What would you tell Satoshi Nakamoto if you could time travel?

If you could go back in time to meet Satoshi Nakamoto while he was still developing Bitcoin, what would you tell him? The question is counterfactual and unrealistic in regards to the contemporary understanding of physics. However, there is still merit to it in the sense that it proves how the last 14 years have provided us a better understanding of what Bitcoin is and how it works.

Satoshi might have been a visionary, but he couldn’t envision how the project would evolve and what kind of challenges it would face while new technology gets built. Something like Taproot wasn’t possible in 2008 – for the simple reason that the patent for Schnorr signatures expired in February of the same year, so there wasn’t enough time to build as many libraries as ECDSA already had. Likewise, Satoshi Nakamoto’s plans to have a game of poker and a peer to peer marketplace embedded into the client proved to be a short-sighted and inefficient idea.

Then there’s the value overflow incident from August 15th 2010: an inflation bug which led to 92.2 billion bitcoins being printed out of thin air. Though the issue was fixed within a few hours via soft fork, it was an early sign that Bitcoin needs conservative development and thorough code review. Clearly, Satoshi wasn’t some time-traveling genius, alien overlord, artificial intelligence, or all-knowing entity. He was a flawed human being who built a network that needed fixing to work for its intended purpose. Libbitcoin maintainer Eric Voskuil would go as far as claiming that Satoshi Nakamoto wasn’t a professional programmer or software engineer, as parts of the C++ code look amateurish.

Satoshi thought that the longest chain was the right one – as opposed to the one with the most Proof of Work cycles that secure it. He also didn’t make a clear distinction between validators and block producers (miners), as he assumed that everyone would mine from their home computer. Then Slush showed up and proved him wrong while he was still around. Satoshi Nakamoto was also wrong about his assumptions regarding privacy: generating a new address for every transaction didn’t turn out to be a great design – but in his defense, cryptographic breakthroughs such as Confidential Transactions, Zero Knowledge Proofs, Ring Signatures, MimbleWimble, and even CoinJoins were created years later. The only privacy tool that Satoshi might have had at his disposal was the Chaumian mint, which is impossible to create without a degree of centralization.

Going back to the initial question: thinking about what you would tell Satoshi Nakamoto is helpful in many regards. It certainly doesn’t change the past and doesn’t affect the current events, but it helps everyone else realize that we’ve come a long way and learned many important lessons.

So as part of my video series that’s all about engaging the community to partake in discussions, it is my great pleasure to ask “WHAT WOULD YOU TELL SATOSHI NAKAMOTO?!”. Check out the video below to get some video responses and take a look at the timestamps to identify what you might be looking for.

Time stamps:

 00:41 – John Osterman: refuse to speak due to butterfly effect

 01:18 – CoinJoined Chris suggests that speaking with Satoshi Nakamoto about Bitcoin is what a time traveler is supposed to do 

01:51 – George Saoulidis: say nothing to Satoshi 

03:06 – Petro Zapata: tell Satoshi to be less aggressive with the coin distribution in the early years

04:17 – DJ: Peter Todd’s tail emmission 

05:25 – The Austrian School of economics in Bitcoin

06:03 – Ray Rizzling: prevent inflation bug 

07:17 – Breaking FUD magazine 

08:00 – Buy a Cryptosteel using promo code BTCTKVR for 10% off 

08:51 – Supra Cycle 

09:36 – New version of Wasabi wallet 

09:59 – Satodime 

10:48 – New episodes of Bitcoin Takeover podcast 

11:25 – Australian HODL: Satoshi should mention that he’s not Craig 

13:07 – Paralelna Cash: Fix the bugs! 

16:00 – Urban Hacker: remove address reuse 

18:45 – Lord Snooty: make Bitcoin not replicable 

21:25 – CoinJoined Chris: why are there 100 million units & what should we call them? 

23:21 – Satoshi pwning Dan Larimer 

24:08 – Silent Lamb: Satoshi should disappear 

25:02 – Bert de Groot: change “we” with “I” for Satoshi’s singularity 

25:59 – Wenze: Satoshi should have burned his coins 

28:06 – Governments & corporations crashing the BTC price effectively 

28:59 – Richard Gordon: weekly difficulty readjustment, annual coin supply decrease 

31:14 – MFer1318: does Bitcoin maximalism make sense? 

36:16 – Elim0nade: redistributing Satoshi’s coins 

40:40 – The Patoshi project 

43:53 – PloetzlichPrinz: change the name of Bitcoin 

46:53 – Thomas Farstrike: Warn Satoshi against altcoins/forks 

51:51 – Rant about shitcoins 

58:26 – Phyrooo: Bitcoin should have been like MimbleWimble 

01:01:50 – Bodi: Satoshi should stay anonymous & lock his coins 

01:04:44 – Christopher MacMillan: Make Bitcoin private 

01:05:06 – Jim On: Warn Satoshi about blockchain analysis 

01:08:53 – Oiko: Don’t trust women 

01:10:12 – Alligatour: Nano, lol