92 Quotes by Satoshi Nakamoto

What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers.

If you’re having trouble with the inflation issue, it’s easy to tweak it for transaction fees instead. It’s as simple as this: let the output value from any transaction be 1 cent less than the input value. Either the client software automatically writes transactions for 1 cent more than the intended payment value, or it could come out of the payee’s side. The incentive value when a node finds a proof-of-work for a block could be the total of the fees in the block.

With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless.

We consider the scenario of an attacker trying to generate an alternate chain faster than the honest chain. Even if this is accomplished, it does not throw the system open to arbitrary changes, such as creating value out of thin air or taking money that never belonged to the attacker. Nodes are not going to accept an invalid transaction as payment, and honest nodes will never accept a block containing them. An attacker can only try to change one of his own transactions to take back money he recently spent.

I’ve been working on bitcoin’s design since 2007. At some point I became convinced there was a way to do this without any trust required at all and couldn’t resist to keep thinking about it.

You could say coins are issued by the majority. They are issued in a limited, predetermined amount.

When someone tries to buy all the world’s supply of a scarce asset, the more they buy the higher the price goes.

Subscription sites that need some extra proof-of-work for their free trial so it doesn’t cannibalize subscriptions could charge bitcoins for the trial.

There is nobody to act as central bank or federal reserve to adjust the money supply as the population of users grows. That would have required a trusted party to determine the value, because I don’t know a way for software to know the real world value of things.