How you ask? You tell me. Why do people ask me strange questions, like what would you do with a billion dollars? Or kindly try to convince me to help sponsor worthy world-changing endeavors. Or insinuate that I’m part of a special group. Or ask if I've heard of Bitcoin, to which I honestly said I didn't think so.
Ok, so once I was asked innocently if I was Nakamoto. This came back to me after studying Bitcoin for a while in 2015. Of course, since the asker knew who I was and I'm not Japanese, the question was kind of funny. I felt kind of negative on the subject, but he explained that he was a smart inventor math guy and that bitcoin was legitimate, and so I said something to kind of get off the subject. I understood that Nakamoto was an identifier for some inventor, and since I didn't know who it was, I honestly felt I couldn't say it wasn't me. So I said, sure yeah, I love inventing and math, so sure.
For all I know Satoshi the name, was invented then based on my name. But I've seen it used pretty early on, so perhaps not. Also, for all I know, maybe at this time S. Nakamoto became a title many started to adopt. Have you seen Radio Rebel? I remember one other thing that I wont say here to protect people's identity.
On a side note, I noticed … talking about Satoshi in his Castle analogy (without saying Nakamoto), and it kind of revealed or I kind of sensed he was talking about himself. Opps… I'm probably just conjecturing here, though. Besides isn't he really Japanese or from Japan?
So I've been studying and liking cryptocurrency ever since, partly from my admiration for this elusive inventor or the vision behind it. I sensed I was involved right away so I fearfully stopped reading up on Nakamoto for a while. Also is the possibility that I'm just a little touched in the head. Heh.
Now the plot thickens… One day (much later) out of the blue I was reading a history on someone with ideas on money, and I asked my father what something meant: public money. He turned it around and said do you think you could make a money public. I said, yeah, why don't we just have a list of all amounts of money so we know who owns what. Wouldn't that be easier, simpler?
I may have asked my grandpa something similar when I was a kid but cannot remember.
My father always lets me get credit for things, like when I created a 3-D emulator based on a short conversation we had. Was he trying to get me to do that, all along?
Anyway, my father immediately said you mean like a ledger… yeah… Well that can't be done mathematically. I said err, what are you talking about. You can't keep people from altering the ledger or misrepresenting transactions. It's a computational riddle with no solution. I responded, 'sure you can, just hash the list'. He said, what's that? It’s like a bit sum, etc. Well, it could be broken with enough computers. Well, hash it every 10 minutes… If that's not small enough, do it every 3 minutes, or 45 seconds. Undoing a hash that quickly take more computational power than every computer in the world combined. (You cannot tell me no one had ever hashed a file or a document to preserve genuineness before this time. Hello, isn't this obvious? Same idea on a list.)
I talked about having a set amount. (This was what I talked to grandpa about when a kid: having money like a stock which could increase in value. I didn't understand money stability and liquidity.) My father insisted there would have to be a way to initially give out the money, a way to reward those providing the computer service. I disagreed totally, but then changed my mind seeing how miners got gold out for later coins or backing, thinking of how gold coins were used in the 1800s. For all I know the phrasology of computational 'mining' comes from this moment. This could easily be proven wrong, if you can find it. I remember saying it would just be public, "I don't know what decentralised means."
By this point Bitcoin was already invented, and someone in the room, involved with open-source, mentioned they were aware of it. I had said they could call it bitgold, which existed, so I even said bitcoin, which they said also existed. The irony. (I said something about bytecoin sounding bad.)
For all I know my father invented Bitcoin, or a similar idea years before. Unlikely, but totally approp for his brilliant mind. I remember him once being against 256 bit (or maybe it was 128 at the time) encryption, though. Also likely is that people thought or began to think I actually did know something about Bitcoin, which I definately did not.
My dad said, wouldn't that be a pyrmid scheme? I said, yeah maybe at first, but it'd be ok. Boy was I right but also wrong, in that I'm not sure Bitcoin itself will mainstream beyond its specialized usage.
I totatlly wish I could say, syk! at this point, but alas. Will someone please let me know that I'm just crazy. At least much of this conversation was led on by other people, one of which was silient at first until mentioning bitcoin's existance. No one has confirmed these events and I’ve avoid asking those involved.
My computer is about to die so I’ll edit this later.