Digital Currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, and Game Theory...What ?

It’s ironic how three of the foundations of the whole blockchain system were precisely the things that put me off for so long.

This post is really about how I was put off bitcoin and blockchains for so long, it’s not about discussing the technology/foundations of blockchains (there's a lot of qualified people and information out there if you want to go deeper).

I first heard about bitcoin around 2012 on the Max Kaiser show on RT.com, where he was talking about how some dude had created a digital currency and his name was Satoshi Nakamoto. I’d been watching Max's show for a long time and loved his no-bull**** approach to many of the financial issues of our time, I have a lot of respect for these types of people. So I thought I'd listen and try to see what this was all about. I then very briefly looked at some other information surrounding bitcoin and I came to the following conclusions.

Firstly, the digital currency thing. I just thought that it would end up being a digital way to pay for stuff, a lot like paying with Visa or a top-up payment card. Since most of the developed countries were heading towards a cashless society, this was just another step in that direction.

Secondly, Satoshi Nakamoto...really !! The moment I heard this name I imagined some Japanese Samurai character from a Kill Bill movie, the name was obviously made up and a group of geeks (I mean clever people) somewhere were having a laugh.

The icing on the cake was when game theory was mentioned in relation to all this.

Lets just take a moment here. We have digital cash, a made up cool name and game theory....this was obviously a way for online gamers to play a new game, earn points and buy the next biggest car or gun right ?.......Wrong (as I now know).

As this was going on I was busy running a beach cafe in Goa and spending 6 months of the year living the dream life...you know the sun, sand, sea and sangria lifestyle (maybe I’ll do a different post about this sometime). The point is I just didn’t take this seriously.

Being somebody who was working for one of the top website design companies during the internet boom (and being made redundant when the bubble burst), somebody who has developed simulators for the aircraft industry, done a lot of Human Factors research and Usability Experiment design....I just can’t believe I missed this one.

Looking into how Satoshi-Ji (‘Ji’ is a term of respect in India) was able to take years of peer reviewed valuable research and put it together in such a way where it all seemed to fit together perfectly, I believe, is the true success story. To be able to solve the issues of trust, double spend and others was beautiful but not done for the first time. The fact that a lot of new technologies and research have been doing this for many years strengthens the fact that blockchain is really here to stay.