Phil Champagne does a great job of collecting, organizing, and providing context for all of Satoshi’s known public writing. Here are some of my favorite excerpts from the book. Amazon link.
The below are copied verbatim from the book. I may have mistakenly attributed some things to Satoshi that were actually Phil’s own words. Hopefully nothing major!
Highlights:
For greater privacy, it’s best to use bitcoin addresses only once. You can change addresses as often as you want…
Those coins can never be recovered, and the total circulation is less. Since the effective circulation is reduced, all the remaining coins are worth slightly more. It’s the opposite of when a government prints money and the value of existing money goes down.
“natural deflation”… I like that name for it. Yes, there will be natural deflation due to payment mistakes and lost data. Coin creation will eventually get slow enough that it is exceeded by natural deflation and we’ll have net deflation.
In the absence of a market to establish the price, NewLibertyStandard’s estimate based on production cost is a good guess and a helpful service (thanks). The price of any commodity tends to gravitate toward the production cost. If the price is below cost, then production slows down. If the price is above cost, profit can be made by generating and selling more. At the same time, the increased production would increase the difficulty, pushing the cost of generating towards the price.
One argument is that anyone who chooses to generate coins is actually making the choice to purchase bitcoins with electricity/computational resources, and that because some/ many people are in fact making that choice, bitcoins have at least that much “value” to the generators, who can be assumed to be maximizing their utility.
It’s hard to imagine the Internet getting segmented airtight. It would have to be a country deliberately and totally cutting itself off from the rest of the world. Any node with access to both sides would automatically flow the block chain over, such as someone getting around the blockade with a dial-up modem or sat-phone. It would only take one node to do it. Anyone who wants to keep doing business would be motivated.
I anticipate there will never be more than 100K nodes, probably less. It will reach an equilibrium where it’s not worth it for more nodes to join in. The rest will be lightweight clients, which could be millions.
I think the traditional qualifications for money were written with the assumption that there are so many competing objects in the world that are scarce, an object with the automatic bootstrap of intrinsic value will surely win out over those without intrinsic value. But if there were nothing in the world with intrinsic value that could be used as money, only scarce but no intrinsic value, I think people would still take up something.
Bitcoins have no dividend or potential future dividend, therefore not like a stock. More like a collectible or commodity.
It would be unwise to have permanently recorded plaintext messages for everyone to see. It would be an accident waiting to happen. If there’s going to be a message system, it should be a separate system parallel to the bitcoin network. Messages should not be recorded in the block chain.
I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle. Maybe instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to your dev contributors; it helps motivate them.
From the author:
One of the major benefits of such decentralized domain name servers would bypass a government attempt at disrupting Internet communications to its citizens, as we have seen occur in Egypt in 2011.
His various writings seem to indicate that he did not expect Bitcoin to take off as rapidly as it has.
From a commenter:
The real problem with the DNS system as it exists today is that somebody has to own theroot. At the end of the day, you have to trust ICANN.