Today marks 17 years since Satoshi Nakamoto published his Bitcoin whitepaper on the crypto mailing list in 2008. At the time, Bitcoin was just a new niche technology proposition, the latest in a long lineage of niche technologies created by the cypherpunks of the 1990s.
Since that day 17 years ago, Bitcoin has undergone many major changes. It has gone from a niche Internet collectible, to a decentralized network powering illegal darknet markets, to a mainstream retail speculative investment, to a new asset class favored by Wall Street and governments around the world. We’ve all had a front row seat to the first explosive global technological revolution for the Internet, and it was a daunting experience.
On this anniversary, I think it’s important to touch on a very relevant concept: POSIWID (The purpose of a system is what it does). The basic idea is that if you have a complex system, it is pointless to try to define it. want What really matters is what the parts of that complex system are actually doing it. At the end of the day, that’s all that matters.
We find ourselves once again in an age where people are bringing back white papers as placeholders for some kind of founding document, definition, blueprint. Whitepapers are not like that. This is just a high-level abstract explanation of Proof-of-Work blockchains used to implement digital currencies. This is the idea of a wheeled cart and the actual blueprint (source code) for the cart.
Bitcoiners seem to obsess over whitepapers like this on a regular basis, inevitably using it as a justification to take hostile actions against use cases and ideas for improving Bitcoin that they don’t agree with. We may or may not get through this eventually, but it is an unhealthy attitude to have towards a potentially impactful technology like Bitcoin.
When the first tendrils of the early Internet stretched between devices and digital modems were invented that allowed digital signals to flow between devices, people weren’t reciting the writings or speeches of Alexander Graham Bell. They accepted it as a valuable innovation, but in today’s world the dynamics are completely reversed. Today, most telephone signals are actually carried by communication media specifically constructed for digital communication.
The telephone network was used to bootstrap the digital medium of the modern Internet in ways that Alexander Graham Bell may have known only a little about, reshaping the entire world in ways that were unimaginable to people of his generation.
When Satoshi released the white paper, he didn’t give us a founding document to bind or constrain us, and he outlined the software that would follow.
That’s the real gift he gave us: software. And he gave it to us completely free and open source to do whatever we decided to do.
“BitDNS users may be completely liberal about adding large data capabilities because they require relatively few domain registrars; Bitcoin users, on the other hand, may become increasingly domineering about limiting the size of the chain to make it easy to use for large numbers of users and small devices.” -Satoshi Nakamoto, 2010
This quote is always brought up in the context of Bitcoin, which allows for limited block sizes and multiple features, but the one that always stands out to me the most is “what the user might get.” After all, before his disappearance, Satoshi clearly respected users’ wishes in the context of important and fundamental decisions like block size limits.
Bitcoin no longer belongs to Satoshi, it belongs to us, including how to actually use it. We decide the purpose of the system. It’s important to remember that.
This post What happened to Bitcoin 17 years after Satoshi Nakamoto published his white paper? First published in Bitcoin Magazine and written by Shinobi.
