"Satoshi Nakamoto" appears and talks about the history of digital cryptocurrency

BI Chinese website reported on November 20

Nick Szabo, widely considered the inventor of Bitcoin, attended a conference in London on Friday to discuss the blockchain technology used by digital cryptocurrencies and his views on their future development.

    The theme of this conference is "Ethereum". Bitcoin attempts to manage all transactions through a public ledger, the "blockchain", to achieve the decentralization of funds. Ethereum attempts to combine cryptography and programming languages ​​to create "smart contracts" to bring further development.

     Szabo's speech was titled "The History of Blockchain," but he did not actually delve into the origins of this technology.

     Bitcoin was invented in 2008 by the so-called Satoshi Nakamoto, a fictional character that many people believe is Szabo. (Szabo himself denies this.) In fact, apart from Ethereum and some of his own work, Szabo did not mention Satoshi in his speech, nor did he mention other important projects in the field of digital cryptocurrency.

     In the speech, Szabo used a slide that mentioned the behavior of Mark Kapeles, CEO of the defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, as an example of the important risks of centralization. However, Szabo did not specifically mention Kapeles in his speech.

     Mt. Gox was once the world's largest bitcoin exchange. In early 2014, the exchange lost $450 million worth of bitcoins and was forced to shut down.

     This time, Sabo focused on the theoretical pioneers of blockchain technology and the future development of this technology.

     Szabo believes that the real proponents of blockchain technology include objectivist writer and philosopher Ayn Rand and economic and political theorist Friedrich Hayek.

     Rand was a supporter of capitalism and believed selfishness was a virtue. Szabo said he had "never finished one of her books" but considered her to be very influential.

     Szabo is considered the inventor of decentralized currency and is critical of all centralized structures. He said that during the Russian October Revolution, due to the centralized social structure, Lenin only needed to control a few places, such as railways and the media, to control the entire society.

     Szabo also talked about the hacker attack on the US investment bank JPMorgan Chase. It is reported that the attackers made more than $100 million from it. He believes that this is a typical example of the adverse effects of centralized architecture on contemporary enterprises, and cryptocurrency technology, especially Ethereum technology, will help solve this problem.

     Szabo said that traditional law has huge flaws, such as vague interpretation, expensive enforcement, different situations in different jurisdictions, and specific enforcement is based on the "threat of coercive measures." In contrast, computer code and Ethereum do not have such problems. Its execution is very precise, the running cost is very low after deployment, and it can also maintain consistency, and the security is guaranteed by block chain technology.

     In the future, you may no longer have to hire a lawyer to help you draw up a paper contract, but you can use Ethereum technology as a platform to record it on this platform. You can use the Ethereum platform to register real estate or to draw up a clear loan contract without the help of any middleman.

     Blockchain technology has a clear advantage: the software cannot be deleted, which solves a fundamental problem that could threaten the entire project.

     At the end of his speech, Szabo said: "Let's look at information security from a broader perspective. Let's try to protect everything, everything that is important to us."

     Although Szabo did not mention his connection with Satoshi Nakamoto, many attendees at the conference regarded him as Satoshi Nakamoto.

     Earlier this month, Nakamoto once again made headlines when economics professor Bhagwan Chowdhry announced that he planned to nominate Nakamoto for the Nobel Prize in Economics.

     However, the formal nomination is kept confidential, so it is not clear whether Chaudhry actually made such a nomination.