The beauty and brilliance of Bitcoin is that it isn’t about one man or one company or one centralized authority. It’s about everyone.
Bitcoin is a grand experiment, a testament to what’s possible, and a glimpse of tomorrow that, in and of itself is, by design, bigger than any single entity. It’s an innovative solution that brings us closer together and is driven by us all and an inspiration for the rest of us to build a smarter world.
The essence of math-based currencies lie in the protocol itself: an elegant convergence of cryptography, a peer-to-peer public ledger, and open source development that solves the Byzantine Generals Problem. Suddenly, people can send money online without an intermediary (at least in crypto-form)—like giving someone cold hard cash—which, perhaps frustratingly and perplexingly, remains no easy feat.
“The practical consequence of solving this problem is that Bitcoin gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer,” wrote technologist Marc Andreessen in an op-ed for the New York Times. “The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate.” [Andreessen’s venture fund, Andreessen Horowitz is an investor in Ripple Labs.]
The exchange of value is fundamental to how our world began, operates today, and accelerates into the future. The better connected our society is—whether through communications or finance—the more efficient and productive we are. The easier it is for anyone to participate, the more we all stand to gain. And the more control we have over our own destiny, the more empowered we become as a whole.
It’s only natural then that we’re curious about the man behind the revolution. Of course, it’s also yet another example of Satoshi Nakamoto’s genius. Beyond laying the groundwork for Bitcoin, he clearly foresaw his own potential as a distraction from the cause. Presumably, he’d prefer that we focus on what’s really important.
Or maybe he simply valued his privacy. Whatever the case, it’s only fitting that we try and respect his wishes. After all, cryptocurrencies, the technology and the movement, transcends any one man.
