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 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
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 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
7. “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” — 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. “It is a global distributed database, with additions to the database by consent of the majority.” — 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. “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
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. “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 heat from your computer is not wasted if you need to heat your home.” — Satoshi Nakamoto
17. “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
18. “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
19. “For greater privacy, it’s best to use bitcoin addresses only once.” — 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. “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
24. “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
25. “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
26. “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
27. “Bitcoins have no dividend or potential future dividend, therefore not like a stock. More like a collectible or commodity.” — Satoshi Nakamoto
28. “Writing a description for this thing for general audiences is bloody hard. There’s nothing to relate it to.” — Satoshi Nakamoto
29. “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
30. “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
31. “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
32. “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
33. “A lot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cause because of all the companies that failed since the 1990s?. 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
34. “When there are multiple double-spent versions of the same transaction, one and only one will become valid.” — Satoshi Nakamoto
35. “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
36. “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
37. “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
38. “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
39. “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
40. “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
41. “The Bitcoin network might actually reduce spam by diverting zombie farms to generating bitcoins instead.” — Satoshi Nakamoto
42. “In a few decades when the reward gets too small, the transaction fee will become the main compensation for nodes.” — 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. “It is strictly necessary that the longest chain is always considered the valid one.” — Satoshi Nakamoto
45. “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: 1,37,500 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
46. “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
47. “Only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes.” — Satoshi Nakamoto
48. “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
49. “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
50. “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
51. “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
152. “When you generate a new bitcoin address, it only takes disk space on your own computer (like 500 bytes). It’s like generating a new PGP private key, but less CPU intensive because it’s ECC. The address space is effectively unlimited. It doesn’t hurt anyone, so generate all you want.” — Satoshi Nakamoto
53. “If you’re sad about paying the fee, you could always turn the tables and run a node yourself and maybe someday rake in a 0.44 fee yourself.” — Satoshi Nakamoto
54. “Those coins can never be recovered, and the total circulation is less. Since the effective circulation is reduced, all the remaining coins are worth slightly more. It’s the opposite of when a government prints money and the value of existing money goes down.” — Satoshi Nakamoto
55. “Bitcoin addresses you generate are kept forever. A bitcoin address must be kept to show ownership of anything sent to it. If you were able to delete a bitcoin address and someone sent to it, the money would be lost.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
56. “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
57. “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
58. “As you figured out, the root problem is we shouldn’t be counting or spending transactions until they have at least 1 confirmation. 0/unconfirmed transactions are very much second class citizens. At most, they are advice that something has been received, but counting them as balance or spending them is premature.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
59. “The average total coins generated across the network per day stays the same. Faster machines just get a larger share than slower machines. If everyone bought faster machines, they wouldn’t get more coins than before.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
60. “The requirement is that the good guys collectively have more CPU proof-of-worker than any single attacker.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
61. “It’s the same situation as gold and gold mining. The marginal cost of gold mining tends to stay near the price of gold. Gold mining is a waste, but that waste is far less than the utility of having gold available as a medium of exchange. I think the case will be the same for Bitcoin. The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used. Therefore, not having Bitcoin would be the net waste.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
62. “Proof-of-work has the nice property that it can be relayed through untrusted middlemen. We don’t have to worry about a chain of custody of communication. It doesn’t matter who tells you a longest chain, the proof-of-work speaks for itself.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
63. “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
64. “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
65. “I would be surprised if 10 years from now we’re not using electronic currency in some way, now that we know a way to do it that won’t inevitably get dumbed down when the trusted third party gets cold feet.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
66. “We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. We started with the usual framework of coins made from digital signatures, which provides strong control of ownership, but is incomplete without a way to prevent double-spending. To solve this, we proposed a peer-to-peer network using proof-of-work to record a public history of transactions that quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change if honest nodes control a majority of CPU proof-of-worker.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
