P2P Foundation forum replies (2 messages)

Bitcoin Research — Law, Regulation, Markets & Origins (2026)

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2009-02-15

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Research, not advice. Part of the Bitcoin research archive (October 2026). Claims labelled unverified, contested or fringe are reported, not endorsed; statuses of bills and rules are as of the date checked. Government, court and patent records are public domain; the research notes are CC BY 4.0.

Satoshi Nakamoto — P2P Foundation forum replies, 15 and 18 February 2009

Satoshi Nakamoto — P2P Foundation forum replies, 15 and 18 February 2009

Compiled 2026-10-09 for ~/Projects/bitcoin (research, not advice).

Source: Satoshi Nakamoto Institute (SNI), data file forum_posts.json
at commit c412eb84a1d97df9114a6bf4dea300820965c0a7 of github.com/NakamotoInstitute/nakamotoinstitute.org, retrieved 2026-10-09.
SNI's site and data are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0; the messages themselves are Satoshi Nakamoto's own writing.

Contents: 2 messages by Satoshi Nakamoto from the P2P Foundation (Ning) forum. Only Satoshi's own messages are included.
Replies by other people in the same threads are left out; text other people wrote that Satoshi quoted inside his own
message is kept as part of his message. Message text is reproduced as SNI publishes it; image tags are replaced by a
text placeholder so this file loads nothing from the internet. Dates are UTC as given by SNI.

Not repeated here because they are already saved in sources/satoshi/: post 1, the 11 Feb 2009 announcement (Satoshi-2009-02-11-P2P-Foundation-Bitcoin-open-source-implementation-SNI.html), and post 4, the disputed 7 Mar 2014 "I am not Dorian Nakamoto" post (Satoshi-account-2014-03-07-P2P-Foundation-I-am-not-Dorian-Nakamoto-SNI.html).

Contents

#Date (UTC)Subject / threadOriginalSNI page

22009-02-15T16:42:00ZBitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency
thread: Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currencyoriginalSNI

32009-02-18T20:50:00ZBitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency
thread: Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currencyoriginalSNI

2. Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency

Poster: Satoshi Nakamoto · Date: 2009-02-15T16:42:00Z · Thread: Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency
Original: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/xn/detail/2003008:Comment:9493
SNI: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/p2pfoundation/2/

Could be. They're talking about the old Chaumian central mint stuff, but maybe only because that was the only thing available. Maybe they would be interested in going in a new direction.

A lot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cause because of all the companies that failed since the 1990's. I hope it's obvious it was only the centrally controlled nature of those systems that doomed them. I think this is the first time we're trying a decentralized, non-trust-based system.

3. Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency

Poster: Satoshi Nakamoto · Date: 2009-02-18T20:50:00Z · Thread: Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency
Original: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/xn/detail/2003008:Comment:9562
SNI: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/p2pfoundation/3/

It is a global distributed database, with additions to the database by consent of the majority, based on a set of rules they follow:

- Whenever someone finds proof-of-work to generate a block, they get some new coins

- The proof-of-work difficulty is adjusted every two weeks to target an average of 6 blocks per hour (for the whole network)

- The coins given per block is cut in half every 4 years

You could say coins are issued by the majority. They are issued in a limited, predetermined amount.

As an example, if there are 1000 nodes, and 6 get coins each hour, it would likely take a week before you get anything.

To Sepp's question, indeed there is nobody to act as central bank or federal reserve to adjust the money supply as the population of users grows. That would have required a trusted party to determine the value, because I don't know a way for software to know the real world value of things. If there was some clever way, or if we wanted to trust someone to actively manage the money supply to peg it to something, the rules could have been programmed for that.

In this sense, it's more typical of a precious metal. Instead of the supply changing to keep the value the same, the supply is predetermined and the value changes. As the number of users grows, the value per coin increases. It has the potential for a positive feedback loop; as users increase, the value goes up, which could attract more users to take advantage of the increasing value.