/biz/ - Business & Finance

In security contexts - and especially in cryptography - Trusted is an epithet. In fact it's almost an obscenity. Trusted means something or someone has the power to break your security by acting in bad faith. Every Trusted role is, by definition, a weakness in security. You can see why security professionals are aghast when people talk about "Trusted Computing Modules" becoming a standard part of computers.

Good security means trying to limit the damage a Trusted role can do, even if you can't completely eliminate the Trusted role. And up until that point, limiting the damage had been the best that any digital-cash system had been able to do. But Satoshi had developed, as far as I'm aware, the first digital cash system with no Trusted role at all and thus, no way to abuse a Trusted position.

And the Trustless nature of Bitcoin was the main thing that convinced me Satoshi wasn't scamming. He built a highway with no toll bridge. People could use Bitcoin without creating any obligation to pay him anything ever. He wasn't selling coins, he was giving them away for solving hashes. He reserved nothing for himself.

He wasn't trying to line his own pockets at the expense of others. In fact I don't think I've ever encountered someone so completely uninterested in personal wealth. You know the old saw about being able to get a lot done if you don't care who gets the credit? Satoshi doesn't want the credit. Two years later he walked away and left the pseudonym behind. And hard as this may be to believe, it looks like he doesn't even want to be paid for it. As far as we can tell he mined approximately a million Bitcoins and has never sold a single one of them.

The first anonymous multibillionaire is being absolutely hardcore about demonstrating to the world that he is not ripping anybody off. He is not even using his privileged early-miner position for personal gain. Just stop and think about that for a minute, before you go on.