Editor's note: I don't even know his gender age or any past, important threads surrounding him include a paper called "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", scattered across 575 posts on the bitcointalk forum , and his name, Satoshi Nakamoto (Nakamoto Satoshi).
As James Burke said in《Connections》,"Things almost never turn out as expected."(Things are always different from what we expected)
The birth of the Greek alphabet advanced the course of philosophy, logic, and democracy. An uneducated Scottish mechanic fine-tunes a steam pump and triggers the Industrial Revolution.
Burke also said，“Each one of innovations is part of a family of similar devices,and is the result of a sequence of closely connected events extending from the ancient world until the present day.” (Every innovation is a member of an “innovation family” similar to it, and it is also an event closely related to it from ancient times to the present collection of results)
A weatherman in the 19th century devised a gizmo that spewed out clouds. Rutherford, who was inspired by it, discovered that atoms can be split, so he was revered as the "father of nuclear physics" by later generations. A Jewish student Rutherford rejected at Cambridge, who switched to theoretical physics, was appointed as the chief scientist of the "Manhattan Project". He was Oppenheimer.
Looking back at every major invention in history, they do not exist in isolation, but stand on the shoulders of their predecessors and are closely related to their era. The same is true for Bitcoin.
As a "young" invention approaching its tenth birthday, whether Bitcoin will be a steam plug or an atomic bomb is unknown. However, Berke once again taught me, "There is nowhere else to look for the future but in the past." (The only way to foresee the future is to look for the past)
secondary title
Spiraling Monetary History The Centralized Home of Credit
5,000 years ago, the Sumerians living in Mesopotamia began to use silver as a supplementary means of exchange. That is to say, "Xiao Su" can exchange 10 catties of wheat + 1 unit of silver ingot for a cow of "Xiao Mei". But here comes the problem, "Xiao Su" only has 5 catties of wheat on hand. He discussed with "Xiaomei" whether it is possible to change the cattle first, and then make up for the short 5 catties of wheat after the autumn harvest. "Xiaomei"'s family has no shortage of cattle, and is in urgent need of wheat, thinking that this can be done in this way. But there was no basis for his words. He dug some mud from the river and squeezed it into a clay tablet. He carved the "debt" with a reed stick, stamped the seal of "Xiaosu"'s family, and then burned it into a clay tablet.
Thus, the earliest credit tool of mankind was born.
After 2000, the Babylonians who inherited the clay tablets learned to transfer clay tablets (obligations), borrow money, and calculate compound interest in more complex business activities.
Silver and clay tablets can play the role of currency and credit, and it is inseparable from some basic conditions:
Silver, with its scarcity, (relative) stability, and portability, has reached a certain "consensus" on top of barter needs.
Restricted by factors such as shortage of resources, limited productivity, different social division of labor, agriculture affected by seasons, and unpredictability of the future, time is endowed with "commercial" value, and credit is then introduced into value exchange.
In order for currency and credit to be widely recognized, a third party (state power at the time) other than the two parties to the transaction was required to endorse; once one party breached the contract, the third party had the right to enforce the agreement in order to achieve a certain fairness.
Let us push the timeline to the first century BC, when the imperial emperor Augustus (Octavian) established the Roman monetary credit system on the gold reserves of the Temple of Jupiter (then the Central Settlement Bank). However, as the empire forced the urbanization movement, the agricultural production that could not keep pace began to be unable to support the rapid development of the city and the high welfare system. In order to make up for the financial deficit caused by the surge in military expenditure,The rulers continued to depreciate the currency by reducing the silver content of the currency.
In 301, the Roman Empire, unable to withstand hyperinflation and poor riots, promulgated the "Supreme Price Law", trying to control prices administratively. But the opposite happened. The "sellers" neither dared to hoard the goods (they would be executed), nor did they want to sell them at a low price according to the law. Trade degenerates back to the age of barter and the free market collapses.
The next emperor, Constantine I, replaced the "silver standard" with the "gold standard". However, only public officials receive salaries in gold coins, and ordinary people who receive salaries in silver coins have to bear the consequences of currency depreciation. As the middle class became proletarian and the economy stagnated, coupled with the barren land and reduced productivity caused by war, the Roman Empire collapsed and the population returned to the level it was in when it was "founded" 500 years ago.
The same is the royal family, and the Stuart family after 1200 obviously summed up a lot of previous experience. In 1694, the Bank of England issued paper money backed by the state. Before that, the more popular financial model in Europe was gold lending and bill payment. Only this time, the notes are upgrades to royally sanctioned banknotes, which anyone can redeem for coinage.The circulation properties of banknotes quickly emerged.
