What Has Bitcoin Become 17 Years After Satoshi Nakamoto Published The Whitepaper?

Today marks seventeen years since Satoshi Nakamoto published a Bitcoin Whitepaper on his crypto mailing list in 2008. At the time, Bitcoin was little more than a proposal for a new niche technology, the latest in a long line of niche technologies created by cypherpunks in the 1990s.

Bitcoin has gone through many massive transformations since that day 17 years ago. It has gone from a specialized online collectible network, to a decentralized network powering illegal darknet markets, to a major speculative investment for retail trading, to Wall Street and governments throughout the world’s favorite new asset class. We all had a front row seat to the Internet’s first explosive global technological revolution, and it was a tough ride.

On this anniversary, I think it is important to touch on a closely related concept, StopOr the purpose of a system is what it does. The basic idea is that when you have a complex system, it’s pointless to try to define it based on what you want He wants To do this, what really matters is what parts of this complex system are actually do. That is all that matters at the end of the day.

We find ourselves once again in a period of time where people are returning to the White Paper as a placeholder for some kind of founding document, definition, or blueprint. The white paper is none of these things. It is simply a high-level abstract explanation of the proof-of-work blockchain used to implement a digital currency. It’s the idea of ​​the wheeled cart, versus the actual layout of the cart (source code).

Bitcoin users seem to periodically focus on the white paper in this way, and inevitably use that as justification to act hostilely toward some use case or idea of ​​improving Bitcoin that they don’t agree with. Maybe we’ll get past this eventually, maybe we won’t, but that’s an unhealthy attitude toward such a potentially impactful technology as Bitcoin.

People were not reading the writings and speeches of Alexander Graham Bell when digital modems were invented to allow the first tendrils of the early Internet to reach between devices and facilitate the flow of digital signals between them. They embraced it as a valuable technological innovation, and in today’s world that dynamic has been completely reversed. Most telephone signals are now actually transmitted over communication media designed specifically for digital communications.

Telephone networks were used to power the digital medium of the modern Internet in a way that Alexander Graham Bell probably had little idea about, reshaping the entire world in ways that were unimaginable to people of his generation.

Satoshi did not provide us with the founding document to be constrained and constrained when he released the white paper, but rather a high-level description of the program that followed.

This is the actual gift he gave us, the program. He gave it to us completely freely, open source, to do whatever we decided to do.

“BitDNS users may be quite liberal about adding any big data features since relatively few domain registrars are needed, while Bitcoin users may become increasingly tyrannical about limiting the chain size so that it is easy for many users and small devices.” -Satoshi Nakamoto, 2010

This quote is always brought up in the context of a block size limit, or Bitcoin enabling multiple functions, but the one that always stood out the most to me was “users may get it”. After all, before his disappearance, Satoshi was clearly respecting the wishes of users, and in the context of a crucial and foundational decision such as the maximum block size.

Bitcoin doesn’t belong to Satoshi anymore, it belongs to us, along with how we actually use Bitcoin, We decide what the purpose of the system is. It’s important to remember that.