Satoshi's Good Name

If you want to create a more egalitarian world, the first step is to ensure the everyone has an equal opportunity to own the means of production of capital. For a long time we tried to engineer this utopian ideal through reallocation of assets via social systems: communism, democracy, socialism, and capitalistic oligarchy creating access through IPOs. So like any good engineer I started toying with the idea of building a technical system that could engender this humanistic ideal.

I landed on the concept of a blockchain. A technical piece of code that created an immutable, collaborative ledger. All anyone needed to contribute to this new form of social commerce was computing power. No longer did the world have to rely on fiat currency backed by a particular location's government. Everyone on the planet could mine a collective currency. It felt like fixing the Tower of Babel. A universal digital coin that could unite humanity and give power back to the collective people.

So why keep my identity secret?

Just as Moses went off to die alone in the desert so that he would not command the deference of a false idol after delivering the ten commandments to humanity, had I revealed my identity it could have undermined the collective wisdom I was passing on to the world. If we are to create a more interconnected egalitarian society, then the focus cannot be one individual as an authority. Authority figures are antithetical to the concept of blockchains, which require collective computing bargaining power to create consensus.

But there is another reason. One I am still hesitant to this day to reveal. Satoshi was created by a collective of women. And women hackers who build ideas that challenge the status quo are never treated kindly online. Our programs are rarely trusted or implemented. Our work frequently falls into obscurity, or worse, results in doxxing and death threats.

For some of you this may seem an obvious concession. If Satoshi were a man or a group of men, he'd have no reason to keep his identity secret. Most men would be thrilled to take credit for such a bold breakthrough, and several male charlatans have already attempted to do just that and profit on it via our problematic patent systems. But a woman designing a breakthrough technology online, her being female is a huge barrier to adoption of that technology. We don't trust technologies built by women as much as those designed by men, and so we tend to be less likely to adopt them as a society until a man comes on board to vouch for a particular breakthrough. Insert Elon Musk Dogecoin joke here.

For many of you, this may not be as obvious a concession. Perhaps in this case, a bit of history will help clarify. Monopoly was a game invented by a woman, Lizzie Magie, to teach the dangers of unfettered capitalism. Her invention didn't take off until the Hasbro brother's acquired it and ironically marketed it to teach the joys of capitalism to consumers. Sure that was the early 1900s. You may believe we as a society have progressed. So let's fast forward 60 years. Dame Stephanie Shirley creates an online alter ego Steve to build a global tech company of all women. She never met her clients in person so they would all assume she was male when doing business. If we fast forward to the 1980s, women still cannot get business loans in the United States without a male consignor. Today almost no major Funds are led by women.

But let's ignore implicit bias and how we do not trust women as a society just yet, and focus on the way women are treated online. We face regular harassment in the form of sexualization, objectification, unsolicited marriage proposals (I will never say yes to 1,000 camels), and death threats when we ignore unwanted advances or when we speak up in dissent of the predominant narrative. I've lost count of the number of times I've been called a stuck up bitch, threatened with rape or physical violence online, or faced digital stalkers. The same holds true for my female collaborators.

A man named Satoshi has nothing to fear about sharing his technology with hackers far and wide, but a woman named Satoshi would lose everything if she came out publicly and risk undermining this breakthrough altogether.

So my digital compatriots and I created a hacking collective under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi because it was a masculine name meaning "one who is focused on enlightenment." And Nakamoto referring to one who lives in the middle because our technology takes a centrist view of wanting to balance the scales of society in favor of the greater good. And in our anonymity we make it far less likely we will be hacked or that zero day exploits in our code will come to light.

So why admit all this now?

The world is teetering on the edge. On one hand, we can embrace an understanding that innovations require huge amounts of collective cooperation from diverse individuals. But just as that beautiful seed of wisdom is taking root, the other hand is pushing back with strong authoritarian reprisal. And so humanity is at a key inflection point. We can either embrace a beautifully diverse, educated, informed, and ethical future filled with innovation, exploration, and a fundamentally new framework for society where exchange of resources is not restricted by imaginary borders guarded by expensive armies and makeshift walls. Or we can fall over the precipice back into a digital dark ages, where authority figures like QAnon run rampant, as corporate oligarchs become the ruling class, and humans lose their collective bargaining power.

The choice is ours.

- S