In 1929, the Great Depression (The Great Depression) began, Britain, Japan, and the United States successively abandoned the "gold standard", and paper money gradually no longer represented the value of gold. In 1944, the Bretton Woods system became the new international monetary system, replacing the "gold standard" with the "gold exchange standard". The US dollar became the equivalent of gold and was at the center of the world currency. In 1971, the seventh U.S. dollar crisis broke out. In order to control inflation and stimulate economic recovery, President Nixon, who had just taken office, made a televised speech announcing that he would stop fulfilling the obligation of foreign governments or central banks to exchange U.S. dollars for gold. Since then, the Bretton Woods system began to disintegrate,The basis of the currency shifted from metal supplies to state commitments.
At this time, it is less than 4 years before the "birth" of Satoshi Nakamoto.
Taking out the above few slides in the long history of money, we will find:
The inconvenience of barter gave birth to money (although Marx did not see it that way);
Currency is both a measure of value and a function of circulation (also taught to me by Adam Smith);
The form of currency is evolving (metal → money order → banknote → digital), but transactions always rely on the trust endorsed by a third party, and the most trusted are often the kingship and the country.
secondary title
image description
The man on the $2, the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, the main drafter of the Declaration of Independence
In 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote,"All men are created equal."
But conspiracy theories about rulers manipulating financial institutions for political ends have never been silenced. The "birthday" of Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned above hides a stalk that makes future generations talk about it, and it is also an insinuation of the original currency system.
Among the first few places where Satoshi Nakamoto talked about Bitcoin, the most "non-anonymous" should be the peer-to-peer technology community website P2P Foundation (James Burke is also the co-founder of the site). Because want to register, birthday is required. Satoshi Nakamoto filled inimage description。
Registration rules of P2P Foundation (paste belowSatoshi Nakamoto's homepage in P2P foundation, although it has not been updated for ten years...)
1933April 5, then President Roosevelt signedExecutive Order 6102. The bill stipulates that citizens are prohibited from privately hoarding gold. Individuals need to hand over all gold (and certificates) to the bank and exchange it for banknotes or deposits at a price of US$20.67 per ounce; the bank will hand over the collected gold to the Federal Reserve.
In January of the following year, the Roosevelt administration defined a new gold price of $35 an ounce, which represented a 41% depreciation of the dollar (the private property of the people).
Although the history books say that this is the first stage of Roosevelt’s New Deal, through the implementation of the so-called Keynesianism, government intervention in the economy at an emergency (the Great Depression mentioned above) has enhanced the international competitiveness of domestic products. However, Congress "confiscated" private gold at a low price without democratic procedures, which has seriously violated the values of freedom, equality, and privacy advocated by the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Lewis Douglas, chairman of the U.S. Congressional Budget Committee at the time, said bluntly: "This is the end of Western civilization.”
However, the assertive government ignored the high court action. In fact, the "temporary" bill issued by Roosevelt in the case of a "national emergency" (national emergency) took effect for 42 years until 3 years after Nixon announced the decoupling of the dollar from gold, that is,1975image description
Image copyright: NBCnews
So, as an individual, is there a way to resist power?
In the late 1980s, a group of genius geeks advocated the use of encryption algorithms to protect their own freedom of information and property, and opposed the monopoly of encryption rules by the government and the military. These small circles have experienced several years of "unorganized operations". Until 1992, Intel senior scientist Tim May initiated the encryption mailing list organization. In 1993, American mathematician Eric Hughes wrote a book called "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto", creatingCypherpunkthe word. The group was formally named.
Members of the mailing group include Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, Bram Cohen who wrote the peer-to-peer file sharing protocol BitTorrent, Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, Nick Szabo, who first proposed the concept of smart contracts, and one of the founders of Facebook. Sean Parker et al. The group members mainly discussed topics such as mathematics, encryption technology, and computer technology, as well as the conception and elaboration of peer-to-peer payment systems (such as virtual currency pioneers such as E-cash, B-money, Beenz, and Flooz). However, these systems have not yet escaped the centralized control, and there is still a "Sarajevo incident" between theory and implementation.
On September 21, 2008, Wall Street investment banks collapsed one after another, and the Federal Reserve announced that it would change the only two remaining investment banks (Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley) into commercial banks; it hoped that it could survive the financial crisis by absorbing savings.
On October 3, 2008, the Bush administration signed a $700 billion financial rescue package.
Twenty-eight days later, on November 1, 2008, a new thread appeared on a cryptography mailing list: "I am developing a new electronic money system that is completely peer-to-peer and does not require a third-party trustee.image description
The paper expounds the design of this peer-to-peer electronic cash system in a more rigorous logic. It first discusses the issue that financial institutions are subject to "trust based" (credit-based), and then explains step by step how to achieve "no third-party organization" and delicate effectively solve the technical problems left over by the predecessors.
