Kind: captions
Language: en
so before we talk about the fundamental
ideas behind a theory I'm a
cryptocurrency perhaps it'd be nice to
talk about the the origin story of
Bitcoin and the mystery of Satoshi
Nakamoto you give a talk that started
with sort of asking the question what
did Satoshi Nakamoto actually invent
maybe you could say who is Toshi
Nakamoto and what did he invent sure so
Satoshi Nakamoto is the name by which we
know the person who originally came up
with Bitcoin so the reason why I say the
name by which we know is that this is a
yam anonymous fellow who has shown
himself to us only over the internet
just step by here first publishing the
white paper for Bitcoin then releasing
the original source code for Bitcoin and
then talking to the very early Bitcoin
community on Bitcoin forums and and if
interacting with that but helping the
project along for a couple of years and
then at some point in late 2010 to early
2011 he disappeared so Bitcoin is a
fairly unique project in how it has this
kind of mythical a kind of quasi godlike
founder who were just and if pops in it
did the thing and if I disappeared and
we've somehow just never heard from him
again so in 2008 was so the white paper
was the first do you know the white
paper was the first time the name was
actually appears that ocean oh come on
leave so so how is it possible that the
creator of such a impactful project
remains anonymous that's a tough
question
and there's no similarity to it in
history of technology as far as I'm
aware yeah so one possibility is that
it's healthy knee because healthy knee
was also active in the Bitcoin community
and as health any in those two beginning
years and how is health any maybe I see
you say one of the
people at the end of early cypherpunk
community he was a computer scientist
computer scientists cryptographers
people interested in technology internet
freedom like those kinds of topics it
was the correct that that rather he
seemed to have been involved in either
the earliest or the first transaction of
Bitcoin
yes the first transaction a Bick would
was between Satoshi and a health inning
do you think he knew who Satoshi was if
she wasn't Satoshi you probably know how
is it possible to work so closely with
people and nevertheless not know
anything about their fundamental
identity it is this like a natural sort
of characteristic of the internet
looking forward to think about it
because you and I just met no there's a
there's a depth of knowledge that we now
have about each other that's like
physical like my vision system is able
to recognize you
I can also verify your identity of
uniqueness like yep this like it's very
hard to fake you being you yes so the
Internet the Internet has a
fundamentally different quality to it
which is just fascinating yeah it's
definitely interesting as I definitely
just know a lot of people just buy their
internet handles and to me when I think
of them like I see their internet
handles and one of them has signed of
profile picture as this kind of face
that's kind of not quite human with
about your hand of psychedelic colors
and at and when I visualize him I could
just visualize that that's not an actual
face yeah you are the creator of the
second
well he's currently the second most
popular kept across e aetherium so on
this topic for just stick on Satoshi
Nakamoto for a little bit longer you may
be the most qualified person to speak to
the psychology of this anonymity that
we're talking about mmm-hmm like your
identity is known like we I've just
verified it but from your perspective
what are the benefits in creating a
cryptocurrency and then remaining
anonymous
like if you can psychoanalyze satoshi
nakamoto is there something interesting
there or just a peculiar quirk of him it
definitely helps create this kind of
image of this a neutral thing that
doesn't belong to anyone then you
created a project and because you're
anonymous and because you also have
disappear or as unfortunately happened
to help any if that is him he ended up I
think dying of abou Gehrig's disease and
he's in a cryogenic freezer now but like
if you pop in and you'd and then you
created and you're gone and all that's
remaining if that whole process is the
thing itself then I think no one can go
and try to and if interpret any of your
other behavior and try to understand
like oh the like this person wrote this
thing in some essay ID at age 16 where
he expressed particular opinions about
democracy and so because of that this
project is like is a statement that's
dragna's your this specific thing
instead it creates this environment
where the thing is what you make of it
and it doesn't have the yeah right the
the the burden of your are their ideas
political thought and so on so so now
then we're sitting with you do you feel
the burden of being kind of the face of
aetherium I mean there's a very large
community of developers but nevertheless
you know is there like a burden
associated with that there definitely is
this is definitely a big reason why I've
been trying to kind of push for the
etherium ecosystem to become more
decentralized in many ways the just
encouraging a lot of kind of course
areum work to happen outside of the
ethereum foundation and if expanding the
number of people that are making
different kinds of decisions having
multiple software bill notations instead
of one and all of these things like
there's a lot of things that I've tried
to do it to and we've removed myself as
a single point of
failure because that is something that a
lot of people criticize me for so if you
look at like the most fundamentally
successful open source projects uh-huh
it seems that it's like a sad reality
when I think about it is it seems to be
that one person is a crucial contributor
often if you look a lioness from from
for Linux for the kernel that is
possible and I'm definitely not planning
to disappear
that's an interesting tension led
projects like this kind of desire a
single entity and yet they're
fundamentally distributed I don't know
if there's something interesting to say
about that kind of structure and
thinking about the future of
cryptocurrency does there need to be a
leader there's different kinds of
leaders you know there's there's
dictators who control all the money
there's people who control organizations
there's a kind of high priests that just
have themselves have their twitter
followers what kind of leader are you
would you say actually a bit more in the
hyper in the high priest direction than
before yeah like I definitely actually
don't do all that much of kind of going
around and make ordering aetherium
foundation people to do things because I
think those things are important if
there's something that I do think it's
important I used I do just usually I
kind of say it publicly or just kind of
say it to people and quite often
projects just gonna start doing it
you