Bitcoin: Famous Satoshi Quotes

$SirToshi
8 min readJun 25, 2023

--

2008.10.31 — In reference to being awarded the GIAC Security Expert Malware (GSE-Malware) certification on 3rd Oct 2008, and only 1 of 4 individuals in the world to be awarded the certification, Craig Wright is quoted as describing it as “One of the hardest certifications ever devised.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20100414045810/http://www.giac.org/certifications/gse-malware.php

2008.10.31 — Craig Wright, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party. The paper is available at: www. bitcoin. org/bitcoin.pdf”. https://craigwright.net/bitcoin-white-paper.pdf https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October/014810.html

2008.10.31 — Craig Wright, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“It is possible to verify payments without running a full network node. A user only needs to keep a copy of the block headers of the longest proof-of-work chain, which he can get by querying network nodes until he’s convinced he has the longest chain, and obtain the Merkle branch linking the transaction to the block it’s timestamped in.” https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/quotes/bitcoin-design/

2008.11.09 —Craig Wright, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“It is strictly necessary that the longest chain is always considered the valid one.” https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/6/

2008.11.17 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“To avoid pressure, the network has to avoid any central point at which pressure can be applied. Recall Nero’s wish that Rome had a single throat that he could cut. If we provide them with such a throat, it will be cut.”
https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/threads/1/

2008.11.17 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

There will be transaction fees, so nodes will have an incentive to receive and include all the transactions they can. Nodes will eventually be compensated by transaction fees alone when the total coins created hits the pre-determined ceiling.
https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/quotes/bitcoin-economics/

2009.01.08 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins.”
https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/threads/2/

2009.01.17 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on.” https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/17/#selection-103.0-103.59

2009.02.11 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.” https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/p2pfoundation/1/

2009.02.11 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“I’ve developed a new open source P2P e-cash system called Bitcoin. It’s completely decentralized, with no central server or trusted parties, because everything is based on crypto proof instead of trust. Give it a try…” https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/p2pfoundation/1/

2009.02.11 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“It’s time we had the same thing for money. With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless. One of the fundamental building blocks for such a system is digital signatures. A digital coin contains the public key of its owner. To transfer it, the owner signs the coin together with the public key of the next owner. Anyone can check the signatures to verify the chain of ownership.” https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/p2pfoundation/1/#selection-53.1-57.287

2009.02.11 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“Bitcoin’s solution is to use a peer-to-peer network to check for double-spending. In a nutshell, the network works like a distributed timestamp server, stamping the first transaction to spend a coin. It takes advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but hard to stifle.” https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/p2pfoundation/1/#selection-61.1-61.288

2009.02.11 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“The result is a distributed system with no single point of failure. Users hold the crypto keys to their own money and transact directly with each other, with the help of the P2P network to check for double-spending.” https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/p2pfoundation/1/#selection-69.1-69.216

2009.02.15 —Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“A lot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cause because of all the companies that failed since the 1990’s. I hope it’s obvious it was only the centrally controlled nature of those systems that doomed them. I think this is the first time we’re trying a decentralized, non-trust-based system.” https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/p2pfoundation/2/

2009.04.12 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling.” https://nakamotostudies.org/emails/satoshi-reply-to-mike-hearn/

2010.02.06 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“Eventually at most only 21 million coins for 6.8 billion people in the world if it really gets huge. But don’t worry, there are another 6 decimal places that aren’t shown, for a total of 8 decimal places internally. It shows 1.00 but internally it’s 1.00000000. If there’s massive deflation in the future, the software could show more decimal places.” https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/46/

2010.02.06 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

Re: Repost: Request: Make this anonymous?
“When you send to a bitcoin address, you don’t connect to the recipient. You send the transaction to the network the same way you relay transactions. There’s no distinction between a transaction you originated and one you received from another node that you’re relaying in a broadcast. With a very small network though, someone might still figure it out by process of elimination. It’ll be better when the network is larger.

