw.
108 If you’re interested in pursuing this line further, start here – http://bit.ly/1tru7NH and here http://bit.ly/1tru7NI. Reading the debug.log is not easy, but you can find Finney’s IP (his server still publicly runs on it, making it verifiable as his) and you can find another Californian IP which seems to be initiating the transaction, as well as a Tor-cloaked IP. Those were the only 3 IPs in the world using Bitcoin that day, and so it seems what was going on was that Finney started his client to receive the promised transaction, Satoshi was sitting in the channel with his favourite IRC client tunnelled through Tor in order to anonymously monitor the details of the P2P networking, and then Satoshi’s Bitcoin client was there to do the actual transaction (the Satoshi client did not support Tor for another year or two). Once you’ve understood that, see the follow up here – http://bit.ly/1tru7NK.
109 ‘Bitcoin and me.’
110 AnonymousSpeech.com, accessed January 22, 2014. http://bit.ly/1trBchh.
111 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re: IPv6, headless client, and more,’BitcoinTalk, June 27, 2010, accessed March 10, 2014, http://bit.ly/1pLBdbX.
112 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re. Potential Disaster Scenario,’ August 15, 2010, accessed March 25, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBfJK.
113 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re: wiki registration email,’ July 29, 2010, accessed March 25, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBfJN.
114 Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcointalk, accessed February 26, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBfJQ and http://bit.ly/1trBchl.
115 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re:URI-scehem for bitcoin,’ BitcoinTalk, February 24, 2010, accessed March 10, 2010, http://bit.ly/1trBfJS. (N.B. ‘photo it’ – is that something a native English speaker would say? I guess so, possibly, just.)
116 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re: How fast do the fastest computers generate bitcoins?’, BitcoinTalk, June 22, 2010, accessed March 10, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBcxA.
117 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re: Potential Disaster Scenario,’ BitcoinTalk August 15, 2010, accessed March 10, 2014. http://bit.ly/1trBcxA.
118 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re. Slashdot Submission for 1.0,’ BitcoinTalk, July 5, 2010, accessed March 14, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru7NL. As a side note, I’m a comedian who writes about economics and finance – in particular about money. One of the hardest disciplines I have always found is to put these subjects – especially money – in a language people understand. I rather identify with Satoshi saying it’s ‘bloody hard’ to do this. One of my frustrations with the economics and finance is that they’re often written in a language lay-people can’t understand. Being a comedian you have to be understood – if the audience doesn’t understand, they don’t laugh and you’re screwed. But there is no such pressure in the world of finance. Sometimes it actually seems to suit people to be vague. Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve Bank, was a master obfuscator. His utterings became known as ‘Fedspeak’, which, he said, ‘is a language of purposeful obfuscation to avoid certain questions’. Remember the famous George Orwell quote, ‘The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink’. Orwell felt there was a link between bad prose and oppressive ideology. Anyway, Satoshi appears to be aware of this very dynamic, that clarity and transparency were essential if Bitcoin was to be successful. I do find a lot of Satoshi’s posts difficult to understand – particularly when he writes about coding matters – but, on the whole, his command of English is considerably better than many native-English speaking financial commentators.
119 Gwern Branwen, comments on ‘Wei_Dai comments on AALWA,’ Less Wrong, March 21, 2014, accessed March 25, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFaGj.
120 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Bitcoin v0.1 released,’ January 16, 2009, accessed March 4, 2014, http://bit.ly/1truasU.
121 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re. The dollar cost of bitmining energy,’ BitcoinTalk, July 16, 2010, accessed April 10, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBcxC.
122 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re. Potential Disaster Scenario,’ August 15, 2010, accessed March 25, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBfJK.
123 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re: A few suggestions,’ BitcoinTalk, December 13, 2009, accessed March 10, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBcxE.
124 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re: Transactions and Scripts: DUP HASH160…EQUALVERIFY CHECKSIG,’ BitcoinTalk, June 18, 2010, accessed March 5, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBcxI.
125 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency,’ P2P Foundation, February 11, 2009, accessed February 19, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tru840.
126 Satoshi Nakamoto Profile, P2P Foundation, accessed February 19, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru841.
127 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper,’ Cryptography Mailing List, November 1, 2008, accessed March 2, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHF9lM.
128 Michael J. Casey, ‘Bitcoin Foundation’s Andresen on Working with Satoshi Nakamoto,’ Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2014, accessed March 10, 2014, http://on.wsj.com/1tHF8yc.
129 Bitcoin Wiki, accessed February 19, 2014, https://en.bitcoin.it//Satoshi_Nakamoto.
130 Bitcoin Wiki, accessed February 19, 2014, https://en.bitcoin.it//Satoshi_Nakamoto.
131 Steve, ‘Who is Satoshi Nakamoto,’ Bitcointalk Forums, April 18, 2011, accessed February 20, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBcxQ.
132 Wei Dai, comments on ‘AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything,’ Less Wrong, 17 March 2014, accessed March 25, 2013. http://bit.ly/1tHFaGj.
