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> For the record, I am not Satoshi Nakamoto. I suppose I could have invented the bitcoin protocols... That's not a given. Nick Szabo provides a good explanati

> For the record, I am not Satoshi Nakamoto. I suppose I could have invented the bitcoin protocols... That's not a given. Nick Szabo provides a good explanation [1] of the state of things when Bitcoin was invented, and why very few people were capable of it then: "The overlap between cryptographic experts and libertarians who might sympathize with such a "gold bug" idea is already rather small, since most cryptographic experts earn their living in academia and share its political biases. Even among this uncommon intersection as stated very few people thought it was a good idea. Even gold bugs didn't care for it because we already have real gold rather than mere bits and we can pay online simply by issuing digital certificates based on real gold stored in real vaults, a la the formerly popular e-gold." Schneier has the cryptographic knowledge, but I've never gotten the sense he as any deep interest in the nature of money, at least not enough to drive him to put together something like Bitcoin. That drive, that obsession with something, is a prerequisite for making something as unprecented and dissimilar to anything previously existing as Bitcoin. [1]:https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-ye-so-long.html https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-...

Sebb767 5y ago
I think the could is meant as "technically, it would have been in my skillset to create something akin to this". It's clear that either motivation and/or ideas were missing, otherwise we would be crediting him for inventing bitcoin ;)
- SkyMarshal 5y ago
  Afaik he doesn't actually have the full skillset required. He has the cryptographic and systems knowledge, but not the deep interest in or knowledge of monetary theory. The latter is prereq too.
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    I guess that's a theoretical question in the end, but it's definitely a valid point.
native_samples 5y ago
That's a poor explanation mostly because Satoshi was not a cryptographic expert, at least not at the start. For example he insisted early on that you can't use elliptic curve cryptography for encrypting messages (wrong), he stated that he had to research ECC because there was very little information out there about it back then, and so on. More importantly all actual cryptographers were trying to build e-cash systems out of novel mathematical constructs. Bitcoin ignored all of that. It just uses SHA2 and digital signatures. Cryptographically it's as plain vanilla as it comes, and lots of developers understand hash functions and signatures. There's no actual expertise required to use them.

Sebb767 5y ago

I think the could is meant as "technically, it would have been in my skillset to create something akin to this". It's clear that either motivation and/or ideas were missing, otherwise we would be crediting him for inventing bitcoin ;)

SkyMarshal 5y ago
Afaik he doesn't actually have the full skillset required. He has the cryptographic and systems knowledge, but not the deep interest in or knowledge of monetary theory. The latter is prereq too.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  I guess that's a theoretical question in the end, but it's definitely a valid point.

native_samples 5y ago

That's a poor explanation mostly because Satoshi was not a cryptographic expert, at least not at the start. For example he insisted early on that you can't use elliptic curve cryptography for encrypting messages (wrong), he stated that he had to research ECC because there was very little information out there about it back then, and so on. More importantly all actual cryptographers were trying to build e-cash systems out of novel mathematical constructs. Bitcoin ignored all of that. It just uses SHA2 and digital signatures. Cryptographically it's as plain vanilla as it comes, and lots of developers understand hash functions and signatures. There's no actual expertise required to use them.