Martti & Satoshi

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

One of the amazing spill-over benefits of the Satoshi Trial happening in U.K. court is the new information that has come out revealing compelling truisms from Bitcoin’s creator on helping undergird his vision for Bitcoin. In several cases, their correspondence confirms some of Satoshi Nakamoto’s quotes that had only ever been available from a single source but are now becoming more solid and trustworthy with the help of Martti Malmi’s newly released emails.

The tone and content of the emails suggest a relationship built on mutual respect and a shared goal. Satoshi is open to suggestions from Malmi and acknowledges his contributions, indicating a collaborative partnership rather than a hierarchical one. Their communication is straightforward and focused on problem-solving, highlighting a functional relationship geared toward developing Bitcoin—a pretty refreshing callback to a simpler, less toxic time.

These communications also reveal Satoshi’s prescient thoughts on Bitcoin’s scalability and its comparative advantage over traditional financial systems like Visa (NASDAQ: V). Notably, Satoshi envisioned a widely distributed network where 100,000 “nodes” would build blocks—much to the chagrin of our small blocker friends—while Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) clients could participate without the full burden of block creation or full-chain validation, ensuring efficiency and scalability.

This approach underlined Bitcoin’s potential to outperform established payment networks in scalability and efficiency long before mainstream acknowledgment. He also talks clearly about the transition to transaction fees and lots of paid (L1) transactions to support the network.

Furthermore, Satoshi’s emphasis on privacy and the need for Bitcoin to scale effectively highlights a foundational concern for user security and network growth. He explains the need for single-cent transactions and many UTXOs to maintain network privacy. All of this requires large blocks in order to make the fees possible on the network.

These emails are a treasure trove of insightful information into the thought process of Satoshi, and the key to understanding his vision for Bitcoin, but it feels like such a shame that these couldn’t have been published in 2016-17 when things like the Hong Kong and New York Agreements were being discussed, and Bitcoin’s greatest battles (to date) were fought. Had these insights been available during debates over Bitcoin’s future direction, they could have provided invaluable clarity on Satoshi’s intentions, potentially guiding more informed and constructive discussions. The unveiling of these emails now invites the Bitcoin community and broader audience to reevaluate the foundational principles and strategic visions that have guided Bitcoin’s development from its inception.

Above, Martti asked the right kinds of questions, and Satoshi answered in plain English how it all worked in the base design. And Martti simply sat on these treasures. This begs two questions:

1: What else might he and others be hiding, or what other treasures remain to be revealed?
2: What happened to Martti and Satoshi’s relationship?

Satoshi’s communications reveal a deep understanding of the potential challenges and opportunities ahead for Bitcoin. There’s a clear vision for Bitcoin’s growth, scaling, and eventual acceptance, paired with a realistic approach to the hurdles it might face, including regulatory and technical challenges. Satoshi’s foresight in predicting the network’s capacity to scale and the transition from an incentive-based to a transaction fee model reflects a nuanced understanding of economic principles and network dynamics from the very beginning of Bitcoin.

The saddest thing for me was to see Malmi’s curiosity and respect for Satoshi’s responses and his wisdom about the architecture of Bitcoin, and knowing that within a few years, Malmi would essentially take over and become the gatekeeper of Bitcoin’s public discourse. Through the lens of history, we know Malmi would either sell or lose the Bitcoin domain to Cøbra—in perhaps the sort of way Anakin Skywalker lost control of the Galactic Republic to Darth Vader, depending on whose story is to be believed…

But Malmi seemed to be a bright-eyed protege of Nakamoto only to become a sort of conflicted villain in Bitcoin’s story during the scaling war. Hopefully, we will get to see more insights from the birth of Bitcoin before they are shredded and burned by more Blockstreamers.

Satoshi staying anonymous is a #Bitcoin feature. If I had logs which narrowed the anonymity set towards Satoshi's identity, I would delete/shred them.

— Adam Back (@adam3us) April 17, 2019

For a detailed exploration of these topics and more, check out the historical dialogue between Satoshi Nakamoto and Martti Malmi: https://mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/