Clip of a March 18, 2020 conversation (Lex Fridman interviewing Vitalik Buterin) about Bitcoin’s origin and Satoshi Nakamoto’s anonymity. Vitalik describes Satoshi as an online-only, anonymous creator who published the Bitcoin white paper and source code, interacted with early Bitcoin forums, and then disappeared around 2010–2011. They discuss Hal Finney as a possible candidate, the social and symbolic effects of an anonymous founder, and the leadership tensions in decentralized open-source cryptocurrency projects — including Vitalik’s efforts to decentralize Ethereum and avoid being a single point of failure.
Chapters
So before we talk about the fundamental ideas behind Ethereum and cryptocurrency, perhaps it'd be nice to talk about the origin story of bitcoin and the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto. You gave a talk that started with sort of asking the question, what did Satoshi Nakamoto actually invent? Maybe you could say, who is Satoshi Nakamoto? And what did he invent? Sure.
So Satoshi Nakamoto is the name by which we know the person who originally came up with bitcoin. So the reason why I say the name by which we know is that this is an anonymous fellow who has shown himself to us only over the Internet, just by first publishing the white paper for bitcoin, then releasing the original source code for bitcoin, and then talking to the very early bitcoin community on bitcoin forums and of interacting with them and helping the project along for a couple of years. And then at some point in late 2010 to early 2011, he disappeared. So bitcoin is a fairly unique project in how it has this kind of mythical, kind of quasi godlike founder who just kind of popped in, did the thing, and disappeared, and we've somehow just never heard from him again.
So in 2008 was. So the white paper was the first. Do you know the white paper was the first time the name would actually appear? Satoshi Nakamoto?
I believe so.
So how is it possible that the creator of such a impactful project remains anonymous?
That's a tough question.
And there's no similarity to it in history of technology, as far as I'm aware.
Yeah. So one possibility is that it's Hal Finney, because Hal Finney was kind of also active in the bitcoin community and as Hal Finney in those two beginning years. And how.
Who is Hal Finney?
Maybe he is one of the people in the end of early cypherpug community.
He was a computer scientist.
Yeah, computer scientists, cryptographers, people interested in technology, Internet freedom, like, those kinds of topics.
Was it correct that I read that he seemed to have been involved in either the earliest or the first transaction of bitcoin?
Yes. The first transaction of bitcoin was between Satoshi and Heleni.
Do you think he knew who Satoshi was? If he was.
If he wasn't Satoshi, you probably know.
How is it possible to work so closely with people and nevertheless not know anything about their fundamental identity? Is this like a natural sort of characteristic of the Internet? Like, if we were to think about it, because you and I Just met. Now there's a. There's a depth of knowledge that we now have about each other that's, like, physical. Like, my vision system is able to recognize you. I can also verify your identity of uniqueness. Like.
Yep.
Like, it's very hard to fake you being you.
Yeah.
So the Internet. The Internet has a fundamentally different quality to it, which is just fascinating. Maybe.
Yeah, no, this is definitely interesting, as I definitely just know a lot of people just by their Internet handles. And to me, when I think of them, like, I see their Internet handles, and one of them has profile pictures, this kind of face that's kind of not quite human with a bunch of psychedelic colors in it. And when I visualize him, I could just visualize that. That.
Not an actual face.
Yeah.
You are the creator of the second. Well, he's currently the second most popular cryptocurrency, Ethereum. So on this topic, if we just stick on Satoshi Nakamoto for a little bit longer, you may be the most qualified person to speak to the psychology of this anonymity that we're talking about. Like, your identity is known. Like, I've just verified it. But from your perspective, what are the benefits in creating a cryptocurrency and then remaining anonymous? Like, if it can psychoanalyze Satoshi Nakamoto, is there something interesting there, or is it just a peculiar quirk of him?
It definitely helps create this kind of image of this kind of neutral thing that doesn't belong to anyone. You've created a project, and because you're anonymous and because you also disappear, or as unfortunately happened to Hel Finney, if that is him, he ended up, I think, dying of Lou Gehrig's disease, and he's in a cryogenic freezer now. But if you pop in and you create it and you're gone, and all that's remaining of that whole process is the thing itself, then no one can go and try to interpret any of your other behavior and try to understand. This person wrote this thing in some essay at age 16 where he expressed particular opinions about democracy. And so because of that, this project is a statement that's trying to do this specific thing. Instead, it creates this environment where the thing is what you make of.
Doesn'T have the. Yeah, right. The burden of your other ideas, political thought, and so on. So now that we're sitting with you, do you feel the burden of being kind of the face of Ethereum? I mean, there's a very large community of developers. But nevertheless, is there, like, a burden associated with that.
There definitely is. This is definitely a big reason why I've been trying to kind of push for the Ethereum ecosystem to become more decentralized in many ways. Just encouraging a lot of kind of core Ethereum work to happen outside of the Ethereum foundation and of expanding the number of people that are making different kinds of decisions, having multiple software limitations instead of one and all of these things. There's a lot of things that I've tried to do to remove myself as a single point of failure, because that is something that a lot of people criticize me for.
If you look at the most fundamentally successful open source projects, it seems that it's like a sad reality when I think about it, is it seems to be that one person is a crucial contributor. Often if you look a Linus for.
Linux, for the kernel that is possible, I'm definitely not planning to disappear.
That's an interesting tension that projects like this kind of desire a single entity and yet they're fundamentally distributed. I don't know if there's something interesting to say about that kind of structure and thinking about the future of cryptocurrency. Does there need to be a leader?
There's different kinds of leaders. There's dictators who control all the money, there's people who control organizations. There's kind of high priests that just have themselves and their Twitter followers.
What kind of leader are you, would.
You say these days? Actually a bit more in the high priest direction than before. I definitely actually don't do all that much of kind of going around and ordering Ethereum foundation people to do things because I think those things are important. If there's something that I do think is important, I do just usually kind of say it publicly or just kind of say it to people and quite often projects just going to start doing it.
