This week, a treasure trove of emails from Satoshi Nakamoto was published, offering profound insights into the Bitcoin creator’s vision for the cryptocurrency. Notably, an email, tagged as #3, provides an unprecedented look into Nakamoto’s thoughts on Bitcoin’s scalability, economic frameworks, and future prospects.
Satoshi Nakamoto, in detailed correspondence with Martti “Sirius” Malmi, outlines the core features of Bitcoin, emphasizing the developers’ focus on security and user accessibility.
Email #3 reveals Nakamoto’s plans to implement an escrow function to facilitate safer physical transactions and the potential exchange of digital currency for fiat money. This strategic approach showcases Nakamoto’s foresight in building a solid foundation for Bitcoin’s integration into the broader economy.
“On next, I plan to work on an escrow function, which is necessary to make real transactions with physical goods safer, and before the currency support by fiat money begins,” Nakamoto explained on May 3, 2009.
Discussing Bitcoin’s scalability, Nakamoto confidently states that Bitcoin can surpass existing payment networks like Visa in transaction throughput, with Moore’s Law ensuring the network’s capability to handle growth.
Nakamoto’s optimism about scalability contradicts the common criticism of Bitcoin’s performance today.
“The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases worldwide per day. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost.
It will never hit a scale ceiling. If you’re interested, I can explain how it will handle extreme loads. According to Moore’s Law, we can expect hardware speed to be ten times higher in 5 years and 100 times faster in 10. Even if Bitcoin transactions grow at a crazy pace, I think computer speed will stay ahead of the number of transactions,” Nakamoto wrote.
In essence, Satoshi Nakamoto’s view on Bitcoin reveals an extensive plan to create a digital currency that would be decentralized, scalable, and secure, all detailed in just one of many emails to Malmi. Nakamoto’s recently published trove of over 100 emails is likely to undergo thorough scrutiny throughout 2024.
It’s intriguing to ponder how the increase in mining hardware power will boost network throughput, especially since a block is found approximately every ten minutes, and the number of transactions per block is limited by its size.
The current Bitcoin block size ranges from 2.35 MB to 1.35 MB, with the last processed block being 1.9 MB. How to fit 150,000 transactions to compete with VISA remains unclear. The community awaits expert review and interpretation of the rest of the hundreds of emails.
However, there’s a significant possibility of manipulation within the Bitcoin network. If the emails turn out to be forged, they could influence the core developers to implement changes such as increasing the number of blocks per minute or massively increasing the block size, proposals that have been previously suggested by external actors and firmly rejected by the development team core.