This may be due to the slow passing of winter, but seeing the behavior of the mainstream media reporting bitcoin as the result of the financial crisis is getting harder. This is not at all true, and it is an important issue that must be addressed.
First, I will explain why the claim that bitcoin is the result of the financial crisis is not true, and why I take the issue so seriously.
Satoshi Nakamoto, who is known to have created Bitcoin, began writing a Bitcoin white paper in early 2007, more than a year before the onset of the financial crisis.
At the time, the subprime mortgage market was collapsing, but even experts who had spent their entire lives in finance could not properly guess the exact scale. Even when information on corporate bankruptcy and bankruptcy was on the front page of the newspaper, Satoshi was probably devoted to white paper work. However, because of this situation, there is nowhere to find evidence that he hastened to work on the white paper.
It was in October 2008 that Satoshi posted a Bitcoin white paper to an email group that included cryptography experts. At the time, the financial markets had completely collapsed, the US government was in direct control of parts of the financial ecosystem, and the world’s central banks were printing money while lowering interest rates.
In January 2009, Satoshi left the title of a major article reported by The Times on the day on the first bitcoin block he mined. It was the phrase “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”.
Because of this, many people think Satoshi made Bitcoin in response to the financial crisis. However, this only shows the lack of understanding of the effort put into designing bitcoin or the philosophy that has been built for a very long time in relation to P2P finance.
The importance of history
This illusion has the potential to undermine the value Bitcoin pursues. The big picture can be missed by misinterpreting the intentions of cryptography experts who have struggled to develop decentralized electronic money solutions for decades.
It wasn’t just one incident that Satoshi tried to respond to. Even those who laid the groundwork for what he did did not plan for a specific situation in advance. They all pondered the fundamental problem of financial sovereignty.
Nothing is known (as far as I know) what Satoshi was thinking about the financial system before publishing the Bitcoin whitepaper. However, right after the first bitcoin block was mined, Satoshi left the following words.
“The fundamental problem with traditional money is that it is based on trust. There must be a trust that the central bank will not damage the value of money, but in the history of fiat currency, there are too many cases where that trust has collapsed.”
Satoshi did not specifically mention the dizzying financial market situation at the time. Of course, the aftermath of the financial crisis was very large and difficult to ignore, but Satoshi seems to have been thinking more than this.
The phrase left in the original bitcoin block and the point in time may be intentional or coincidental. The exact thing is unknown. However, there is no change in the fact that an important message has been delivered.
Satoshi tried to accuse the reality that institutional finance is dominated by politics. It emphasized that trust in the weak financial structure and institutional financial soundness is depleting. Fundamentally, it depicts the financial crisis that was going on at the time, but the financial crisis is only one of many examples that revealed more fundamental problems, not the decisive event that led to the creation of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin was created not because of the financial crisis. The financial crisis is just one symptom of the bigger problem that underlies Bitcoin’s birth. If the story that bitcoin was created in response to the financial crisis continues to survive, then bitcoin will only be seen as a new solution designed to solve a relatively recent problem.
This is not true. Bitcoin is a long-awaited solution that can solve a long-standing problem.
If we only think of bitcoin as related to a single event called the financial crisis, we have no choice but to think that the necessity will gradually disappear over time after the painful adjustments are over.
But it won’t be that way. Skills cannot be put back into the vial. Once awareness of the vulnerabilities inherent in the financial system we all rely on, once increased, it can never be reversed.
Bitcoin has created an opportunity for ideas that once only flowed between members of secret email groups to spread more widely. This prompted us to rethink our financial rights, personal data, and our own identity.
Unfortunately, the situation at the time of the birth of bitcoin encouraged the spread of this idea even more, and the pace of spreading again is accelerating as traditional monetary policy has been neglected recently. Financial privacy, the impossibility of confiscation, and the depreciation of fiat currencies are some of the many topics that come and go every time the cryptocurrency market fluctuates. And now these discussions are taking place in the most sacred realms of traditional finance.
However, Bitcoin was not created to correct the crisis. It was created to give people a choice.
Bitcoin should not be viewed as a result of responding to a specific situation, but rather as a technical achievement of efforts that began decades ago. In addition, we must applaud the thinkers of those days, who for a long time predicted the future that the centralization of finance and economy will ultimately bring.
· Translated by NewsPeppermint.
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