The Irony of Fate

Satoshi Nakamoto

The irony was thick. In Japanese, the words mean “central intelligence,” but the goal of the project would decentralize and confound some of the most “intelligent” minds in the world. It was a fast agreement when somebody suggested the name. We were working in tech, and racial profiling was alive and well. Nobody will question the validity of tech developed by an Asian. To be fair, we had an asian in the group, although he wasn’t Japanese. Malaysian, more precisely, but again, for those of you who think we’ve got this race thing figured out these days, you’d be wrong. The rest of the team was as random as they come. White guy from back east, and Indian from Great Britain, a valley girl from up the road and some dude that crawled out his mom’s basement in Indiana to write world-changing code. Our names aren’t important. We know what we’ve done.

Writing the code wasn’t that difficult really, we had a collective of some of the brightest, untapped minds in the world. Being untapped gave us the clean start we needed. The hard part would be disseminating the product. Convincing the world that the concept works is another story, but we saw the end coming. Traditional currency is headed toward an eventual collapse, and we wanted to be waiting in the wings. The headline of the Times on launch day couldn’t have been more of a prophetic boon, and we encoded it into our genesis block as a timestamp, so all of history would know why we were here. “The Times Jan/03/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”

It was slow to take root, because people love what they know. We quietly continued mining in the background while other groups, investors and forward-thinking organizations started dipping their toes in the crypto water. But people are scared without guardrails. We need shepherds to make us feel safe from the wolves that prowl cyberspace. We weren’t about to facilitate regulation of the thing that we created to avoid centralized finance, so we withdrew from the game before the lawmakers and regulators moved in. It was inevitable, and even with the sticky fingers of the government and outside regulators on it, the currency offered a grassroots stability that the shaking foundation of the dollar could not. It's a further irony that centralized banking would regulate and facilitate the growth of the thing that would in theory, replace that very system.

2008 had taught people the lesson of too much faith in centralized banking. They were ready for a network that was driven and guided by their peers. By 2012, thanks to an obscure reference on a TV drama, people started asking more questions, and the thing blew up. We had mined a million coins before we bowed out, and now, while we diverted our energy to the next disruptive technology, we would watch our investment grow and the system that we set out to disrupt deploy our technology.

We were some of the brightest and best minds, we knew that the idea of decentralized currency was imperative to the survival of modern economies, but as one of our more famous contemporaries once said, “Fate loves irony." It was hard work and collaboration that launched the concept but it was sheer luck and the power of suggestion that propelled it. It is no surprise to us that a bit of TV fiction could be the jet fuel to compel crypto to its current levels. How we get to success is far less important than the eventual arrival, and we have arrived.

Satoshi Nakamoto is alive and well, although operating under a different moniker, more in line with our focus, and we’ve just launched our next project. It is creeping into human awareness through an equally ironic means. The masses will never accept the shouting prophecies of the world’s most intelligent geeks, but if you tell them in a TV show, or funnel your ideas through the right connections in today’s media owners, the message is delivered, all tied up in a shiny, better-than-fiction packet. It’s like God, speaking through the donkey’s mouth. They don’t have to believe it right out of the gate to make it real, and like Bitcoin, it is very, very real.