In The Shadow of Satoshi's Ghost: Why Bitcoin Mythology Matters

The Breakdown

Blockworks

Investing, Business

4.8 • 806 Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2020

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On Wednesday, a batch of coins mined just a month after bitcoin’s birth were moved. It was the first time since August 2017 that any bitcoin from early 2009 had been transferred, and the action set Bitcoin Twitter on fire. While a number of bitcoin archaeologists quickly and persuasively argued the tokens were almost assuredly not mined by bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, it was a moment that reinforced the living history in the bitcoin ecosystem. In this episode, NLW looks at what makes the Satoshi mythology powerful: Genuine technical innovation and problem solving that had stymied some brilliant minds for decades Incredible instincts around narrative and human psychology, as reflected in the “Chancellor on the Brink” message embedded in the Genesis Block and the ceremony around the halving The incredible contrariness of a creator withdrawing in a world where entrepreneurs are lionized like no one else in society And while the battles within the bitcoin community around interpretation may look more like the early history of religions than like a business ecosystem, NLW argues that fervor is a key part of what de-risks bitcoin, even for investors who don’t at all care about the mythology.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond.
0:12.0	This episode is sponsored by ArisX.com, the Stellar Development Foundation, and Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund.
0:20.0	The Breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk.
0:22.6	Here's your host, NLW.
0:27.7	Welcome back to the Breakdown.
0:29.9	It is Friday, May 22nd.
0:32.6	We are on the verge of Memorial Day weekend,
0:35.3	the historic beginning of summer around the U.S.
0:39.1	And to celebrate going into this new season, this new period where we hopefully leave behind
0:44.9	a lot of the pain of the last season, I wanted to celebrate and just discuss something
0:50.1	that was uniquely Bitcoin from earlier this week. On Wednesday, I tweeted out,
0:55.7	as if Bitcoin didn't have so much else going for it right now, the absolute intrigue of
1:01.0	the living history of it is insane. So this episode is about what I was talking about and why
1:07.1	Bitcoin's mythology matters. At about 11 a.m. East Coast time on Wednesday, the world noticed that a Bitcoin transaction
1:16.9	had occurred with Bitcoins that were more than 11 years old. These UTXOs, which refer to the
1:23.6	specific Bitcoins that were moved, date back February 9th, 2009, which was only one
1:30.4	month after the creation of Bitcoin. So these coins were mined when Bitcoin was literally worth nothing.
1:36.9	There was nothing to even theoretically give it a value, which means it was one of the very
1:41.3	earliest miners who actually had produced these coins, right?
1:45.7	They were produced with a GPU, most likely, on just someone's random computer.
1:49.9	And so immediately people got incredibly excited, wondering, is it possible?
1:55.4	Was it possible that these were Satoshi coins?
	...

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