133 Greenberg, ‘Nakamoto’s Neighbor: My Hunt For Bitcoin’s Creator Led To A Paralyzed Crypto Genius.’
134 Ibid.
135 Wei Dai, comments on ‘AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything,’ Less Wrong, 17 March 2014, accessed March 25, 2013. http://bit.ly/1tHFaGj.
136 Regarding Adam Back, consider also his first post at BitcoinTalk in April 2013. ‘Oh the ignominy of it. Hi, I am Adam Back, inventor of
Hashcash (the bitcoin mining function). I also implemented the opensource library credlib which implements Chaum and Brands ecash. I consulted for Nokia on ecash crypto back in 2002. I worked at Zero-Knowledge Systems from 2000-2003. So anyway I know a few things about ecash, privacy tech, crypto, distributed systems (my comp sci PhD is in distributed systems) and I guess I was one of the moderately early people to read about and try to comprehend the p2p crypto cleverness that is bitcoin…If like Hal Finney I’d actually tried to run the miner back then, I may too be sitting on some genesis/bootstrap era coins. Alas I own not a single bitcoin.’
Adam Back, “Re. Introduce yourself :),” BitcoinTalk, April 18, 2013, accessed February 19, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBfK0. Reading through his posts at BitcoinTalk in 2013, it’s clear he was learning about Bitcoin. It’s hard to fake a learning curve and I doubt Satoshi would have bothered. Back has given several interviews about Bitcoin and his insight is vast. But he missed the Bitcoin train when it left the station. He is not Satoshi.
137 Wei Dai, comments on ‘Bitcoins are not digital greenbacks,’ Less Wrong, 19 April, 2013, accessed March 13, 2013, http://bit.ly/1tru4RU.
138 Wei Dai, comments under ‘Making Money with Bitcoin,’ 25 February, 2011, accessed March 12, 2014, http://bit.ly/1truaJb.
139 Graduation database, accessed May 1, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru843.
140 Nick Szabo, ‘Increasing subscriber base,’ Cypherpunks Mailing List, November 1, 1993, accessed March 12, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru847.
141 Nicholas Szabo, ‘Shelling Out – On The Origins Of Money,’ 2002, accessed April 10, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFbdp.
142 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘re. Bitcoins are most like shares of common stock,’ BitcoinTalk, August 20, 2010, accessed March 4, 2014, http://bit.ly/1oosoFD.
143 Nick Szabo, ‘Bit gold markets,’ Unenumerated, April 8, 2008, accessed March 11, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHF95b.
144 Nick Szabo, ‘Re: on anonymity, identity, reputation, and spoofing,’ Cypherpunks Mailing List, October 18, 1993, accessed March 29, 2014, http://bit.ly/1truaJg.
145 Skye Grey, ‘Like In A Mirror,’ accessed March 26, 2013, http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com.
146 Skye Grey, ‘Occam’s Razor: who is most likely to be Satoshi Nakamoto?’, Like In A Mirror, March 11, 2014, accessed April 1, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFaGq.
147 Gwern Branwen, comment on ‘Satoshi Nakaoto is (probably) Nick Szabo,’ Reddit, December 1, 2013, accessed March 30, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru849.
148 Adam L. Penenberg, ‘The Bitcoin Crypto-Currency Mystery Reopened,’ Fast Company, October 11, 2011, accessed May 20, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHF8OR.
149 Satoshi Nakamoto, email message to Wei Dai, ‘Re. Citation of your b-money page,’ January 10, 2009, accessed May 22, 2014, http://bit.ly/1truaJj.
150 ‘Researchers uncover likely author of original Bitcoin paper,’ Aston University, April 16, 2014, accessed May 15, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFaWU.
151 Nick Szabo, Keynote speech on smart contracts (presented at the IEEE International Workshop on Electronic Contracting (WEC), San Diego, California, USA, July 6, 2004), accessed April 10, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru84a.
152 Nick Szabo, ‘New Zealander challenges Amazon one-click patent,’ Unenumerated, December 20, 2005, accessed March 12, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHF95j.
153 Nick Szabo, ‘Contracts With Bearer,’ 1997, 1999, accessed April 10, 2014, http://bit.ly/1truaJk.
154 Nick Szabo, ‘Consulting Services,’ Unenumerated, April 2, 2008, accessed March 30, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHF95e.
155 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re. Slashdot Submission for 1.0,’ BitcoinTalk, July 5, 2010, accessed March 14, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru7NL.
156 Nick Szabo, ‘Bit gold’, Unenumerated, December 29, 2005, accessed March 30, 2014, http://bit.ly/1truaJm.
157 Nick Szabo, ‘Flying Money,’ Unenumerated, August 27, 2008, accessed March 30, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHF95h.
158 Nick Szabo, ‘Antiques, time, gold, and bit gold,’ Unenumerated, August 28, 2008, accessed April 1, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFbdq.
159 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency’, P2P Foundation February 11, 2009, accessed March 30, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tru840.
160 ‘Bit gold.’,
161 Ibid.
162 ‘Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency.’
163 Nick Szabo, ‘Ten ways to make a political difference,’ Unenumerated, August 12, 2007, accessed May 22, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHF95l.
