13 years ago today, the creator of the Bitcoin network, Satoshi Nakamoto published the inventor’s first forum post on the P2P Foundation website. The forum post called “Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency” introduced the e-cash system to the members of the advocacy and research forum focused on peer-to-peer dynamics in society.
The first of the February 3, 2009 forum posts introducing Bitcoin
There were three occasions in February 2009 when Satoshi Nakamoto presented the Bitcoin inventor’s white paper and open source code base to members of the P2P Foundation forum. The February 11, 2009 occasion was the first time the creator of Bitcoin publicly announced the project using the P2P Foundation forum. Prior to these instances during February, Nakamoto operated the messaging system linked to the crypto mailing list hosted at metzdowd.com.
The introductory forum post is quite fascinating, and the inventor also leaves a link to the software’s first version on the forum as well. “I’ve developed a new open source P2P e-cash system called Bitcoin,” Nakamoto wrote 13 years ago today. “It’s completely decentralized, with no central server or trusted parties, because everything is based on crypto proof instead of trust. Give it a try, or take a look at the screenshots and design paper,” the creator added.
Nakamoto is extremely descriptive in the first forum post, and the inventor of Bitcoin explains the problem with conventional currencies. “The fundamental problem with conventional money is all the trust needed to make it work,” Nakamoto wrote that day. “You have to trust the central bank not to depreciate the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks have to be trusted to hold our money and move it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.
Bitcoin’s inventor further stressed:
We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.
Nakamoto responds, “I think this is the first time we’ve tried a decentralized, non-trust based system”
Anyone who reads the first forum post written by Satoshi can understand that the inventor is trying to spread the word, so that more people can test out the Bitcoin network in the early days. Nakamoto’s message on the forum was not answered until the next day, as an individual named Sepp Hasslberger was the first to respond to Nakamoto’s P2P Foundation’s first thread.
“Great stuff,” Hasslberger wrote at the time. “This is the first real innovation in money since the Bank of England started to issue its promissory notes for gold in the vaults, which then became known as banknotes. I believe an open source currency has great potential. A bit like Google becoming the default search engine for many of us,” Hasslberger added. A few other individuals in the post talked about “old Chaumian central stuff” and e-currency projects such as e-gold that failed in the past.
Satoshi answered a few questions in the thread and noted that the “old Chaumian central mint stuff” was the only thing available at the time. Bitcoin’s inventor reminded members of the P2P Foundation that the Bitcoin protocol was decentralized and different. “A lot of people automatically dismiss e-money as a lost cause because of all the businesses that have failed since the 1990s,” Nakamoto replied to one of the thread replies on February 15, 2009. obviously it was just the centrally controlled nature of these systems that doomed them. I think this is the first time we’ve tried a decentralized and non-trust based system,” added the creator of the cryptocurrency.
On February 18, Nakamoto came back to the thread to answer multiple questions asked by inquisitive Sepp Hasslberger at the time. In response to Hasslberger’s questions, Nakamoto laid out three interesting features the Bitcoin network showcased and insisted that the coins would be scarce. Nakamoto said:
It is a distributed global database, with additions to the database with majority consent, based on a set of rules they follow: [One] – Every time someone finds proof of work to generate a block, they get new coins. [Two] — Proof of work difficulty is adjusted every two weeks to target an average of 6 blocks per hour (network-wide). [Three] — Block given coins are halved every 4 years — You could say coins are majority issued. They are issued in a limited and predetermined amount.
It’s safe to say that Satoshi Nakamoto’s e-cash system caught on and after 13 years, 18,954,937 bitcoins have been issued out of the maximum supply of 21 million so far. Bitcoin’s (BTC) market capitalization is currently worth more than $800 billion and since its inception on January 3, 2009, the network has been functional with a 99.98713391230% uptime rating. Nakamoto’s invention has also sparked the creation of thousands of crypto coins, and today there’s 12,523 crypto assets within the crypto economy.