The paper expounds the design of this peer-to-peer electronic cash system in a more rigorous logic. It first discusses the issue that financial institutions are subject to "trust based" (credit-based), and then explains step by step how to achieve "no third-party organization" and delicate effectively solve the technical problems left over by the predecessors.
Two months later, Satoshi Nakamoto released the first version of the open-source Bitcoin client and mined 50 Bitcoins for the first time. The block that produced the first batch of bitcoins is called the "Genesisblock" (genesis block), the genesis block was compiled into block 0, and it was not uploaded to the chain. Satoshi Nakamoto used6 daysDig out this block. This has also triggered discussions in the bitcointalk forum. Bitcoin "believers" think of the Bible, "God created the world in six days, and then rested on the seventh day."
“God creates this earth and its heaven and all forms of life in six days……and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.” - Genesis
Although concepts such as decentralized (decentralization), token (pass pass), and economy (economy) did not appear in the paper, Satoshi Nakamoto explained in detail how blocks (Block) and chains (Chain) work in the network. Like God said,"Let there be light, and there was light. - Genesis 1:3。"After that, Bitcoin realized the first real-world payment by exchanging pizza, WikiLeaks, whose account was blocked by the US government, miraculously survived by relying on Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto's "decentralization" and retirement, true and false appearances and rumors, etc. A series of legends such as "Bible Stories" are integrated with the expectations, imaginations and speculations of later generations.。
This paper later became the "Bible" of "Bittheism", technology became the cornerstone of faith, and developer documentation became the "Code of Hammurabi".
After that, Bitcoin realized the first real-world payment by exchanging pizza, WikiLeaks, whose account was blocked by the US government, miraculously survived by relying on Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto's "decentralization" and retirement, true and false appearances and rumors, etc. A series of legends such as "Bible Stories" are integrated with the expectations, imaginations and speculations of later generations.
There are also people who are not satisfied with the world depicted in the "Old Testament", and set up another sect, write the teachings into the white paper, and tell the story of their faith in the ten years after Bitcoin. Just as the 66 books of the Bible were written over 1,500 years and interpreted over 2,000 years, ChristianityDifferentiated into 33000 branches。CoinMarketCap shows, There are more than 2,100 types of digital currency, and the overall market size of digital currency exceeds 200 billion US dollars (the last icon that started from 0 to 200 billion was Berkshire Hathaway founded by Buffett). Bitcoin still leads the entire digital currency market with a market value of more than US$110 billion, and its average price yesterday was US$6,487.13.
Whether the wildly growing "currency circle" has exceeded Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision, we don't know. Just like whether digital currency and blockchain have gone off track, it is also a difficult question to answer.
secondary title
Every major achievement raises new questions Are humans the sex organs of technology?
Let's start by reading the "References" on the last page of the paper:
Why do these "big gods" appear on this page? I put together a table:
We found that the public key signature in Chapter 2 of the Bitcoin paper, the timestamp in Chapter 3, the Hashcash and PoW in Chapter 4, the Merkle Tree in Chapter 7, and the idea of protecting privacy in Chapter 10 are all in appeared in the table.
The work done by Satoshi Nakamoto includes adding time stamps to all transactions through hash, and then merging them into the chain as transaction records; realizing tamper-resistant records through hash-based PoW, which solves the Byzantine general problem and double-spend problem; designs Consensus mechanism and incentive economic mechanism to prevent network attacks - more than 50% of the computing power is required to achieve the attack, and those who meet this condition can obtain more mining income than the income obtained by attacking the network... and finally formed a set of "including the required full rules and incentives" P2P electronic currency system.
"Humans are the sex organs of technology." Kevin Kelly said in "The Technium".
In the long history of technology, Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin is just "a small step in technology". Ten years ago, he integrated the experience and achievements of his predecessors in the fields of distributed databases, P2P networks, encrypted computing, and time stamps, and "became Satoshi Nakamoto". Ten years later, countless innovators "stand on the shoulders of Satoshi Nakamoto" to transform digital currency and blockchain. What Satoshi Nakamoto left to future generations is not only "an electronic cash system", but also the methods of discovering and solving problems, as well as free thinking.
