Author | Bitcoin Magazine
Compiled by | Odaily Planet Daily
Academic discussion between Satoshi Nakamoto and Adam Back before the release of Bitcoin
1. The following figure shows the first email record between the two parties (2008), in which Satoshi Nakamoto quoted Adam Back's notification letter on the Hashcash paper. From the content, people familiar with the Bitcoin white paper should be able to find that most of the content in the article is the summary of the Bitcoin white paper.
The two sides then discussed academic issues:
2. Adam Back wrote back to Satoshi Nakamoto and suggested that Satoshi Nakamoto read Wei Dai’s “B-money” paper. (Rizzo Note: Dei is a well-known cryptographer who is dedicated to the research of digital cash and is often mentioned as a possible candidate for Satoshi Nakamoto.)
3. Satoshi Nakamoto wrote back to thank Adam Back and said that he had not read the "B-money" paper. He also explained that the main innovation of Bitcoin was to use proof of work to support distributed timestamp servers at the same time. When users generate proof of work to create new cryptocurrencies for themselves, the same proof of work also supports network timestamps. This replaced Usenet.
4. Adam Back wrote back to Satoshi Nakamoto, apologizing for not having read the Nakamoto paper, and also mentioned: "Another related paper is by Rivest et al., called micromint, which uses k-way collisions to provide a computational advantage over time for the bank to create tokens. Your mention of a group of players gaining an advantage through computational cycles reminds me of micromint. In micromint, the bank's advantage grows over time because some advantages are accumulated in the accumulation of partial results, which helps to create further partial collisions more cheaply."
5. Satoshi Nakamoto wrote back again to thank Adam Back for his help and for providing other materials such as Wei Dai's "b-money" paper. He also said that he had released the open source code related to the paper named Bitcoin v 0.1. He gave Adam the link and screenshots and introduced that the main idea of the system is to create a self-proving consensus by generating a series of hash-based proofs of work. Users get new cryptocurrency by contributing proofs of work to the chain. (Rizzo Note: According to Adam's public statements, he did not pay attention to Bitcoin again until the end of 2012.)
Note: The above is the end of the email history between Adam Back and Satoshi Nakamoto. Adam may have only regarded Satoshi Nakamoto as a person seeking knowledge at the time, and never thought that Bitcoin would become one of the top 10 assets in the world in the future.
Answering questions after the release of Bitcoin: email exchanges between Satoshi Nakamoto and early collaborator Martii ‘Sirius’ Malmi
1. Satoshi Nakamoto was looking for collaborators, and Martii became an early partner of Bitcoin. The picture below shows the first email between Satoshi Nakamoto and Martii. In the original email, Satoshi Nakamoto thanked Martii for starting the topic on ASC and praised his accurate understanding of Bitcoin. He also stated the main direction of Bitcoin at present, hoping that Martii could create a website on Sourceforge and manage the summary of Bitcoin FAQs. Satoshi Nakamoto also said that he could provide Martii with a compilation of information, facts and ideas when answering questions in some emails and forums.
2. When asked how Bitcoin would scale in the future, Satoshi Nakamoto responded that the Bitcoin network would have a maximum of 100,000 nodes, and based on the current situation, he calculated and discussed the economics of a large-scale network. (Rizzo note: Currently, there are about 50,000 nodes running Bitcoin clients.)
The picture below shows Satoshi Nakamoto’s remarks.
3. Satoshi Nakamoto believed that Bitcoin mining would consume less energy than the traditional banking system. The following image shows the foresight of Satoshi Nakamoto.
The original text is "Ironically, we may eventually have to choose between economic freedom and environmental protection. Unfortunately, the only solution I have found is Proof of Work (POW), which is essential for coordinating the network and preventing double spending. Proof of Work is the key to making peer-to-peer electronic cash systems work without trusting a third party.
Even if energy consumption increases to appreciable levels, I think it will still be more economical than the labor and resource intensive activities of traditional banking. It will cost far less than the billions of dollars in bank fees required to pay for all those brick-and-mortar buildings, skyscrapers, and spam credit card offers.”
4. Satoshi foresaw at least one viable non-monetary use for Bitcoin, supporting the timestamping use case.
The original text is "Someone was talking about secure timestamping the other day. You want to be able to prove that a certain file existed at a certain time in the past. In my opinion, Bitcoin's blockchain is very suitable for this purpose. Bitcoin is a distributed secure timestamping server, and a few lines of code can create a transaction with an additional hash, which can be used to timestamp anything needed. I should add a command to timestamp files in this way."
5. Satoshi Nakamoto describes the difference between Bitcoin and David Chaum’s failed electronic currency DigiCash. (Rizzo note: It is worth noting that Chaum’s remarks had a profound influence on cypherpunks including Hal Finney.)
The original text is "DigiCash is similar to using digital signatures to represent currency, but differs in privacy protection and prevention of double spending. The recipient of a Bitcoin payment is able to check whether it is the first payment, and if not, the secondary payment is not accepted. There is no offline mode to later capture and disclose double spenders, because this would require the participants to have identities. To protect privacy, key pairs are used only once, and new key pairs are generated in each transaction. The owner of the currency is the person who holds his private key. Of course, the biggest difference is that there is no central server. This is the Achilles' heel of the Chaumian system. When the central company shuts down, the currency will also shut down. In Bitcoin, the supply of currency is limited. The total amount will be 21,000,000 coins. Transactions simply transfer ownership."
