Regarding My Involvement in the Satoshi Administration

I used to be a cypherpunk, angry at “The Man” and their attempts to deprive us of our rights. I tried making it right by helping figure out ways to use technology to make that impossible. Those days were long gone, as that sort of thing doesn’t really pay. But a massive corporation that makes its money by ignoring those rights I once tried to protect? They certainly do. The work wasn’t too fun, but I had a nice house to relax in to take my mind off it. I still worked a bit as a maintainer for Bitcoin core, the main software everyone uses to deal with Bitcoin, but at this point I wasn’t too invested in it. It had its time to get off the ground, but it seemed fiat was here to stay. And so I found myself, in the Summer of 2038 watching Jimmy Kimmel and hoping something would change, while doing nothing myself to change it. 

And then a moment I will never forget: the host introduced their special guest for the night, a slim asian man in his late thirties, proclaiming him to be “the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamura.” My interest was immediately piqued, though I didn’t yet believe it was really him. After all, there had been so many impostors making the same claim over the years, though Kimmel was a little high-profile. To this day I have no clue how he managed to secure that. Regardless, I decided to check out some of the old cypherpunk forums I used to frequent, if for no other reason than to jeer at the latest Satoshi wannabe. He went into a long spiel explaining Bitcoin and running over its strengths, and generally seemed more competent than expected. Kimmel eventually asked for a demonstration, in which Satoshi transferred one full Bitcoin to Kimmel’s wallet.

Prior to this point the forums were having a blast. Every simplification Satoshi made about blockchain was picked apart, his mannerisms mocked, all the standard internet vitriol. Once he said he would move a full coin, people started questioning if it was a skit. Would an impostor really spend a couple hundred grand on a demo? Was the app faking the transaction? People called him an idiot for implying he would move a Satoshi coin, which could be so very easily verified. The jeering continued until a few moments after the transaction was made, at which point a message came through from an old bot, xx_Walletwatchdog_xx, whipping the forum into a veritable frenzy: “SATOSHI COINS MOVING.” Satoshi’s transaction was confirmed, and it came from the real deal. At that point I was glued to the television. The man who embodied the principles I wished to live by had returned, and his words were gospel.

Satoshi knew when his transaction had been confirmed as well, and quickly pivoted the topic of conversation to politics, saying everything I wished I could say to the world and more. He railed against corruption and advocated for the myriad policies that every politician says they might implement in a decade, like tax reform and police accountability, tying it all back to the inherent corruption introduced by the dollar. He offered Bitcoin as a solution to this, and announced he would run for president in 2040 to implement it as a second currency alongside the dollar. I was through the roof with excitement. My hero had returned, and I was ready to follow him to hell and back. He promised no more dollar-driven wars, no more corrupt payments exchanged behind closed doors, and no more evil eye dictating what you can and can’t buy. 

I spent the next few weeks in a frenzy of campaigning for Satoshi. I bought and hung posters around the city, talked with everyone I knew, and tried to spread his message as far as I could online. Satoshi kept making media appearances, solidifying his campaign around what I can best describe as progressive populism. He was very hard on elites and corrupt politicians, calling out the myriad abuses committed at their behest, and tied it all back to the dollar. He maintained a constant push for Bitcoin adoption, repeating many of the touted benefits of doing so, but staying away from the really untenable ones. Anyone who questioned this was beaten back with accusations of FUD, greed, and corruption, both by his followers and Satoshi himself. He engaged in many of the same practices Trump pioneered, sacrificing professionality for recognizability and separating himself from the standard politician template that many have become disillusioned with.

Not to mention, Satoshi’s preaching for Bitcoin wasn’t exactly hurt by the price. Before Kimmel, Bitcoin was priced around $415,000, but afterward the excitement caused it to balloon to just over a million, setting back down to around $800,000 after a few weeks. The volatility was concerning to many, but it was volatility with an overall upward trend, which most people found to be more compelling. The usual crowd of speculators who appear after every price hike gained a lot of popularity, but Satoshi (and I) made sure to keep separate from them. Bitcoin is a currency, a way to transact, not an asset to be speculated on. That said, their support for Bitcoin was welcome regardless. Even if they didn’t have the same motivations as us, we all still wanted Bitcoin to succeed, and they were able to provide a great deal of publicity and, importantly, political clout.