164 Nick Szabo, ‘Ben Bernanke plays John Law,’ Unenumerated, May 13, 2008, accessed May 22, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFaX0.
165 Hal Finney, ‘Re. Bitcoin P2P ecash paper,’ Cryptography Mailing List, November 8, 2008, http://bit.ly/1trvGLt.
166 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘They want to delete the Wikipedia article,’ BitcoinTalk, July 20, 2010, accessed March 30, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBcha.
167 Gwern Branwen, ‘Bitcoin is worse is better,’ Gwern.net, May 27, 2011, accessed April 1, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF7KL.
168 Andrew Smith, ‘Desperately seeking Satoshi,’ The Sunday Times, March 2, 2014, http://thetim.es/1trvID1
169 Adrian Chen, Twitter, accessed April 1, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBcO7.
Why Bitcoin is the Enemy of the State
170 Steve Connor, ‘Flu epidemic traced to Great War transit camp,’ The Irish Independent, January 8, 2000, accessed February 1, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHF8yf.
171 Alan Greenspan, US Federal Reserve Board’s semi-annual Monetary Policy Report to the US Congress, February 11, 2004.
172 E.C. Riegel, ‘The New Approach to Freedom’, Chapter 3, The Heather Foundation, 2003, http://bit.ly/1tHF956.
173 Michael McLeay, Amar Radia, Ryland Thomas, ‘Money creation in the modern economy’, Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, Q1 2014.
174 Dominic Frisby, Life After the State (London, Unbound, 2013).
175 ‘National Average Wage Index 2012,’ US Social Security Administration, accessed March 17, 2014, http://1.usa.gov/1trvGLy.
176 The average UK wage has gone from around from £2,000 per annum in 1971 to around £25,000 in 2014.
177 The most obvious form of consumption tax, and the hardest to hide, is to tax use of the land – land value tax. Its proponents argue that it would also bring about the much needed re-balancing of land ownership. Seventy per cent of the UK, for example, is owned by 0.7% of the people – and they receive subsidy for it. A world in which they have to pay tax on that land, instead of receiving subsidy for it, would see many sell land they are not making use of because it has become a liability rather than an asset.
178 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re: Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper,’ Cryptography Mailing List, November 14, 2008, accessed March 17, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru7NC.
How Bitcoin will Change the World
179 Tim Worstall, ‘Finally, A Proper Use For Bitcoin, Avoiding Capital Controls,’ Forbes, November 21, 2013, accessed May 25, 2014, http://onforb.es/1tHFbtQ.
180 Tyler Durden, ‘JPMorgan On The Inevitability Of Europe-Wide Capital Controls,’ Zero Hedge, March 22, 2013, accessed March 15, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFaGl.
181 Jon Southurst, ‘Why China is Leading the Global Rise of Bitcoin,’ Coindesk, November 18, 2013, accessed March 19, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHF957.
182 ‘Credit Card Ownership Statistics,’ Statistic Brain, July 24, 2012, accessed March 17, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFaGg.
183 ‘Number of credit card holders fell in India: HSBC survey,’ The Hindu Business Line, May 13, 2013, accessed March 20, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFaWP.
184 ‘All About Bitcoin,’ Top Of Mind, Issue 21, Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research, March 11, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHF8hR.
185 ‘Squawk Box,’ CNBC, March 14, 2014, accessed March 17, 2014, http://cnb.cx/1tHF7KJ.
186 Ibid.
187 ‘All About Bitcoin.’
188 Ibid.
189 Ibid.
190 Kyla Yeoman, ‘M-Pesa helps world’s poorest go to the bank using mobile
phones,’ Christian Science Monitor, January 6, 2014, accessed March 15, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHF9lH.
191 Ibid.
192 NBC News, ‘Cell phones could “completely change the livelihood of many Kenyans”‘, August 8, 2012, accessed April 10, 2014, http://nbcnews.to/1tHFaGc
193 Kyla Yeoman, ‘M-Pesa helps world’s poorest go to the bank using mobile phones,’ Christian Science Monitor, January 6, 2014, accessed March 15, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHF9lH.
194 Census of India 2011.
195 Sudeep Jain, ‘Why So Few Indians Have Bank Accounts,’ Wall Street Journal India, November 1, 2012, accessed March 15, 2014, http://on.wsj.com/1tHFaGt.
196 Ibid.
Should You Buy In?
197 All of these calculations assume all 21 million coins have been mined. If they haven’t, the targets will be higher.
Appendix II: Who Is Satoshi? The Usual Suspects
198 ‘Interview with Jed McCaleb, inventor of the Ripple protocol and co-founder of OpenCoin,’ Ripple, April 17, 2013, accessed March 12, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHF8OD.
199 Ibid.
200 Jed McCaleb, ‘Hiring C++ and JS programmers,’ BitcoinTalk, September 11, 2012, accessed March 11, 2014. http://bit.ly/1CNGtWX.
201 Michael J. Casey, ‘Bitcoin Foundation’s Andresen on Working with Satoshi Nakamoto,’ Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2014, accessed March 10, 2014, http://on.wsj.com/1tHF8yc.
202 ‘Occam’s Razor: who is most likely to be Satoshi Nakamoto?’.
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