If you send by IP, the recipient sees you because you connect to their IP. You could use TOR to mask that.

You could use TOR if you don’t want anyone to know you’re even using Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is still very new and has not been independently analysed. If you’re serious about privacy, TOR is an advisable precaution.”

2010.02.14 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“In a few decades when the reward gets too small, the transaction fee will become the main compensation for nodes.” https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/57/

2010.02.14 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“I’m sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/x9o8ud/satoshi_2010_im_sure_that_in_20_years_there_will/

2010.06.17 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.” https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611 https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/126/

2010.06.18 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“(I’ve been working on Bitcoin) Since 2007. At some point I became convinced there was a way to do this without any trust required at all and couldn’t resist to keep thinking about it.” https://www.satoshivibes.com/quotes/126

2010.07.17 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

I believe it’ll be possible for a payment processing company to provide as a service the rapid distribution of transactions with good-enough checking in something like 10 seconds or less.

The network nodes only accept the first version of a transaction they receive to incorporate into the block they’re trying to generate. When you broadcast a transaction, if someone else broadcasts a double-spend at the same time, it’s a race to propagate to the most nodes first. If one has a slight head start, it’ll geometrically spread through the network faster and get most of the nodes.

A rough back-of-the-envelope example:
1 0
4 1
16 4
64 16
80% 20%

So if a double-spend has to wait even a second, it has a huge disadvantage.

The payment processor has connections with many nodes. When it gets a transaction, it blasts it out, and at the same time monitors the network for double-spends. If it receives a double-spend on any of its many listening nodes, then it alerts that the transaction is bad. A double-spent transaction wouldn’t get very far without one of the listeners hearing it. The double-spender would have to wait until the listening phase is over, but by then, the payment processor’s broadcast has reached most nodes, or is so far ahead in propagating that the double-spender has no hope of grabbing a significant percentage of the remaining nodes.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=423.msg3819#msg3819

2010.07.29 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don’t generate.”
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306

“If you don’t believe me or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry.” https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6269#msg6269

2010.08.11 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:
“Imagine if gold turned to lead when stolen. If the thief gives it back, it turns to gold again.” https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/340/

2010.08.27 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“Bitcoins have no dividend or potential future dividend, therefore not like a stock. More like a collectible or commodity.” https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/427/

2010.11.13- Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“I’m happy if someone with artistic skill wants to contribute alternatives. The icon/logo was meant to be good as an icon at the 16x16 and 20x20 pixel sizes. I think it’s the best program icon, but there’s room for improvement at larger sizes for a graphic for use on websites. It’ll be a lot simpler if authors could make their graphics public domain.” https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/500/#selection-33.0-37.74

2010.12.11 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“It would have been nice to get this attention in any other context. WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.”
BitcoinTalk Re: PC World Article on Bitcoin 23:39:16 UTCOriginal PostView in Thread

2011.04.23 — Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.” (Gavin Andresen).https://i.redd.it/exactly-12-years-ago-satoshi-nakamoto-wrote-ive-moved-on-to-v0-ux6inz5pzsva1.png?s=d5637100863a868c6fc97dbd582fc122fc46da8b

2011.04.26 — Email conversation between Satoshi Nakamoto & Gavin Andresen…
“I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure,” Nakamoto wrote to Andresen. “The press just turns that into a pirate currency angle. Maybe instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to your dev contributors; it helps motivate them.”
Andresen responded: “Yeah, I’m not happy with the ‘wacky pirate money’ tone, either.”
https://www.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/face-behind-bitcoin-247957.html

2014.03.07 at 1:17pm— Craig Write, as Satoshi Nakamoto, famously wrote:

“I am not Dorian Nakamoto.” https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/p2pfoundation/4/#selection-33.0-33.25
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/i-am-not-dorian-nakamoto-real-satoshi-nakamoto-speaks-first-time-five-years-1439251

--

--