6. Satoshi Nakamoto resisted labeling Bitcoin as an "investment", worried about legal risks, and urged Martii to delete the relevant remarks. (Rizzo Note: It can be seen in the original text that the term "cryptocurrency" was not the first term thought of by Satoshi Nakamoto.)
Original text: "There are a lot of things you can say on a SourceForge site that you can't say on my own site. Even so, I'm uncomfortable with explicitly saying 'consider it as an investment'. That's a dangerous statement, and you should delete the project. If they come to that conclusion themselves, that's fine, but we can't market it as such; someone brought up the term 'cryptocurrency', maybe we should use that term when describing Bitcoin, what do you think?"
7. In July 2009, after 18 months of development, Satoshi Nakamoto felt tired and needed a rest. The article also mentioned Hal's absence from work.
Original post: "Hal has helped me a lot on the cryptography forums and defended the design, but is not currently actively involved. He did some initial testing of Bitcoin when it was first released. He contributed a lot to the field many years ago with his Reusable Proof of Work (RPOW). I can't help much now either, work is busy, and after 18 months of development, I need a break."
8. Rizzo's interpretation here feels biased. Rizzo's interpretation is: Satoshi Nakamoto discussed how Bitcoin might be adopted. Notably, he emphasized the fact that Bitcoin is easy to obtain because you can mine it on your computer. This is very different from how we think about Bitcoin today.
Based on my understanding of the original text, the author believes that what Satoshi Nakamoto wanted to express is that Bitcoin was easy to obtain at first, but as its scarcity and value increased, it became more difficult to obtain, which echoes today's reality.
Original text: "Providing currency to support Bitcoin will attract free money seekers, which will have a lot of publicity benefits. At first, it will be seen mainly as a way to get free currency for computer idle time. Perhaps it can be promoted as helping to support the future of e-commerce and earning some income during computer idle cycles. As people cash out and actually get paid, the word will spread exponentially. It may help to keep the minimum transaction amount above the amount a typical user can accumulate, so that users must trade with each other to collect enough to cash out. Aggregators (the prototype of exchanges) will set up small exchange shops, which will increase users' confidence in exchanging Bitcoins, and there will be more buyers to choose from. At first, people will be skeptical about getting currency for free, but as competition increases the difficulty of proof of work, the scarcity of Bitcoin should become obvious. People will realize that they can't just get all the Bitcoin they want at will. This will establish a minimum value for Bitcoin, allowing it to be used for other purposes, if there is hope, other purposes are waiting to be used."
9. Satoshi Nakamoto received donation requests from others, but he transferred the funds to Martii.
10. Satoshi Nakamoto believed that Bitcoin would become a way to trade other Internet currencies, such as Liberty Reserve. (Rizzo Note: Liberty Reserve was later closed by the United States.)
Original text: "Converting to Liberty Reserve is also an option. It is an online currency similar to e-Bullion, Pecunix or Webmoney, allowing transactions without questions and privacy. Buying Liberty Reserve and other currencies is difficult because exchangers are very cautious and afraid of being cheated by reverse payments, so they require more details and holding time. Cashing out is very easy. Liberty Reserve is irreversible, so there are many exchangers eager to convert it to any payment method. In contrast, it is very easy to obtain Bitcoin through mining. Customers can easily exchange Bitcoin for Liberty Reserve and then exchange it for cash, gold, PayPal, or if they just want to keep the money, they just need to exchange Bitcoin for Liberty Reserve.
Additionally, BTC 2 PSC came up with the idea of selling Bitcoin as paysafecards. Delivery can be online by emailing the card number, or an unopened physical card can be delivered by post. There are many different variants. In some countries, they are called gift cards and can be used wherever credit cards are accepted. Some people cannot get a real credit card because they have no credit history, so they buy gift cards themselves to pay for things that require a credit card. ”
11. Satoshi removed the word “anonymous” from the Bitcoin website because he thought it sounded shady.
Original post: "I think we should tone down the emphasis on anonymity. With the popularity of Bitcoin addresses, we can't give the impression that it's automatically anonymous. If someone digs deeper into the transaction history and starts exposing information that people thought was anonymous, the consequences will be much worse if we don't warn in advance that precautions must be taken. As Tor says, 'Tor doesn't encrypt all your Internet activity like magic. Learn what Tor does and doesn't provide you with.' Besides, anonymity sounds a bit suspicious. I think those who want anonymity will figure it out on their own, and we don't have to make a big fuss about it."
12. Satoshi Nakamoto appreciated Gavin and recognized his development capabilities. (Rizzo note: It is worth noting that, considering the historical revisionism of this event, Satoshi Nakamoto was very appreciative of Gavin Andresen)
13. Satoshi wanted Martii’s name to be put on the developer list of the Bitcoin website, emphasizing that it must be a real name. (Rizzo note: Finally saw a copy of the email Satoshi sent to other developers before removing his name from the project website. Satoshi did not mention his intention to withdraw from the project in the email.)
