That Time I Met Satoshi
Wall Street, October, 2019 ....
I arrived for my CPA continuing education class at 8:30AM on October 29, 2019. Wall Street, 40 Wall Street to be exact. The course was entitled, “Digital Currencies, Accounting and Tax Treatment.” The speakers began at 9:00, following the all-too typical continental breakfast of less-than-fresh Danishes. No offense to anyone from Denmark, of course.
At 10:00 a gentleman came in and sat two seats to my right. After plopping down his bicycle helmet, emptying his backpack, and opening his laptop, he proceeded to cough and sneeze for the next few minutes. Great. Simply great. I had the New York City Marathon coming up in exactly five days. Panic set in. Distracted, I tried to concentrate on the speaker, who was giving us a primer on just what digital currencies were, how they were created and various other important things we needed to know about crypto.
At maybe 11:00, I glanced to my right and noticed that the sneezing biker had a badge on, not just the run of the mill name tag. He was a speaker at this event. I instantly forgave him for the coughs and sneezes. When I read his nametag, I figured he was probably one of the smartest people in the room.
Glancing at him and scanning LinkedIn at the same time, I realized the gentleman was Stuart Haber, accomplished mathematician and cryptographer. Graduate of Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia. He was then introduced by the moderator as the “inventor of the blockchain.” Now, that got my and everyone else’s attention.
If you have read the original Bitcoin whitepaper from 2008, congratulations. I have read it and understood some of it, but not much. Then again, I am not a mathematician, but an accountant. What is amazing about the Bitcoin whitepaper, which just may end up being the written infrastructure of one of greatest technological innovations of human history, is that it’s only eight pages long. Well, eight pages plus page nine that lists some references that Satoshi relied on. That’s where I saw the name Stuart Haber. Three times. From the Bitcoin whitepaper:
References
[3] S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "How to time-stamp a digital document," In Journal of Cryptology, vol. 3, no 2, pages 99-111, 1991.
[4] D. Bayer, S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Improving the efficiency and reliability of digital time-stamping," In Sequences II: Methods in Communication, Security and Computer Science, pages 329-334, 1993.
[5] S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Secure names for bit-strings," In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pages 28-35, April 1997.
And not only Stuart Haber. Haber had apparently done groundbreaking work in the field of time-stamping and date-stamping with Scott Stornetta, who also spoke at the conference that day. The two spoke of their original project of creating a time-stamping technology to be used in every edition of the New York Times. Sure enough, Haber held up a current edition of the Times, and there it was, printed in a small, boxed section of the paper. The technology is still used by the paper today.
I got some time to talk with Haber at lunch, and he was shy and reserved, most gracious, and seemed flattered that I would want to connect with him on LinkedIn. Soon, several of the conference attendees approached to meet him, shake his hand, and yes, take selfies with him. Now he looked a bit embarrassed.
Discussions had been taking place during lunch over who everyone thought was the real Satoshi Nakamoto. American? Japanese? Man? Woman? Group of people? Consortium of companies? (That seems doubtful to me, since so far everyone’s remained mum.) Was it really Hal Finney, the developer and avid marathoner from California, as many believe? If so, we may never know since Finney passed on in 2014. Finney is reported to have received the first Bitcoin transaction ever, from Satoshi Nakamoto, in 2009. Finney, however, had denied being the actual Satoshi Nakamoto.
Near the end of the lunch break, I was remarking to the attorney seated to my left that we had just met one of the key figures in the history of blockchain technology, and yes, Bitcoin. I thought it was all very cool. She remarked, “I’ve read a lot about Stuart Haber. I think he is Satoshi.” Well, I didn’t ask him.
So, did I meet the real Satoshi Nakamoto on October 29, 2019? The world may never know.
Happy 13th Birthday to the Bitcoin Whitepaper!
It was October 31, 2008 when Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin research paper that sparked a revolution in the technology of digital currency. The paper resolved the long-standing “double spending” problem which had affected all previous attempts to build digital money systems.
Some of the wording in the whitepaper is beautiful in its simplicity. Consider this from the initial abstract:
“A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”
And this, from the whitepaper’s conclusion”
“We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity.”
Tweet of the Week:
I love this analysis. The price appreciation of Bitcoin is astounding if you just zoom out a bit.
Issue No. 28, November 5, 2021
Rick Mulvey is a CPA, forensic accountant and crypto consultant. He writes about all things Bitcoin, and yells at the Yankees and Giants. He also runs marathons and makes wine, neither professionally.
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