Will The Real Satoshi Nakamoto Please Stand Up

It was a little over a decade ago, when the financial institutions we held as the stewards of our modern economy collapsed under the most basal desires of human nature, greed. We trusted them, even though they had failed us again and again, because what other option did we have? Where else would you store your money? How would you invest and grow your wealth? How would you transfer your money to your cousin on the other side of the planet? How else would you buy a new house, if not for the generous low-interest loans they provided to you?

You had to hand them over your money, to store, to save, and to grow your wealth. You had to give them complete access to your hard earned income, in exchange for the sweet financial services they provided to you that made your life so much more convenient. There was no other option, these institutions were the central authority, the pillars on which our entire modern economy was built. We couldn’t operate without them, could we? We couldn’t dissolve them out of existence, no matter how big of a blunder they had committed, no matter how many millions of people they had cheated. They are far too important and critical for our modern society to abandon. Or are they?

Satoshi Nakamoto, the faceless person or people, had a dream at that moment, right after the colossal damage of the 2008 Financial Crisis became evident. They dreamt of finishing the project started long before by the Cypherpunks, a project that would completely eliminate the very need for any central authority to come into the picture in the first place, to control the flow of a nation’s economy. They dreamt of building an end-to-end system for decentralized digital money that could be created, used and distributed seamlessly across the world without the interference of any central authority, using nothing more than Math and Computers.

And so Bitcoin was born. More importantly, however, it was the birth of Blockchain. Why is Blockchain more important you ask? Because it’s the technology that powers Bitcoin, it’s a breakthrough in Computer Science that allows us to do something that was never even remotely 
possible throughout our entire human history, it let’s us decentralize trust.

Take a moment to internalize the gravity of that statement, how could you possibly decentralize trust!? Trust, by nature, has centralization designed into it! Look at any industry, any exchange of information or value throughout history, at every step of the way, there is always, without doubt, the case that one party had to trust another party to exchange value. So how did Satoshi Nakamoto, this still unknown faceless person or people, build a system that lets multiple parties exchange value and information with each other, without any of them trusting any single other party?

By standing on the shoulders of decades of research and progress made in Cryptography and Computer / Networks. Don’t understand? That’s okay! Here is the best video available on the Internet to explain to you how Blockchain works at the most fundamental level :

3Blue1Brown’s video on Blockchain

To be more accurate through, it is Vitalik Buterin who should get most of the credit for framing the Blockchain technology as far more important and powerful than Bitcoin. This scrawny young Math prodigy, who was just around 18 years old at the time, realized long before many others did that the technology built into the fabric of Bitcoin had far more possible applications than just a decentralized digital currency. He realized that this technology can be used to build the world’s biggest and most powerful distributed computation platform, and he materialized this vision of his by buildingEthereum.

Vitalik and Satoshi are very different people, but at the same time, if you think about it, they are pretty much the same. Satoshi’s dream, at the heart of it, was to put the power back in the hands of the people, to give them absolute freedom over their assets and value they rightfully owned, to take away the middleman.

Sure, Satoshi was focused on having that impact on just the Finance world, but with that motivation, they were able to build a technology that Vitalik later realized could be used for far more applications, with the same core principles of handing the power back to the people, of decentralizing trust, ownership, and the exchange of value. They both had the same dream, of removing the middleman.

And so, in a metaphorical way, Vitalik Buterin is Satoshi Nakamoto.

Vitalik

In fact, I would go ahead and argue that every single person who believes in decentralization and sees it as the future of our world, is at heart a Satoshi Nakamoto. We don’t know who the real Satoshi is, and we might most likely never know. There would continue to be many calms, I am sure, but that’s not relevant. I would like to think of Satoshi as an identity that we can all adopt, to be the stewards of this new world, to believe in and build a decentralized society that follows the same principle and vision. We can all be Satoshi Nakamoto.

Just like Satoshi, we have our own dream that’s built on the same vision. We believe that it’s as much important to bring together these stewards of the new world — the developers, entrepreneurs, enthusiasts, and everyone else who believes in decentralization into a single space where they can all interact and freely share their knowledge, insights and opinions with each other. This single vision has driven us to build the biggest Blockchain community in India, with thousands of members.

In the past two years, a lot of people have joined our community across India, a lot of enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, developers, investors and people from all backgrounds who are genuinely interested in learning more about and being involved with the Blockchain movement taking place right now. None of us were around when Electricity was discovered. We weren’t a part of the Industrial Revolution. Most of us grew up only as consumers of these great technologies, the Internet being the greatest yet. But this time around, we have the option to be a part of this great revolution that can change the way our society works. We are on the verge to decentralize our entire world. This is our revolution, we can all participate in it by inventing our own solutions on top of this technology and building a better world.

Today, we have decided to take the next step. We are organizing a 5 day festival on Blockchain and Decentralized Applications (DAPPs) — the India Dapp Fest 2019 and all of you are invited! If you believe that decentralization is the future of our world, if you are a Blockchain developer or someone who wants to become one, then you need to be there. Our goal is to give you an opportunity to explore the fast-growing and still mostly unknown DAPP ecosystem of India and the world. We want all of you to meet with each other, strike conversations and perhaps give birth to a collaboration that can go down in history as a pivotal point in this movement.

We want to give the next Satoshi Nakamoto, who for all we know could be from our own motherland, a platform to build their ideas and share them with the world. So join us on this voyage to the future, to meet and collaborate with the many Satoshi Nakamoto of India.

See you all in June at the India Dapp Fest 2019 in Bangalore!