Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
“ Freedom is what we choose to reveal to the world. ”
With the advent of the Internet and digital technology, the protection of personal data is becoming a priority.
In the IT field, cryptography is the art of encrypting information to make it unintelligible , that is to say incomprehensible to the average non-computer scientist, except to those who have the key to decode it.
Governments were interested in cryptography because it was crucial to the outcome of World War II , they saw it as ammunition and limited its export.
The Cypherpunks in 1993
This is a group of activists based in San Francisco where freedom is placed above everything , it is for it that they fight, in 93 in his manifesto Eric Hughes said it all:
“In the electronic world where society is open, privacy is essential, we cannot expect governments, companies, or any other giant faceless entity to graciously grant us the means to preserve our privacy. Cypherpunks write code, we know someone has to build the software to protect privacy and we'll do it."
According to them, a human being could only express himself by maintaining his anonymity .
This movement has given rise to attempts to recreate various fundamental institutions in society using the complex mathematics of cryptographic systems , such as electoral systems, privacy-preserving communication systems. Cryptography allowed cyberpunks a certain form of new freedoms such as communicating , sending money , there were different creations of the concept of digital money .
Controlling people's money means controlling every aspect of their lives; if you monitor people's money, you know everything there is to know about them.
For years, there had been a form of distrust in the traditional market system, and some people had been working on a peer-to-peer currency system for decades. As the Internet democratized information, it was also necessary to find the system. currency that went with it, such as a universal global currency that does not depend on a central bank, this is where the leading role of Satoshi Nakamoto came into play, to shake up the international monetary system with its creation.
Double spending
He who controls exchanges controls freedom, given that the Internet had become an immense purchasing interface, he needed his anonymous, tamper-proof cash, without an intermediary, but an obstacle made all this impossible for the moment, it was the double expense .
Double spending is the fact that the digital information left after a purchase transaction on the Internet was easy to copy, it was necessary to find a way so that a digital transaction was only spent once, because the digital universe allows make a perfect copy of the original indistinguishable digital information, while keeping that original. Solving the double spending problem was a way to prevent counterfeiting on the network and make copy and paste obsolete for digital payments.
Bitcoin is the answer to this problem, the fruit of several years of reflection by passionate actors, and of a cypherpunk ideological movement for freedom.
The Advent of Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto
In 2008, the United States experienced the worst day of financial crisis on Wall Street since 1987, the stock market experienced a staggering 21% drop in its shares, leading to a global recession, and one day, Satoshi Nakamoto pulverizing double spending, allowing the use of a virtual currency with complete transparency, anonymity and security, by preventing the copying of digital transactional traces, it was a feat, a revolution, and an upheaval of the international monetary system already in place for years. decades. On October 31, 2008, he published a very detailed 8-page white paper on the metzdowd.com website, explaining the cryptography of the digital currency Bitcoin to a list of cryptographers including cyberpunks, and on January 9, 2009, he published on sourceforge.net, the first bitcoin software which launched the peer-to-peer network allowing the first Bitcoin cryptocurrency transactions.
For Satoshi Nakamoto, it was an alternative to the international monetary system in full decline, in order to legitimize the birth of an anti-bank, anti-central bank and anti-government digital currency, and Bitcoin becomes the means of transaction monetary for people who no longer have confidence in the banking system, removing this obligation of confidence in banks.
It very quickly grew in assets and production, as the cypherpunks very quickly developed the codes to implement it, so that it could spread all over the world.
Initially, Bitcoin was not perfect, it had bugs and flaws and could be easily destroyed by a motivated attacker, this did not happen, because most people and governments saw Bitcoin as a commodity. junk money, which is what some governments still think today.
Initially, the value of bitcoin was very low compared to the dollar:
1 dollar = 1500 bitcoins
In 2011 and 2012 people announced “I have 10,000 bitcoins to sell” and it sold for 10 dollars.
The first real bitcoin transaction to buy an item was a pizza for 10,000 bitcoins from Laszlo on a forum.
It was used at that time as a common currency, and autonomous without the need for external guarantee, but not yet on the scale of a state currency like the dollar or the euro in which people have complete confidence, regarding its value and through fact that they can have this money in their hands, pay their taxes and benefit from this currency on the national territory.
In 2010 with the Wikileaks affair, where Julian Assange, having in his possession classified secret files compromising several countries, became the most wanted man in the world, and put pressure on them by threatening to reveal everything about them, on Internet via the Wikileads platform to save its life, the governments of the countries began to invest in digital and block Wikileaks transactions with Paypal and Visa. Having no means of payment to sell its information, wikileaks turned to bitcoin, because no one can take your money and prevent it from being sent to you using cryptocurrency. Bitcoin became the currency of those who needed to remain anonymous, being a free network accessible to all, and without permission to store and move value.
This virtual world is closely linked to the real world, because each digital action has an impact on your reality.
In February 2011, bitcoin reached parity with the dollar:
1 bitcoin = 30.23 dollars
It was in this same year that Satoshi Nakamoto decided to permanently disconnect from the computer system and no longer make public posts, just private emails with bitcoin developers, then disappear, after the CIA asked a by his collaborators Gavin Andresen a presentation on bitcoin in April 2011. He decided to remain anonymous, because it would be a weakness to have someone identifiable as the creator of his program. Thus, no one can be attacked, nor prosecuted or put in prison, they cannot be forced to introduce new control codes for cryptocurrency, which helps to protect it and allow it to develop.
Satoshi Nakamoto would be a group of people or an English-speaking person who uses British spelling, the times of his posts on the Bitcoin forum would indicate the time zones where he might live.
Little anecdote
The American press harassed a sixty-year-old named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto whom he took for the real creator of Satoshi, because he lived a few blocks from where one of the first developers of bitcoin lived.
In 2009, nine days after the creation of the Bitcoin blockchain, Satoshi Nakamoto signed the first bitcoins he mined and sent them to an address that belonged to Hal Finney, a computer scientist who was one of its first developers who was interested in to bitcoin and to communicate with Satoshi. Hal designed reusable proof of work, one of the components that made bitcoin successful. Satoshi asked him for help with building the system, mining and launching, they collaborated, and sent him the first bitcoin transaction. Hal continued to work on bitcoin until his death, suffering from a neurodegenerative disease, he was cryogenically stored at Alcor.
Bitcoin is digital gold, because like gold, it is in limited quantity, and the more researchers there are, the more difficult it is to find it.
What is mining?
This is the keystone of Bitcoin technology, it is a monetary system from which you own money or send it. At the IT level, it takes the form of a register which lists who owns how much money, if someone wants to send money, we modify the register, in this system each participant in the ecosystem keeps a copy of the register, if someone wants to make a transaction and therefore modify the register, they must coordinate with others so that everyone accepts that the transaction takes place. The actors of the community called miners during a transaction, will draw from the group of pending transactions and will constitute a block, they will all compete with each other to validate this transaction block and to be paid in return in bitcoin. The network creates a very complex mathematical puzzle that someone must solve to advance the blockchain by creating a new block in the blockchain, so one must test all possible combinations requiring a lot of computing power, the first one to find the combination the most. tells others, it is he who will validate the block which will be added to the register and the transaction will be considered validated, and therefore we will receive the bitcoin which was sent to us.
As soon as a set of transactions is validated, it constitutes a block , if this block meets certain criteria specific to the cryptocurrency blockchain, it is then added to the top chain forming what is called the blockchain . For Bitcoin, a validated transaction, therefore mining, requires 5 confirmations.
Cryptocurrencies are based on a peer-to-peer network which operates thanks to servers linked to dedicated software, these servers form the nodes of the network and the software allowing communication between its servers is called client . Validated, a transaction within the Bitcoin blockchain amounts to confirming 5 steps which are:
- 1 the propagation of information
Where the bitcoin user during his transaction encodes a signal which is sent to the network's servers
- 2 decentralization of information
Each node records the entire blockchain, so the entire cryptocurrency transaction history is saved in the servers
- 3 information sharing
a node makes its version of the chain available to the public if it allows it
- 4 verification
When a node receives a transaction, it checks whether the issuer of the transaction has the funds it wants to spend; when a node receives a new block, it can also check whether the latter has been validated.
- 5 searches and additions of blocks
A node assembles a group of transactions verifies them, and constitutes a block containing these transactions as well as a hash of the previous block guaranteeing the tamper-proof nature of the chain. This block will be transmitted by the
node across the network to other nodes so that they can recognize it validate it and add it to their new version of the chain. The blockchain lists all transactions made in bitcoin.
Bitcoin does not depend on anyone and relies on all its participants, no central bank, but a ledger shared by all, transparent, unassailable, widely dispersed software which becomes unstoppable, and impregnable.
Satoshi Nakamoto amassed over a thousand bitcoins at the start of the program and has been a billionaire since 2013, as he went from $10 to $1,000. In January 2013, there were about ten companies at the bitcoin meeting, and when it went to $260 in March, there were about a hundred, investors were handing out their business cards, bitcoin was starting to exist. It was mentioned at the conference, companies were raising funds to develop services, the fact that it reached 1000 dollars surprised everyone. This new technology was very profitable, because of the confidence that was increasingly eroding in the current banking system. Bitcoin is a currency limited to 20,999,999,976.9 units, i.e. a life expectancy of 132 years after its creation until 2141. It is for this reason that the cryptocurrency will retain and gain even more value in the years to come. come to be linked to its rarity of purchase.
James Orel threw away his hard drive on which his wallet contained 5,000 bitcoins, without thinking that today it would bring him 5 million euros. This virtual currency is based on a wallet having a private digital key with an email address and a password, if you forget the password or throw away the hard drive this money is lost forever, it is the equivalent of 'a bank account.
Between 2009 and 2020 Satoshi Nakamoto is said to have mined 22,000 blocks and earned nearly 1.1 million bitcoins. He is anonymous rich and the most disturbing thing is that he has never touched the bitcoins in his wallet since its creation and his earnings.
Craig Wright is an Australian entrepreneur who in 2016 presented himself in the media as the real Satoshi Nakamoto, but his statements convinced no one. Despite this lie, the person concerned did not come forward to reestablish the truth about his legitimacy.
In 2017, a bitcoin was worth $19,891.36 and new cryptocurrencies appeared with coding similar to the first cryptocurrency, to copy it, and enrich themselves and appropriate this technology.
People who missed the opportunity to get rich with bitcoin, fell back on other cryptocurrencies in search of the next blockchain whose price will explode and invested en masse, being dream targets for altcoins. At the start of 2018, the capitalization of cryptocurrencies stood at $800 billion. Satoshi Nakamoto became the 50th richest man in the world, making him the 44th richest man in the world.
Everyone created their altcoin and launched it, imagining mining algorithms to have their currency to the detriment of security measures on the blockchain of these cryptocurrencies. Fundraising ICOs were created for the implementation of new cryptocurrency such as ethereum in 2014 where 1 bitcoin (which was worth 200 euros) = 2000 eth.
Blockchain
It is a database, a large register which will list the transactions made in a cryptocurrency, a decentralized, autonomous currency without intermediaries where trust is decentralized. The term blockchain had such hype between 2015 and 2017 that companies like IBM and Deloitte enriched themselves by adding this word everywhere in their advertising.
In 2019 Facebook proposed to implement its Libra cryptocurrency, which became diem, which will then be abandoned in January 2022.
There are 2 big threats to privacy, the Internet giants and the state, which is accelerating their central bank digital currency project issued against debts as still centralized. By digitalizing cash would lose a fundamental characteristic which is anonymity. Companies that provide users' personal data get rich. The risks in certain totalitarian countries in relation to the implementation of their cryptocurrencies, is to better control mobile users who, by using these cryptocurrencies for transactional exchanges, leave behind electronic traces, which is a source of information for these states to know our habits. These electronic traces are transformed into a social score which is a rating assigned by these spy applications to define our purchasing behavior, which encroaches on our privacy and individual freedoms if these technical tools are used for surveillance purposes. This centralized digital currency is a tool for controlling our freedoms and our privacy to show their power according to Satoshi Nakamoto, opaque and traceable which would use our data against us, exactly what the cypherpunks had feared. This phenomenon of control by these totalitarian states through this tool tends to become widespread both in European countries and in the United States . There are therefore applications to prevent any electronic trace during digital transactions.
Bitcoin is a decentralized decision-making system so that its community can decide what to add and what to change and what to avoid. This technology is very specialized and very complex.
The disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto creates an independence and value for bitcoin that other cryptocurrencies do not have.
Today, bitcoin has become an essential currency for certain large banks having already integrated this cryptocurrency into their portfolio.
Companies are buying large amounts of bitcoins worth thousands of millions of dollars and calling it an investment for the future.
In February 2022, 1 bitcoin = 37,320.29 Euro, it is a very volatile currency whose price will continue to fluctuate and will continue to increase in value over the years.
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Magic wallet
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