I don’t think it’s fair to blame Nakamoto for the way idiots have abused his invention (unless he’s a crypto bro and I don’t know about it, in which case, please pardon my ignorance).
Nakamoto didn’t invent blockchains; Merkle did, in 1979. Nakamoto’s paper presented a cryptographic scheme which could be used with a choice of blockchain. There are several non-cryptocurrency systems built around synchronizing blockchains, like git. However, Nakamoto was clearly an anarcho-libertarian trying to escape government currency controls, as the first line of the paper makes clear:
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
Not knowing those two things about the Bitcoin paper is why you’re getting downvoted. Nakamoto wasn’t some random innocent researcher.
The tweet doesn’t say that he created bitcoin. It says he created blockchain. I didn’t want to assume something negative about a person without knowing for sure. For all I know, he’s just some random dude who’s good at math/coding, and others are responsible for the bitcoin nonsense.
I even admitted my ignorance on the topic, hoping for a straightforward answer, and you can see how well that worked out.
Well, Satoshi’s whitepaper is called “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, so it’s pretty obvious what the author(s) consider(s) its main contribution to be. Arguably, the concept of a blockchain wasn’t invented by Satoshi (the idea of a ledger using Merkle trees of hashes existed before), neither was proof-of-work (the idea of requiring computation as a cost of performing an action also existed, e.g. to prevent email spam). The novelty was combining all that to create a currency system and the implementation. And the motivation spilling throughout the paper is very much libertarian and goldbuggy.
I don’t think it’s fair to blame Nakamoto for the way idiots have abused his invention (unless he’s a crypto bro and I don’t know about it, in which case, please pardon my ignorance).
Edit: what don’t I know?
Nakamoto didn’t invent blockchains; Merkle did, in 1979. Nakamoto’s paper presented a cryptographic scheme which could be used with a choice of blockchain. There are several non-cryptocurrency systems built around synchronizing blockchains, like git. However, Nakamoto was clearly an anarcho-libertarian trying to escape government currency controls, as the first line of the paper makes clear:
Not knowing those two things about the Bitcoin paper is why you’re getting downvoted. Nakamoto wasn’t some random innocent researcher.
Thank you! This was the information I was looking for. Apologies to everyone I annoyed.
We’ve been begging people for 17 years to understand that reality matters.
…okay?
I’m sorry but like why do you think Satoshi created Bitcoin, like what was the purpose of that paper?
The tweet doesn’t say that he created bitcoin. It says he created blockchain. I didn’t want to assume something negative about a person without knowing for sure. For all I know, he’s just some random dude who’s good at math/coding, and others are responsible for the bitcoin nonsense.
I even admitted my ignorance on the topic, hoping for a straightforward answer, and you can see how well that worked out.
… is someone forcing you to type these comments? use an em-dash if yes, ascii hyphen if no
Well, Satoshi’s whitepaper is called “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, so it’s pretty obvious what the author(s) consider(s) its main contribution to be. Arguably, the concept of a blockchain wasn’t invented by Satoshi (the idea of a ledger using Merkle trees of hashes existed before), neither was proof-of-work (the idea of requiring computation as a cost of performing an action also existed, e.g. to prevent email spam). The novelty was combining all that to create a currency system and the implementation. And the motivation spilling throughout the paper is very much libertarian and goldbuggy.
i think you’ve answered your own question there