13 years ago today (December 12, 2010), the masked founder of Bitcoin — Satoshi Nakamoto, (presumably) left Bitcoin development, forever.
Satoshi’s last post was about a software update for Bitcoin that has updates concerning denial-of-service(DoS) attacks on the protocol.
Safe to say, Satoshi left quite hastily without any final messages concerning leaving.
The reason
While it is unconfirmed and anyone is free to speculate, with other theories saying that Satoshi simply died, the consensus is that Satoshi likely left for his/her/their personal security.
Gavin Andresen, one of Bitcoin’s earliest developers, posted on Bitcointalk that he would have a presentation about Bitcoin for the CIA.
This presumably spooked Satoshi — knowing that Bitcoin is now in the sights of the CIA, potentially risking his/her/their security.
Knowing that it’s safe to assume that creating an unregulated currency that could potentially rival local currencies was going to be inevitably shut down by the authorities, Satoshi was right to be worried.
But in the end, who knows? Satoshi might still be contributing to the Bitcoin codebase — just under a different pseudonym(or perhaps, under his/her/their real name) this time, just to be sure.
The positive effect
With Satoshi leaving, it leaves the decision-making of the entire Bitcoin protocol to the community, which is the way it should be — decentralized.
Satoshi continuing to contribute to the protocol in general would give a lot of bias to the community as Satoshi is the founder after all, so people would assume he/she/they would always know best.
Achievements
Regardless of Satoshi’s departure, it’s undeniable that Bitcoin has reached so many milestones even with the absence of the masked founder.
Market cap
Bitcoin has amassed a peak market cap of a whopping $1.2 trillion at its peak in November of 2021; with its current market cap today(12th of December, 2023) of around $800 billion(which can potentially go far higher assuming we are in a bull market).
Community
We now have Bitcoin groups and communities established around the globe, with them educating people on the advantages of a sound, decentralized currency.
Institutional adoption
A few companies like MicroStrategy and Coinbase now have bitcoin on their balance sheets as an investment and/or as a hedge against inflating currencies, as well as a country — El Salvador.
Looking forward
Safe to assume, that we’re going to see more and more bitcoin adoption in all the sectors previously mentioned.
Not only that, we’re now about to get Bitcoin’s first exchange-traded fund or “ETF”, which will allow far better access to traditional and institutional investors.
While Bitcoin is definitely in no way perfect, one thing’s for sure — the future is bright for Bitcoin.
