the root problem is trust

february 11, 2009.

a random forum post on the p2p foundation. no marketing. no hype. no vc backing. just a quiet announcement that would change everything. most people know the whitepaper. but the forum post.... the forum post is where satoshi said the quiet part out loud.

"the root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work."

trust. thats the word. not technology. not innovation. trust. trust that central banks wont debase the currency. but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. satoshi's words. not mine. trust that banks will hold our money safely. but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. trust that they wont let identity thieves drain our accounts. trust that their overhead costs wont make basic transactions impossble.

and then satoshi made a comparison that most people miss entirely. he talked about computer systems in the 1970s. how users had to trust system administrators to keep their files private. privacy could always be overriden by the admin based on his judgment call. then strong encryption became available to the masses. and suddenly.... trust was no longer required. data could be secured in a way that was physically impossible for others to access. no matter what. no matter the excuse. and then the line that still gives me chills 16 years later:

"its time we had the same thing for money."

thats it. thats the whole thing. encryption did for data what bitcoin does for value. it removes the need for trust by making the alternative mathematicaly impossible. not economically impractical. not legally risky. physically impossible. we spend so much time arguing about price predictions and etf flows and what musk tweeted yesterday. and thats fine i guess. but sometimes its worth going back to the source.

back to a random post on an obscure forum from a person who never revealed their identity. a person who solved a problem cryptographers had been working on for decades. a person who gave it away for free and then disappeared. 16 years later, that code is still running. 24/7. no bailouts. no downtimes. no "were experiencing technical difficulties." the question satoshi asked in 2009 is still the right question today: do you want money that requires trust.... or money that replaces it? where do you stand?