The new spike in publicity around Bitcoin brought back into focus the ever-present debate around changing Bitcoin’s rules in order to “make it better to use.” This was, of course, sacrilege. Bitcoin was Bitcoin, not anyone’s science project. It was governed by a set of immutable, established rules, which couldn’t be changed at the whims of any random person or group. There had been forks, of course, but nothing that didn’t follow the rules. Anything that broke them spun off into a new coin and withered away, from the old ventures of Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash to the newer ones like Bitcoin 2035 or Bitcoin Vision. Some of these claimed to be the “real” Bitcoin, but of course they failed to convince anyone. Bitcoin followed the rules Satoshi laid down decades ago; that was the Schelling point that everyone could agree on. Though a thought was brewing: If Satoshi was back and wanted to lay down a couple more, maybe that point could shift. 

Evidently, Satoshi agreed, as a few weeks into his campaign he contacted Bitcoin Core with a proposal for a one-time hard fork upgrade to futurize Bitcoin. The Core team can’t simply force the upgrade, of course, but we did have substantial social standing in the community, which we would need to use to get them on board with any sort of changes. Satoshi’s new vision for Bitcoin was centered around the lightning network, a second layer on top of the base blockchain which makes transactions fast and easy enough to rival debit. However, it still requires on-chain transactions, which use up limited space within the blocks, though less than standard on-chain transactions. This protocol has been revised and improved many times in the past two decades, but given the fitful growth of Bitcoin, the blocks were beginning to fill anyway. Not to mention the looming threat of quantum computing completely breaking the current algorithms. To solve this, Satoshi wanted a few technical changes to better integrate lightning and alter the algorithms to quantum-safe versions, alongside a small one-time increase in block size to 10MB. The former two suggestions, while they would require a hard fork, seemed fine enough, but the latter was scary. Even more moderate suggestions had failed early in Bitcoin’s history, triggering the Blocksize War, so trying the same thing again seemed to be tempting fate. 

But then again, this was Satoshi. He quickly won over the Core team, including myself, and we got to work convincing the community. A number of holdouts persisted, pushing for more moderate proposals, but Satoshi wouldn’t budge, and he was backed by the rest of the team. The idea of not having a hard fork was rejected outright, given the quantum-safe changes requiring one with no clear workaround. Many wanted at first to limit the changes to this, but Satoshi pushed the idea that we may as well make other hard fork improvements while we’re at it. Remarkably, he turned the usual slippery slope argument on its head, contending that pushing through all the changes at once would prevent an attitude of positivity toward regular hard forks. 

Among the community there was considerable pushback at first, but Satoshi quickly softened them to the idea. The memes about him shifted from political like “the triple Jimmy” (for his appearances with Jimmy Kimmel, pre-cyborg Jimmy Fallon, and inexplicably Jimmy Carr) to anti-hard fork, calling him “Block Breaker,” then to pro-hard fork, e.g. “BitFren.” There were charity events, seminars, and demonstrations every week for several months, and he set the miner consensus threshold for activating the fork at 95%, clearly cognisant of the effects that placing thresholds too low had in the Blocksize War. These efforts ended up working out well, and Bitcoin forked on New Years Day, 2039, with 99% of miners flagging for the upgrade. I had the date tattooed on my shoulder. The split was remarkably clean, and the old-rules chain almost completely died after around twelve hours. Undoubtedly this would not have occurred without Satoshi’s leadership, and cemented him as the messiah in the Bitcoin community. As a bonus, his involvement with Core served to let me get to know him personally, and I became involved in his campaign as a sort of technical advisor. 

His campaign, fortunately enough, was going almost as well as his changes to Bitcoin. Satoshi ran as a democrat, continuing his policy push and continuing to heavily advocate for Bitcoin. The main contingent of the party ran Chelsea Clinton, a classic democrat, who as her unofficial meme campaign slogan “23% less war!” implied, was not interested in changing much. She was narrowly defeated by a combination of Satoshi’s tactic of relentlessly harassing his adversaries, widespread meme support, and the revelation that she had been evading taxes for at least the past decade by bribing officials to zero out her balances. Incidentally, this final factor threw even more fuel onto the Bitcoin frenzy, being the point at which I believe the wider public to have begun caring about it. Satoshi proposed a new scheme which would have made her crime impossible: Bitcoin tax collection. This way, if a major political figure didn’t pay, it should be clear for everyone to see. I, and many in the community, didn't exactly believe in this, given that it would be rather easy to just move government coins through the wallets anyway, and the idea of government involvement was somewhat uncomfortable. However, we mostly just figured this was a genius political maneuver. After all, this was Satoshi.

The main campaign against Ron CruzSantis went similarly. Satoshi made himself stand out from the basic politician template, which appealed to many, and CruzSantis provided plenty of avenues for attack, namely his corruption, pointing out how much money he’d taken from special interest groups and insider trading. Satoshi himself had no real history, and funded his campaign primarily through his Bitcoin, so CruzSantis really couldn’t fight back on equal footing. He tried, of course, but Satoshi simply out-blustered him. Satoshi used the corruption as a grand indictment of the dollar, pushing harder for Bitcoin adoption, and in the middle of the second large debate announced a new lightning app, Patriot, intended to be used in a similar manner to El Salvador’s Chivo. This pattern continued, and Satoshi narrowly won, becoming president of the US. Bitcoin had come from a small cypherpunk project to a real, mainstream utility that the country believed in. 

Unfortunately, I believe that this is the point at which the stress started to get to Satoshi. I had built a strong working relationship with him, and earned sufficient trust to be afforded a position as an advisor, mostly to serve as a liaison to Core, who had become a very important ally. Being so close, I often acted as a confidant, and Satoshi began to speak more and more of the stresses of politics. He wanted to make good changes, getting the government out of peoples’ private lives, but the pushback from the establishment was immense. He was much better suited to being a developer, not a statesman, but no one else was willing to change anything, so he felt obliged. However, this was incredibly stressful, and his ideas at times began to become more radical. He started to brush off more moderate solutions to issues as half-measures and started to make jokes about just burning the whole system down. This was somewhat concerning, but I still believed in him. After all, he still knew what he was doing when it came to Bitcoin, and Bitcoin was a clear upgrade to fiat.

Bitcoin was well underway with a major change at this point, one which I am still unsure of my feelings on. I had believed it to be fully decentralized, and to an extent still did, but the oversized influence of Satoshi and the US government was undeniable. When people looked to the future of Bitcoin, they looked to Satoshi or to US monetary policy, not to the rest of the community. This represented a distinct break from full decentralization, which had been a major Schelling point for Bitcoin up until Satoshi’s return. We had become sufficiently infatuated with Satoshi over the years that upon his return we viewed him as infallible. So, when he wanted to make changes and ostensibly centralize Bitcoin underneath himself, most figured it was fine to shift somewhat away from decentralization. The politics of the issue helped grease the wheels considerably as well, since Satoshi was supporting policies popular in the crypto space, so people were hesitant to criticize. 

Satoshi spent his first term maintaining his campaign promises, ramming through congress climate, abortion rights, and anti-corruption legislation, and simplifying taxes to the point that the IRS simply sent an invoice, as in many other countries. The option was also available for this to be paid in Bitcoin, marking the beginning of the system promised in the primaries. The US acquired a significant amount of Bitcoin, though the details of how the wallet was set up were kept (in hindsight, intentionally) opaque, even to me. Three years into his presidency, Satoshi made Bitcoin an official second currency, giving every US citizen $100 in Bitcoin if they installed Patriot, closely mirroring the launch of El Salvador decades ago. This proceeded similarly well, with a few major networking hiccups but overall working decently enough. This caused Bitcoin’s price to hit $2,000,000, settling back down to $1,500,000 after a few days. Bitcoin was adopted by about 20% of people in some manner, mostly for e-commerce and peer-to-peer payment, but the dollar remained the nation’s primary currency. 

Foreign policy experienced a similarly major shift toward Bitcoin. The US began a major foreign campaign championing Bitcoin adoption, going as far as to offer additional aid to nations accepting it in Bitcoin. This garnered significant criticism, but Satoshi refused to capitulate, leading to several public political fights. I myself began to act as somewhat of a Bitcoin ambassador, visiting developing nations across Sub-Saharan Africa and South America to convince them to adopt Bitcoin. This campaigning led to some beginning the early stages of adoption, especially among those nations with weak fiat currencies, most prominently the remaining CFA nations. 

Furthermore, two major events outside of America’s control were capitalized upon by Satoshi to speed up adoption. First, hurricane Ernesto, the largest to date, tore through the Caribbean, leading to nearly $1T in damages. Satoshi, very controversially, made a show of Bitcoin coming in to save the day, offering enormous amounts of Bitcoin-based aid. To his credit, the aid certainly was helpful, though ostensibly the same result would have occurred if the aid was given in dollars. Second, many oil-producing nations across the Middle East and Central Asia decided to denominate their oil trades in various non-dollar currencies, weakening the dollar considerably. In the past, this would have undoubtedly forced a strong American response, but critically Satoshi did nothing, instead stressing the adoption of Bitcoin, since it wasn’t nearly as affected. Incidentally, I was involved in negotiations with Azerbaijan to swap from trading using the dollar to Bitcoin. It is also important to note that despite the declining prominence of the dollar, most nations still kept much of their treasuries in dollars, unwilling to move so quickly to cryptocurrency. This limited the growth of Bitcoin on a macro-scale somewhat, but the increased demand for Bitcoin caused the price to hit $3,000,000 briefly. 

On the back of the limited success of Bitcoin and maintaining of his progressive campaign policies, Satoshi won the primary nomination, repeating much the same tactics as before. He was very clearly becoming increasingly frustrated with the status quo and his inability to push through some of his more extreme adoption policies, actively beginning to make references to simply bringing the whole system down. He assured me in private that these were jokes, but I was beginning to become concerned. The majority of the country tended to agree too, seemingly, as Satoshi was unable to gain reelection, losing narrowly to Trump Jr. He locked himself in his office for four hours after the election was called, very clearly distraught. Nonetheless, it seemed that he had accomplished much of what he had set out to. Bitcoin was finally beginning to become somewhat less volatile due to being stabilized by large reserves and mass adoption, which lent much more legitimacy to our cause. Politically, Satoshi’s antics and ideology had spawned a futurist political movement, the aptly named Futurist party, and members were able to win a large minority in congress. Altogether, Bitcoin adoption looked to be going about as smoothly as possible, and even if Trump Jr. was going to pump the brakes a bit.

Satoshi disagreed. The day before he was to hand over the presidency, the white house went into lockdown. I was unable to contact Satoshi, nor was any other member of the cabinet. An hour later, this fact leaked to the press, who reported that no one knew where he was. An hour after that, a block was mined with an enormous series of high fee chained transactions from the main wallets of the US government. All were almost completely drained, and the coins were already being sent through tumblers, many being cashed out via automated exchanges in various currencies. A large portion were burned outright, rendered completely irretrievable. After another hour, Satoshi posted an unhinged manifesto on Mastodon, ranting about how the global financial system is irredeemable and needs to be burned to the ground. This gave rise to the meme: “From the ashes of Bitcoin and the petrodollar, a new decentralized phoenix shall rise.” To date, Satoshi has not been heard from again. Undoubtedly he was able to use his vast political and economic connections to ensure he will never be found. Satoshi blindsided us all and successfully rugpulled the entire United States. 

Bitcoin’s price crashed, causing an enormous hit to the US economy and outright destroying the economies of nations that bought more into it. Those who bought into the decentralization myth, including myself, were dumbfounded as the emptying of a few wallets destroyed the economy. The government scrambled trying to perform a rollback, but the miners were unwilling. The massive fees Satoshi attached to the transactions served as bribes, and the large mining pools stood to lose billions if they gave into a rollback. After a week, the government attempted to make their own new fork rolling back to just before Satoshi’s rugpull, but this was too little too late. People were done with crypto altogether. Consensus about which Bitcoin was real was completely destroyed, and no one could even agree that it still had value at all. Some moved to other projects, like Ethereum, but Bitcoin essentially brought them down with it. 

After a few weeks, details began to come out that Satoshi had been hiding significant corruption and abuses related to Bitcoin adoption, including schemes to corner hash power, withholding of aid until countries accepted it in Bitcoin, significant insider trading, and more. Furthermore, the technical issues with Bitcoin were not universally solved with his pre-election edits, and the largest US psyop in history was undertaken to prevent dissemination of this information. Two sections of the new code in Core he authored had exceedingly subtle bugs which had been exploited over the years to slowly siphon Bitcoin from random addresses. Some of the major mining pools had been let in on this in exchange for flagging for the upgrade. Not to mention, the upgrade had likely only gained popular support due to an enormous astroturfing campaign by Pinkerton, funded by Satoshi, of course. This likely helped him spread his influence outside of the crypto space to the general public, though to an extent his opponent wasn’t making it very hard for him. Regardless, the entire operation was bursting at the seams, and without the power of the presidency, he could no longer keep it contained. So, he simply left it to explode, according to his manifesto in order “to advance the “anarcho” in “anarcho-libertarianism.””  

This has left me destroyed. I was one of the more public-facing members of Satoshi’s administration, and one of the few who remained in the states to explain. I saw the signs early on, but I never thought he was anywhere close to doing something like this. I do not know if this was Satoshi’s intention all along. All his closest confidants, who may know, are currently unreachable. Perhaps this will come to light in the coming months as the congressional investigation advances, but I am doubtful. 

I believe that he genuinely wanted to change things, reducing government power from the inside, but he was ill-suited for politics. Satoshi was uncompromising, which did not help in negotiations. Many may remember the first few months of his term, where aside from a few key items very little substantial was done by the White House. Behind closed doors, this is because Satoshi refused to give an inch, even to gain a mile. Progress was sluggish, but he soon realized that bribes and favors were just the right tricks to grease the wheels. He got his uncompromising reforms and those with the votes he needed got beach houses. Some have remarked on the smoothness with which he was able to push through his measures after those first few months; this was how that was made possible. Perhaps I should have seen this as a red flag, as a sign of things to come. Frankly, I’m not convinced it was that much worse than the Johnson administration before us, or the five others before that. It was just more concentrated, though I digress. I do not mean to take away from what was done here, or from my responsibility.

I was largely responsible for advancing Bitcoin adoption in many of the nations whose economies were completely destroyed, and I am now left to watch them burn. The dollar died with Bitcoin, dragging the US and much of the rest of the world down with it, since they kept their treasuries in dollars. I feel terrible for all the people my and Satoshi’s actions have affected, and for that I am truly sorry. I still believe in the original idea behind Bitcoin, but what has been done with it has been an unmitigated disaster. I bought into the idea that Bitcoin could be widely adopted while remaining decentralized, but clearly this is not the case. The political and social factors surrounding Bitcoin cannot be ignored, and it seems that by its nature, Bitcoin tends toward an easily centralized, vulnerable state. Satoshi was able to use his social standing, political power, and technical knowledge to rugpull an entire country, and I feel responsible for allowing this to happen. For that, I am sorry.

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