Albert Einstein once said,"A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it." (A clever person solves a problem, a wise person avoids it)
The "smart" Satoshi Nakamoto also left two paintballs:
Snowden once disclosed that the NSA (National Security Agency) has buried a "back door" in the elliptic curve algorithm (ECC), which can weaken this curve in a special way. But Satoshi Nakamoto did not choose the international general encryption standard, but adopted the Koblitz curve.
secondary title
Hello
When you wake up with superpowers, will you tell the world (like Iron Man) or will you hide your identity (like Spiderman)?
During the same period of the cypherpunk movement, there were also many attempts to "decentralize finance", but the ending was not beautiful. In 1998, Hawaii resident Bernard Von NotHaus created the private currency Liberty Dollar. In 2007, the FBI raided its minting activities and seized Liberty Dollar. Bernard Von NotHaus was convicted of "manufacturing private coins that compete with the official currency of the United States". In 2007, the digital currency e-Gold was accused of being illegal due to insufficient collection of customer information, and the inventor was placed under house arrest.
Back to the main line of the story. On December 12, 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto published his last article on the bitcoin forum bitcointalk and handed over the website to Gavin Andresen, the chief developer of bitcoin. Since then, his email exchanges with "friends in the circle" have gradually decreased to zero.
The masses who lost their "threads" began to realize that Satoshi Nakamoto never disclosed personal information and used PGP encryption and the Tor network to communicate with anyone. The two websites bitcoin.org and bitcoin.net he registered in 2008 have domain name company anonymousspeech to provide anonymity protection. He even deliberately forged some personal characteristics in white papers and community speeches to avoid the tracking of metrological stylistics (identifying a person's identity by treating writing style as each person's unique fingerprint).
Remember that in "Easter Egg 1", Satoshi Nakamoto didn't step on the NSA's "algorithm trap"? Perhaps the FBI sensed danger, and it has been investigating the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto for many years. There have been FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests submitted to the FBI and CIA asking for information about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. The reply was "Glomar response" (neither denying nor acknowledging). There are also many people who firmly believe that the NSA knows the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.
Every once in a while, someone claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, and the media also announces from time to time that they have discovered Satoshi Nakamoto or the organization behind him. Regrettably, the news published by Wired magazine, Gizmodo website, Bloomberg, etc. have also been questioned and finally refuted the rumors.
At the beginning of 2014, the US "Newsweek" conducted an investigation and believed that the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto was Dorian Nakamoto (Dorian Nakamoto Satoshi), a Japanese-American.
image description
Thank you ChangjiaScreenshots of the year
Perhaps, after "becoming Satoshi", the game of "finding Satoshi" becomes meaningless. Just like we don't know (and don't need to know) who the Sumerians were who thought of silver ingots and clay tablets 5,000 years ago.
secondary title
References and related reading
Satoshi Nakamoto，《Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System》https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Interesting history, "Unveiled: How did the Sumerians play credit 5,000 years ago?" "http://www.qulishi.com/news/201603/94824.html
Bi Jingyue, "Why the Ancient Roman Empire Declined: The Government Issuing Currency and Soaring Prices"http://cul.qq.com/a/20170612/011701.htm
Square Finance, "Understanding the Bretton Woods System in Ten Minutes"https://www.sohu.com/a/134748888_474256
Wikipedia, Executive Order 6102https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
Yang Jiaxu, "The Process and Causes of the 2008 American Financial Crisis"
David Orrell.(2016).《The evolution of money》
Yoram Barzel.(2002).《A Theory of the State》
Handa, Jagdish.(2009).《Monetary Economics》
Mouse under the light, "Bitcoin, blockchain and the history of cypherpunk"https://www.jianshu.com/p/7d0327e18244
Chang Jia, "We are all Satoshi Nakamoto: Pioneers who worked hard to build cryptocurrency"https://www.8btc.com/article/6697
Melody, "Why does Satoshi Nakamoto remain anonymous?" "https://www.8btc.com/article/194131
Barrett, Kurian, Johnson.(2001).《World Christian Encyclopedia》
Wendy, "The World's Lowest Billionaire: Satoshi Nakamoto Still Receives Bitcoin Every Year"https://www.8btc.com/article/150353
qq88, "Searching for Satoshi Nakamoto"https://www.8btc.com/article/36132
Dominic Frisby.(2014).《Bitcoin：The future of money?》
Wikipedia, "Double-spending"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending
Special thanks tohttps://blog.csdn.net/dhd040805/article/details/79899642
Special thanks toJames Burke for "providing methodology" for this paper. (1995). Connections.
I am Hao Fangzhou, senior editor of Odaily. I am looking for reports on high-quality blockchain projects. You can add nooxika. Please note the company + name + reason. Let me make another small preview, "A Brief History of Bitcoin" written by Odaily Research Institute will be published soon, and will tell you more stories after 2008, so stay tuned~