67. “By convention, the first transaction in a block is a special transaction that starts a new coin owned by the creator of the block. This adds an incentive for nodes to support the network, and provides a way to initially distribute coins into circulation, since there is no central authority to issue them.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
68. “Generation is basically free anywhere that has electric heat, since your computer’s heat is offsetting your baseboard electric heating. Many small flats have electric heat out of convenience.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
69. “The fact that new coins are produced means the money supply increases by a planned amount, but this does not necessarily result in inflation. If the supply of money increases at the same rate that the number of people using it increases, prices remain stable. If it does not increase as fast as demand, there will be deflation and early holders of money will see its value increase. Coins have to get initially distributed somehow, and a constant rate seems like the best formula.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
70. “A rational market price for something that is expected to increase in value will already reflect the present value of the expected future increases. In your head, you do a probability estimate balancing the odds that it keeps increasing.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
71. “As computers get faster and the total computing proof-of-worker applied to creating bitcoins increases, the difficulty increases proportionally to keep the total new production constant. Thus, it is known in advance how many new bitcoins will be created every year in the future.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
72. “What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
73. “Yes, [we will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography,] but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. 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
74. “If you’re having trouble with the inflation issue, it’s easy to tweak it for transaction fees instead. It’s as simple as this: let the output value from any transaction be 1 cent less than the input value. Either the client software automatically writes transactions for 1 cent more than the intended payment value, or it could come out of the payee’s side. The incentive value when a node finds a proof-of-work for a block could be the total of the fees in the block.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
75. “We consider the scenario of an attacker trying to generate an alternate chain faster than the honest chain. Even if this is accomplished, it does not throw the system open to arbitrary changes, such as creating value out of thin air or taking money that never belonged to the attacker. Nodes are not going to accept an invalid transaction as payment, and honest nodes will never accept a block containing them. An attacker can only try to change one of his own transactions to take back money he recently spent.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
76. “You could say coins are issued by the majority. They are issued in a limited, predetermined amount.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
77. “Subscription sites that need some extra proof-of-work for their free trial so it doesn’t cannibalize subscriptions could charge bitcoins for the trial.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
78. “I very much wanted to find some way to include a short message, but the problem is, the whole world would be able to see the message. As much as you may keep reminding people that the message is completely non-private, it would be an accident waiting to happen.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
79. “The design supports a tremendous variety of possible transaction types that I designed years ago. Escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third party arbitration, multi-party signature, etc. If Bitcoin catches on in a big way, these are things we’ll want to explore in the future, but they all had to be designed at the beginning to make sure they would be possible later.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
80. “The incentive can also be funded with transaction fees. If the output value of a transaction is less than its input value, the difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive value of the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
81. “When a node finds a proof-of-work, the new block is propagated throughout the network and everyone adds it to the chain and starts working on the next block after it. Any nodes that had the other transaction will stop trying to include it in a block, since it’s now invalid according to the accepted chain.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
82. “We should have a gentleman’s agreement to postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can for the good of the network. It’s much easer to get new users up to speed if they don’t have to worry about GPU drivers and compatibility. It’s nice how anyone with just a CPU can compete fairly equally right now.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
83. “The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
84. “At equilibrium size, many nodes will be server farms with one or two network nodes that feed the rest of the farm over a LAN.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
85. “The guy who received the double-spend that became invalid never thought he had it in the first place. His software would have shown the transaction go from “unconfirmed” to “invalid”. If necessary, the UI can be made to hide transactions until they’re sufficiently deep in the block chain.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
86. “This helps keep you from turning your coins over rapidly unless you’re forcing it by actually turning all your coins over rapidly.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
87. “The price of .com registrations is lower than it should be, therefore any good name you might think of is always already taken by some domain name speculator.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
88. “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.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
89. “Although it would be possible to handle coins individually, it would be unwieldy to make a separate transaction for every cent in a transfer. To allow value to be split and combined, transactions contain multiple inputs and outputs. Normally there will be either a single input from a larger previous transaction or multiple inputs combining smaller amounts, and at most two outputs: one for the payment, and one returning the change, if any, back to the sender.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
90. “The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU proof-of-worker than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto
91. “The receiver of a payment must wait an hour or so before believing that it’s valid. The network will resolve any possible double-spend races by then.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto