SATOSHI'S MOST MEMORABLE LINE

Satoshi Nakamoto was known for choosing his words wisely. Rarely prone to displaying emotion in his communications, he gave the air of studious academic rather than a fiery cypherpunk. For this reason, his true feelings have remained largely inscrutable to Bitcoin historians – save for the occasional stirring that hinted at the passion and possible frustration associated with corralling the community that had coalesced around his creation.

If there is one phrase for which Satoshi is most famous, it’s the words he typed on the Bitcointalk forum on July 29th, 2010, by which point Bitcoin had emerged from the shadows and was attracting an influx of new users. There is a hint of frustration in the line: “If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry” – even if Satoshi wasn’t trying to lash out at the poster in question.

That poster was “bytemaster,” who had been debating Bitcoin’s ability to scale and handle quick payments. The man behind the moniker was Dan Larimer, a software engineer who would later become known as the founder of BitShares, Steemit, and EOS. Scaling Bitcoin, so that it could support more transactions without sacrificing decentralisation, was to prove a contentious point in the coming years, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that Satoshi was uncharacteristically abrupt over this issue over all others.

A Scalding Over Scaling

The scaling debate had kicked off in the thread a week earlier when “Red” pondered whether Bitcoin could accommodate 5 million transactions per day. Various forum users chipped in with their thoughts on the matter, including bytemaster, who provided an articulate and elaborate reply in which he ventured that Bitcoin’s 10-minute block times made the network unsuited to payments that required instant verification.

It was evident, even at this early stage in his crypto journey, that bytemaster was an intelligent technologist who was possessed of great foresight. In the thread, he effectively envisioned the rise of cheaper and faster onchain payment solutions that would sacrifice some decentralisation in favour of convenience. Then Satoshi entered the thread.

In typical Satoshi fashion, he methodically went through each of bytemaster’s concerns in turn, explaining the rationale behind Bitcoin’s design and recalling an earlier discussion in which he’d opined that a vending machine could use a payment processor service to confirm a Bitcoin payment “in something like 10 seconds or less,” with a fraud risk “much lower…than credit cards.” Satoshi then delivered the now-famous final sentence: “If you don’t believe me or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry.”

What’s not widely reported is how bytemaster responded to Satoshi’s mic drop. He meekly replied: “I fully believe you and came to [the same] conclusion you did.” In other words, there was no beef. It was simply a handful of bright minds debating ways to circumvent the limitations of Bitcoin’s architecture without forgoing the properties that made it so powerful.

There are a few ways of reading Satoshi’s testy response. It’s possible that his closing remark has been taken out of context by historians reading too much into the comments of someone who, regardless of their true identity, was just another fallible human reacting to being challenged as any internet user would. Another is that the recent increased interest in Bitcoin had arrived faster and more feverishly than Satoshi had expected – and now he was feeling the pressure.