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17 years* (thelemmy.club)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/buttcoin@awful.systems
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/37913022

https://mastodon.online/@FranckLeroy/109627512801712672

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[+] -8 points 6 months ago (4 children)

I don’t think it’s fair to blame Nakamoto for the way idiots have abused his invention (unless he’s a crypto bro and I don’t know about it, in which case, please pardon my ignorance).

Edit: what don’t I know?

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  • [–] 13 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Nakamoto didn't invent blockchains; Merkle did, in 1979. Nakamoto's paper presented a cryptographic scheme which could be used with a choice of blockchain. There are several non-cryptocurrency systems built around synchronizing blockchains, like git. However, Nakamoto was clearly an anarcho-libertarian trying to escape government currency controls, as the first line of the paper makes clear:

    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.

    Not knowing those two things about the Bitcoin paper is why you're getting downvoted. Nakamoto wasn't some random innocent researcher.

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I'm sorry but like why do you think Satoshi created Bitcoin, like what was the purpose of that paper?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)

    The tweet doesn’t say that he created bitcoin. It says he created blockchain. I didn’t want to assume something negative about a person without knowing for sure. For all I know, he’s just some random dude who’s good at math/coding, and others are responsible for the bitcoin nonsense.

    I even admitted my ignorance on the topic, hoping for a straightforward answer, and you can see how well that worked out.

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago

    Well, Satoshi's whitepaper is called "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", so it's pretty obvious what the author(s) consider(s) its main contribution to be. Arguably, the concept of a blockchain wasn't invented by Satoshi (the idea of a ledger using Merkle trees of hashes existed before), neither was proof-of-work (the idea of requiring computation as a cost of performing an action also existed, e.g. to prevent email spam). The novelty was combining all that to create a currency system and the implementation. And the motivation spilling throughout the paper is very much libertarian and goldbuggy.

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