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. “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

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

— Satoshi Nakamoto

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

— 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 Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

7. “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

8. “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

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

— Satoshi Nakamoto

10. “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

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

— Satoshi Nakamoto

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

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

— Satoshi Nakamoto

16. “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

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

— Satoshi Nakamoto

19. “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

20. “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.”

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

— 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. “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

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

— Satoshi Nakamoto

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

36. “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

37. “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

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

— Satoshi Nakamoto

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

— Satoshi Nakamoto

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

— Satoshi Nakamoto

42. “The price of any commodity tends to gravitate toward the production cost. If the price is below cost, then production slows down. If the price is above cost, profit can be made by generating and selling more. At the same time, the increased production would increase the difficulty, pushing the cost of generating towards the price.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

43. “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

44. “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

45. “In this sense, it’s more typical of a precious metal. Instead of the supply changing to keep the value the same, the supply is predetermined and the value changes. As the number of users grows, the value per coin increases. It has the potential for a positive feedback loop; as users increase, the value goes up, which could attract more users to take advantage of the increasing value.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

46. “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

47. “It is strictly necessary that the longest chain is always considered the valid one.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

48. “Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins. It’ll be distributed to network nodes when they make blocks, with the amount cut in half every 4 years. first 4 years: 10,500,000 coins next 4 years: 5,250,000 coins next 4 years: 2,625,000 coins next 4 years: 1,312,500 coins etc... When that runs out, the system can support transaction fees if needed. It’s based on open market competition, and there will probably always be nodes willing to process transactions for free.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto

49. “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

50. “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