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Little is known about Satoshi Nakamoto, the person. Although often Satoshi is referred to as a he in a singular, that is only for convenience as no one know whether he is an individual, a group, an institution or even, as some may believe, an alien from outer space. There are, however, circumstantial evidences and some revealing statements which may show why he is anonymous and why it may be difficult, if not perhaps impossible, for his identity to be unwillingly known. In all probability Satoshi is a cypherpunk, a group of prescient who’s who of the computer world who foresaw decades ago the dangers, as well as the benefits, of technology with a primary focus on the near death of privacy that our society now faces. They are and have been at the forefront of an arms race between a government which aims to know more and more and a citizenry which highly values privacy and anonymity. Egold, Liberty Dollar, Liberty Reserve and all other previous attempts at emoney, like Napster, were centrally controlled and shut down by the government for one reason or another. Furthermore, the leaders of these centralized attempts at creating emoney were imprisoned under one law or another, which would have warned anyone familiar with these events that the government was very hostile to any attempts to create emoney.Satoshi was clearly aware of this background as shown by a statement he made in a Bitcointalk thread about a wired article on Bitcoin which paints it as a currency that Wikileaks could adopt to raise funding following a financial blockade by banking institution:Satoshi was clearly aware of this background as shown by a statement he made in a Bitcointalk thread about a wired article on Bitcoin which paints it as a currency that Wikileaks could adopt to raise funding following a financial blockade by banking institution: “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.” It is probable, therefore, that the precautions he would have taken to maintain anonymity would have needed to be sufficiently robust to protect from government surveillance, which, even prior to Snowden’s revelations, was taken to be a fact by the cyberpunks as they believe that “information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space.” The hacker’s claim therefore that Satoshi used a “primary gmx under his full name and had aliases set up underneath it” is simply not credible when Satoshi’s aim seems to have been from the very beginning to leave no trace of his identity not only to the public, but also to the government.
He has succeeded so far and his success has turned him into a hero of the digital age, an incarnation of the principle of privacy which is impossible without anonymity, and into a figure of myth which, like all myths, tells us a truth about today’s reality through symbolisms and metaphors. Genesis Block is the name of the first block of Bitcoin ever mined—thus called "Genesis." The Genesis Block forms the foundation of the entire Bitcoin trading system and is the prototype of all other blocks in the blockchain. In 2009, Bitcoin's named developer, Satoshi Nakamoto, created the Genesis Block, which launched the process of Bitcoin trading that's in place today. Perhaps the true gift of the Genesis Block is its legacy of accountability, integrity, and transparency. Because the Genesis Block, also known as Block 0, began the process of trading bitcoin, Bitcoin fans hold the Genesis Block in a kind of cult-like reverence, as they do its creator. Fans are drawn to Bitcoin's arcane construct and idiosyncratic vocabulary with the fervor of one obsessed with a sophisticated arcade game.Bitcoin devotees have been donating small amounts of bitcoin (BTC) to the Genesis Block as a tribute to Satoshi Nakamoto. This is seen as a kind of sacrifice because once a coin is moved into the Genesis Block, it can never be moved again—sort of like throwing a quarter into a fountain. Bitcoin is a type of cryptocurrency, which is based on the peer-to-peer electronic cash system developed by Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin refers to the system and concept of the trading platform and "bitcoin"—small "b"—refers to the virtual coinage that is traded. There are no actual coins, thus the "bit"—or binary digit, the most basic unit of data in computing—before "coin."In the world of digital currency, blocks are files where data about the Bitcoin network and its transactions are permanently recorded. Each time a block is completed—that is, filled with bitcoin transactions—it gives way to the next block in the blockchain. The only way to release new cryptocurrency into circulation is through mining. So, to "mine bitcoin" is to "mint currency."Like gold, Bitcoin cannot be created arbitrarily. Gold must be mined out of the ground, and BTC must be mined via digital means. Moreover, Bitcoin's founder stipulated that, like gold, the supply of bitcoin should be limited and finite. Only 21 million BTC can be mined in total. When miners have unlocked this many bitcoin, then the planet's supply will be tapped out, unless someone changes Bitcoin's protocol to allow for a larger supply. Mysteries of the Genesis BlockBeginning with the fact that the name, "Satoshi Nakamoto," itself is a pseudonym, the Genesis Block and the founding of Bitcoin remains riddled with mystery. Shortly after the launch of Bitcoin, the person called "Satoshi Nakamoto" vanished from the face of the earth, leaving barely a trace. This auspicious event paved the way for the continuous enigma surrounding what fans lovingly call "the Block." The First 50 BTC Could Not be SpenThe Genesis Block's beginnings were shrouded in the debate about a fine point of its creation: Was the code that rendered the Genesis Block effectively untradeable an intention or a mistake on the part of Nakamoto? Although the Genesis Block points to a web address—written into the Genesis Block's code—that link displayed an error message when activated. The system could not find the first 50-BTC transaction in its database, and the spending transaction was rejected. So, the Genesis Block's transaction is not considered as a "real transaction" by the original Bitcoin client. But Why? Did Nakamoto mean for the first bitcoin to be non-tradeable? Or, was it a mistake? This became the subject of much debate among Bitcoin fans and insiders. Because of the precision of this developer, however, most believe that it was hardly an error. Nakamoto likely wrote the code for the Genesis Block exactly the way he wanted it. We just will never know why, as the quirk was not discovered until after Nakamoto disappeared. Current versions of the Bitcoin system handle the block/transaction databases differently from the original system, so the Genesis Bock's transaction is now just a weird special case in the codeAnother puzzling aspect of the Genesis Block is the secret message that Nakamoto instilled within the Block's raw data: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."vAlthough Nakamoto never commented on the meaning of this text, most believe that it serves as a mission statement for Bitcoin itself. The text is a headline for an article in the January 3, 2009 edition of The [London] Times about the British government's failure to stimulate the economy following the 2007–08 financial crisis. Nakamoto famously hated the idea of too-big-to-fail financial institutions and wanted Bitcoin to be different in that regard. Most people think that Nakamoto's reference to the article in the Genesis Block's code was a hint as to how Bitcoin is different from the big investment banks that needed government bailouts in 2008.Bitcoin cannot be bailed out because its process eliminates the middleman; there is no third-party, no corporate entity to go between BTC and the consumer. The Bitcoin network checks and double-checks itself continuously via complex mathematical problems that are first resolved by computers, then by human bitcoin miners. One cannot proceed with any bitcoin trade until the math puzzle is validated. Another failsafe is that, because all transactions are stored forever, the actions of miners can always be traced, which makes it impossible to hide any evidence of wrongdoing. In November 2013, early protegees of Nakamoto formed the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute (SNI) to educate the public about the history and vision of Bitcoin’s creation. Among other interesting details, the SNI houses one of the biggest remnants of Nakamoto’s online existence: An extensive list of forum posts, broken into subject categories, that the Bitcoin creator penned while he still worked on the project.Perhaps the true gift of the Genesis Block, however, is its legacy of accountability, integrity, and transparency—qualities that the financial services sector is painfully learning to acquire.
35 unique frames created individually in illustrator and compiled into GIF animation. 1091x1200px, 44.8MB