Dan Held: Satoshi Nakamoto Made Initial Bitcoin Distribution Fair

Satoshi Nakamoto, the person or group of people who created the Bitcoin protocol and its Bitcoin Core reference software, made sure that the initial distribution of Bitcoin was as fair as possible. Or at least that was the outcome of the study conducted by Dan Held, the co-founder of Interchange.

First, Satoshi gave a warning to cyberpunks via email, the only people who would probably be interested in a decentralized cryptocurrency at that time, 2 months before the genesis block was removed in January 2009. The technical document was published on October 31, 2008, then the Bitcoin 0.1 software was launched on January 9, 2009.

Likewise, the Genesis block was minted on January 3, 2009. It was different from all other blocks (there was no previous block for reference) and required a custom code to extract it. Satoshi included a message in the Genesis block as “proof that there is no previous mining”.

On the other hand, during the early years of Bitcoin, there was not enough hashrate to produce the 144 blocks per day, 1 block every 10 minutes as it is now, and the extraction difficulty did not increase. Apparently, Satoshi was mining, non-profit, to keep the small network safe. Let’s remember that Bitcoin had no monetary value until the second half of 2010.

Eventually, Satoshi decreased his mining hashrate, as the network itself was earning enough hash to keep itself safe. He finally stopped mining in early 2010.

Satoshi lost the potential to exploit huge amounts of Bitcoin by reducing his hash consumption at first, making it clear that he was more concerned with fair distribution than making money.

It should be noted that Satoshi has not yet sold its Bitcoin fortune, which is estimated to be between 700,000 and 1 million bitcoins. Dan Held concludes that Satoshi wanted to show everyone that Bitcoin was not a scam.

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