1970 was the year in which Paul McCartney announced that The Beatles had split, Miles Davis released the critically acclaimed album Bitches Brew and Japan became the world’s fourth space power. In Brisbane, a city in the northeastern state of Queensland in Australia, Satoshi Nakamoto was born on October 23, 1970, and four decades later, he would publish the Bitcoin whitepaper and alter the course of finance and several other sectors.
Today, Satoshi turns 51.
Dr. Craig Steven Wright, aka Satoshi, now serves as the chief scientist at commercial blockchain solutions provider nChain. Describing himself as an eternal student, he is a lawyer, a mathematician, an economist, a banker and much more.
When Satoshi published the Bitcoin whitepaper at just 39 years of age, the world was in chaos following the 2007-08 financial crisis. People were losing faith in centralized banking and financial systems and consequently, in the government as well.
In the whitepaper, Satoshi described a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that would no longer rely on trusted central entities. In the years that would follow, Bitcoin would go from being a currency for the geeks and tech nerds and become a global phenomenon.
However, as with all great things, malicious forces were lurking. These forces wanted to keep Bitcoin contained and fought off efforts to grow the block size from the initial 2MB. This led to a fork from which the BCH ticker was born for the progressive minds that were at the time keen on Satoshi’s vision of a blockchain that never hits the scaling ceiling. The Core developers, who kept the ticker BTC, wanted to stay at 2MB and use Satoshi’s creation for their own selfish gains.
It would later turn out that the BCH group also had malicious factions that wanted to curtail the growth of Bitcoin. This led to another fork from which emerged the ticker BSV (Bitcoin Satoshi Vision). As the name suggests, BSV has sought to fulfill Satoshi’s vision of peer-to-peer electronic cash with instant payments and very low fees, currently averaging $0.000124. It also focuses on enterprise adoption and underpinning the new era of the Internet by scaling unbounded and having a stable protocol.
As he turns 51, Satoshi is finally seeing his brainchild become what he envisioned. Bitcoin SV has overshadowed BTC in virtually all metrics, from daily transactions to miner profitability to block sizes. It’s also now seeing an ecosystem of applications and users that can rival any other blockchain project. Additionally, BSV’s compliance with regulations has set it apart from BTC, BCH and a plethora of other blockchain projects that are now facing the full force of the law.
Satoshi, on his part, is still valiantly fighting the war he started over a decade ago. Aside from being at the heart of the nChain team that has been key to the advancement of Bitcoin (BSV), he is still conducting research and sharing his thoughts on his blog and on several interviews, such as on Theory of Bitcoin.
Satoshi is also a never-disappointing highlight of the CoinGeek Conferences where he delivers powerful speeches on what he envisions the future of Bitcoin to be. He also engages in discussions with other cryptography titans, Bitcoin skeptics and economic luminaries including George Gilder and Stuart Haber.
Legendary painter Vincent van Gogh, the father of modern physics Galileo Galilei, philosopher Henry David Thoreau and influential poet and playwright Oscar Wilde had come before their time. Their ideas and visions were futuristic. Satoshi is ahead of his time as well, but looking back a decade or two from now, he will be widely recognized as a one of the brightest minds of our time.
Happy Birthday Satoshi!
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