Quote Wall

“Everything was centralized, so I was googling for something like a peer-to-peer currency, and then Bitcoin came up; it had just been published.”

Satoshi Nakamoto's first collaborator, creator of Bitcoin Talk and first content manager on Bitcoin.org, describing how he found the project just after it was published.

“I think Bitcoin is a very clever protocol, and I have enormous respect for the guy who invented it.”

The creator of PGP, the encryption tool at the center of the 1990s crypto wars, gives his view of Bitcoin and its inventor.

“To me, the tribe should be first and foremost not about a particular asset, but about the underlying ideals. I hope that as Ethereum we can continue to convince all of you that we can be very effective stewards of those ideals, making sure that financial self-sovereignty and a free and open internet can continue to be a reality for people, even during a time when lots of people don’t want it to be.”

Ethereum’s co-founder, who started out writing about Bitcoin, arguing that crypto should be loyal to the cypherpunk ideals of self-sovereignty and a free internet rather than to any one coin.

“Bitcoin was never supposed to be a get-rich-quick scheme. It was supposed to be a get-free-quick scheme.”

Early 2011 Bitcoin investor and evangelist who sold his Lamborghini to buy more bitcoin under $1, and later became the most popular supporter of big blocks.

“My big one is that I think Bitcoin should have a small bit of inflation. My argument only becomes relevant in maybe another 20 years anyway, so it doesn’t really matter that much right now.”

A long-time Bitcoin Core contributor making his case for tail emission, still an open debate concerning Bitcoin’s security budget.

“As Bitcoin grows, as this stuff becomes more popular and more widespread, it actually starts challenging government sovereignty over money.”

The founder of SatoshiDice and ShapeShift on why Bitcoin collides with state control of money.

“Bitcoin is the best form of money that human civilization has ever encountered.”

The creator of Litecoin and a former Coinbase engineer ranking Bitcoin as money.

“There was all this fighting about how to activate it without a civil war, when nobody was actually against Taproot.”

Blockstream’s research director, who worked on the Schnorr and Taproot research, describing the 2021 activation fight.

“If I had to do it again, I would do it again, but not the same way.”

The former CEO of Mt. Gox, whose 2014 collapse is one of the defining events of Bitcoin’s history, on whether he would do it again.

“I think the security of open source is the way to achieve security.”

The founder of the first Bitcoin mining pool and co-founder of Trezor refers to open source as the basis of security.

“I’m not Satoshi. I wish. I tried to be Satoshi for two years at DigiCash, trying to figure out how to make Chaumian DigiCash decentralized.”

The Zcash founder, who worked at DigiCash in the 1990s, on the years he spent trying to make Chaumian ecash decentralized before Bitcoin did it.

“One of the things that made me sad about Bitcoin maximalism is that people take it to an extreme, really dumping on developers who just want to try something new and interesting.”

A Bitcoin Core developer from the Satoshi era explains where maximalism goes wrong.

“You can’t be involved with Bitcoin and not have a node.”

The lead developer of libbitcoin, an alternative full-node implementation, talks about the importance of running your own node.

“There’s also going to be a controversial discussion about what we do with all the Bitcoin sitting in quantum-vulnerable UTXOs.”

The Casa co-founder and security engineer on the quantum-vulnerable coins question, still an ongoing debate.

“Bitcoin’s money use case is really important, but it only resonates with a small number of people. If we can make Bitcoin do more things, and more interesting things, then we can make Bitcoin resonate with more and more people.”

The creator of Ordinals and inscriptions, the protocol that reopened the blockspace debate in 2023.

“In a truly permissionless system, a miner shouldn’t have enough information to be able to prevent a transaction. Bitcoin does not have privacy, and that means permissionlessness is a social construct: the only reason Bitcoin remains permissionless is that there is a social contract around it.”

The former Monero lead maintainer on why, without privacy, Bitcoin’s permissionlessness rests only on a social contract.

“All these people are making a huge mistake, because when the miners care more about fees than the block reward, the endgame will be merge-mined L2s that pay transaction fees to the miners.”

The author of the drivechain proposals (BIP 300/301) on why the endgame for Bitcoin’s security is merge-mined layer 2s that pay their fees to miners.

“The only reason the Bitcoin supply can’t be inflated is that the community protects it like nothing else.”

A Bitcoin developer, later a Taproot Wizards co-founder, on social consensus as the guard of the supply cap.

“If they can coordinate easily, that means they are a giant attack surface, because then the government knows that this group of developers is easy to coordinate.”

A long-time Italian Bitcoin educator on why developers that are easy to coordinate are a security risk.

“The vision is that integrity should never be assumed. It should always be demonstrated publicly for all to verify.”

The co-inventor of STARKs and co-author of the Zerocash paper stating the idea behind validity proofs.

“If you’ve got a protocol that can be easily changed, then of course you can’t get that level of trust.”

The BitGo CEO, who co-created the SPDY protocol behind HTTP/2, on why a protocol that resists change earns trust.