Satoshi Nakamoto Quotes

1. “If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

2. “It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

3. “I’m sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

4. “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

5. “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

6. “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

7. “It is a global distributed database, with additions to the database by consent of the majority.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

8. “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.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

9. “Being open source means anyone can independently review the code. If it was closed source, nobody could verify the security. I think it’s essential for a program of this nature to be open source.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

10. “Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

11. “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.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

12. “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.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

13. “It’s very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I’m better with code than with words though.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

14. “The heat from your computer is not wasted if you need to heat your home.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

15. “Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

16. “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.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

17. “Bitcoin would be convenient for people who don’t have a credit card or don’t want to use the cards they have.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

18. “It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on. If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

19. “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

20. “For greater privacy, it’s best to use bitcoin addresses only once.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

21. “Imagine if gold turned to lead when stolen.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

22. “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.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

23. “With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

24. “When someone tries to buy all the world’s supply of a scarce asset, the more they buy the higher the price goes.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

25. “I’ve been working on bitcoin’s design 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.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

26. “I don’t believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea. So much of the design depends on all nodes getting exactly identical results in lockstep that a second implementation would be a menace to the network.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

27. “There is nobody to act as central bank or federal reserve to adjust the money supply as the population of users grows. That would have required a trusted party to determine the value, because I don’t know a way for software to know the real world value of things.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

28. “At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

29. “Bitcoins have no dividend or potential future dividend, therefore not like a stock. More like a collectible or commodity.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

30. “Bitcoin generation should end up where it’s cheapest. Maybe that will be in cold climates where there’s electric heat, where it would be essentially free.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

31. “Writing a description for this thing for general audiences is bloody hard. There’s nothing to relate it to.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

32. “Bitcoin isn’t currently practical for very small micropayments. Not for things like pay per search or per page view without an aggregating mechanism, not things needing to pay less than 0.01. The dust spam limit is a first try at intentionally trying to prevent overly small micropayments like that.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

33. “If SHA-256 became completely broken, I think we could come to some agreement about what the honest block chain was before the trouble started, lock that in and continue from there with a new hash function.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

34. “The Bitcoin network might actually reduce spam by diverting zombie farms to generating bitcoins instead.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

35. “I anticipate there will never be more than 100K nodes, probably less. It will reach an equilibrium where it’s not worth it for more nodes to join in. The rest will be lightweight clients, which could be millions.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

36. “Sigh... why delete a wallet instead of moving it aside and keeping the old copy just in case? You should never delete a wallet.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

37. “Only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

38. “A block header with no transactions would be about 80 bytes. If we suppose blocks are generated every 10 minutes, 80 bytes * 6 * 24 * 365 = 4.2MB per year. With computer systems typically selling with 2GB of RAM as of 2008, and Moore’s Law predicting current growth of 1.2GB per year, storage should not be a problem even if the block headers must be kept in memory.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

39. “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.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

40. “When there are multiple double-spent versions of the same transaction, one and only one will become valid.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

41. “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.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

42. “SHA-256 is very strong. It’s not like the incremental step from MD5 to SHA1. It can last several decades unless there’s some massive breakthrough attack.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

43. “Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. To facilitate this without breaking the block’s hash, transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree, with only the root included in the block’s hash. Old blocks can then be compacted by stubbing off branches of the tree. The interior hashes do not need to be stored.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

44. “How does everyone feel about the B symbol with the two lines through the outside? Can we live with that as our logo?”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

45. “In a few decades when the reward gets too small, the transaction fee will become the main compensation for nodes.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

46. “As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner. Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to the same owner.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

47. “Once it gets bootstrapped, there are so many applications if you could effortlessly pay a few cents to a website as easily as dropping coins in a vending machine.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

48. “The steps to run the network are as follows: 1. New transactions are broadcast to all nodes. 2. Each node collects new transactions into a block. 3. Each node works on finding a difficult proof-of-work for its block. 4. When a node finds a proof-of-work, it broadcasts the block to all nodes. 5. Nodes accept the block only if all transactions in it are valid and not already spent. 6. Nodes express their acceptance of the block by working on creating the next block in the chain, using the hash of the accepted block as the previous hash.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

49. “To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest in running nodes over time, the proof-of-work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they’re generated too fast, the difficulty increases.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

50. “The main properties: Double-spending is prevented with a peer-to-peer network. No mint or other trusted parties. Participants can be anonymous. New coins are made from Hashcash style proof-of-work. The proof-of-work for new coin generation also proof-of-workers the network to prevent double-spending.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto