Dr Craig Wright aka Satoshi Nakamoto has been a dominant force in recent years, giving presentations and talks on the technology he invented all around the world. What is rare, however, is for Dr Wright to grant an AMA (Ask Me Anything) interview.
Dr Maximilian Sinan Korkmaz, the inventor of my2cents and Bau app, recently had the chance to moderate such an AMA with Dr Wright at the Blockchain Developers Conference in Istanbul. The questions posed by users on the my2cents platform cover everything from Dr Wright’s early life to the invention of Bitcoin, and even his favourite type of socks.
A collection of the questions and responses from the interview can be found below. Some of the questions and answers have been edited for context and clarity. You can watch the full interview with Satoshi Nakamoto here:
What did you do before you started working on Bitcoin?
‘It depends on how far you go back. Before I started working on the digital cash system, which was back in the nineties, I was running a company called DeMorgan. This included doing Information Security solutions and managing the Australian stock exchange. I also did a lot of things involving technology with Vodafone.
‘Later, around 2008, I was working with the accounting firm BDO doing a bunch of different things. Running a bunch of departments and also teaching at Charles Sturt University, and I also did some of the training at the police academy.’
What exactly made him come up with the idea of Bitcoin?
‘It had nothing to do with the (2008) bank bailouts. I started coding before the bank bailouts and came up with the idea before that. If you read the article I put in the Genesis block, it has nothing to do with being anti-bank – it has something to do with anti-socialism.
‘The Chancellor threatened to nationalise British banks. If you think about it, it’s another Socialist (issue). The banks won’t take the money, won’t keep spending the money which the government gives them, and if they don’t do that we are going to nationalise them. Digging a deeper hole and doing more stupid things because you have already made stupid decisions is a bad thing.’
Why did you choose to publish the white paper with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto?
‘I have had other pseudonyms in the past. Some are related to science fiction and others are (based) on Japanese. I have a strong history with Japanese culture because of my grandfather and also other people that I grew up with. I would call myself Zen/Christian or Zen/Buddhist. Tominaga Nakamoto was a philosopher I quite liked.’
(On why he uses a pseudonym) ‘Newcastle University when I proposed this (Bitcoin) said don’t be stupid if it could ruin your career, so I didn’t (use my real name) and never expected it to get as big as it did.’
Do you recommend using paper wallets?
‘What I would do is have a proper digital PKI certificate (which) links everything. Bitcoin can be recovered if you have an identity and a way of calculating it. It is not being done correctly by most wallets – and there is an opportunity there.
‘If you have a proper PKI certificate and registered identity with all of your money calculated under that, then you don’t have one big address with all of your money under it. The idea would be to keep $1,000 maximum in any wallet and have lots of them calculable from one single off-chain identity.’
Read: Bitcoin wallets: an intro for developers
Do you think governments understand Bitcoin and will be able to regulate it properly?
‘Going back to electronic transaction legislation from 1996 – there is already regulation in place. The problem is that everyone runs around making false statements about decentralisation and other BS. So yes, of course (governments can understand and regulate it properly).
Read: Clearing up misunderstandings about Bitcoin’s decentralisation
‘How quickly the government does it is a different issue. Government is a combination of politicians who say what they need to say to get into the next voting cycle. It is also comprised of bureaucrats who try and hide everything, so they don’t ever get noticed and no one ever fires them.’
What’s the next dream you would like to make real?
‘I am boring, so my dream remains the same. At least 10 billion transactions a second before 2030. Transaction fees are under 1/1000th of a cent, with many free. (I also want) five billion people using the system. That’s it – that’s all I work for. ‘