Said Natoshi Sakamoto when I spoke to him the other day, he only lives a few blocks from where I live.
"Let me call this the brownpaper-bagholder version.", Natoshi said to me while he prepared a doggy bag for me. He was known to me for quite a long time, often visiting both the store and restaurant he owns. They were the first to accept Cryptos. Somewhere back in 2010 he told me to install an application called The Bitcoin Wallet. It was an ugly looking User Interface {UI} build on WX-Widgets. And I remember just staring at it, being empy, showing me I had 0 BTC...!? It was in those times where I was focused on gaming that had cool 3D. That was exciting stuff. Here nothing happened, was it not supposed to be like magic money? How ignorent I was back in the days of miracle and wonder. Closed it, reopend it, thought it would by now have magicly mined those BTC already. Still at ZERO, so I decided to unistall it. Well, at least his petstore and restaurant do well. Never had a second thought about it in those days. Until about the end of 2012, I think, I did get more into how Bitcoin actually worked. The Dutchlander {me} is such a dumkopf. {D(e)ut(s)ch word for a very smart person}.
So after that experience I started to pay more attention to the words of Natoshi Sakamoto. Even though his name was totally different from the legend, he seemed to have a lot of insider information. One day I had to confront him, of course, because we Western type of humans do that: "Well, if you are, who I think you are, or you do suggest you are, why did you leave all those BTC unspend?", I confronted Natoshi, while we were sitting at the bar in his restaurant, having a beer. "Because that would have proven right away it was me.", he answered while staring in the distance. The restaurant had already closed and we were the last people inside, so we could speak freely. "Pour us a couple of new ones will ya, I gotta take a leak.", Natoshi said while he pointed at the tap. During all these years we had become good friends and now and then I was helping him out. And I must have asked him too often why he did not cash in. Which then made him laugh and since the splittening he'd always reply with: "Do not even get me started on cash, hahaha!"
When he returned from the loo, he looked at the beer in front of him, holding two fingers to the glass. He'd always do that when I poured us a couple. "Good, you still have it in you, foam head at the right height, so you did use clean glasses this time...", in my opinion he was quite anal about these kind of things. Yet, I did learn to pay more attention to detail, thanks to him. He also tought me about the YinYang symbol, which annoyed him. "First learn how to give things the proper name they have been honored with, than you are ready to receive its wisdom.", never got that Eastern wisdom stuff. Anyway that is how I learned the true name of that symbol: Tajitu. And it held a lot of wisdom, easy to remind, just by looking at it, it made a lot of sense. In that way he became my friend and Sensei. (Yes, I know the Tajitu/ 太极图 is Chinese Taoistic, but much of the Japanese and Chinese culture are intertwined. Ki and Chi, go figure...) "Pay attention to everything you do, to every detail, no matter what it is, this will keep you in the here and now.", see, I told you he was quite uptight.
"When ever you spend BTC, or move it, it can be traced back all the way to when it was mined.", he now looked at me with a face like 'do-you-now-finally-get-it-for-fog-sake' !? Then it was time for me to bring up the cash splittening thing, we have had enough to drink, so even when we would end up in a wordfight, we would have forgiven each other the day after. "Is Bitcoin Cash then the real Bitcoin, as you envisioned it in your, to be considered, holy whitepaper?" There was a moment of silence and I was a bit afraid he would start a rant, even though I had never seen him lose his temper before. So much different from the way I did respond to confrontations, if my head could explode, it would have had already so many times that I would have lost count. "Honestly? Hashcash was the first Crypto ever. Everything after that is basicly a fork, only a blockchain was added at first, as a public ledger. Does this make HashCash the real and only one? Then Adam Back has every right to claim he is the real creator of Bitcoin...", while he said that he looked at me and smiled mysteriously. "Maybe we should fork off Bitcoin Cash hard then and call it Hashcash?", we both laughed out loud, guess we were getting close to being blootered.
"But seriously, listen, I mean this, you will understand, okay, listen very carefully, I shall say this only once.", now Natoshi his voice dropped to a very low volume level. And he continued: "If Hashcash was considered to be the real deal, then what use would Open Source Software Developement be? No one can actually claim Bitcoin is a conservative static thing, those who do apparantly did not get it why it is Open Sourced. And the whitepaper is a concept. Only innovation will create progression. That is the right way to move forward. No matter what it is called." Again he stared into the distance for a while. "It must be tough to be quoted constantly in a deceiving manor and that you have to stay silent about it." He clicked his glass to mine and said: "Cheers to that my friend, you got it, spot on." He got off his barstool and walked a bit in a not so straight line towards the beertap. "C'mon mate, finish yours already, there are new glasses to be filled." Yes, this was going to be one of those nights where we would end up singing ACDC songs from the top of our lungs... My bet was on 'Highway to hell', in line with the Bitcoin Cash story.
"Seriously now? They should rebrand Dogecoin to Bitcoin Cash Lite.", Natoshi planted another tap beer in front of me and it started to look to me as if he had given me two. That was a sign for me that this was the last round that I had to take down slowly, or the very unpleasent roller coaster experience would start. "Hahaha, yeah, sure, you are joking right?", I replied as I looked at his face. But he looked dead drunk serious to me. "No, I do mean it, rebrand Dogecoin to Bitcoin Cash Lite, as DOGE is actually the one delivering what the Bitcrap Cash looters claim.", his face turned almost to dark purple as he pointed his finger in anger towards me. "All these so called self acclaimed Bitcoin Maximalists do not understand shait what is really the purpose here, they seem to be cluesless. The right way would have been to create a genesis block. But instead they drained value out off the original Bitcoin blockchain. And with that virtual value they then were able to manipulate the whole Cryptos realm. All they want to do is to become rich overnight, they are in it for the money, to them it is just business. But Bitcoin was created to break the monopoly of the Banking Monetary Governance system!", this was the first time I really saw him this angry, he did seem to have lost his ZEN here...
"Well I do hope there will be hard forking blockchain splitting clones of that Bitcrap Cash. As much as possible, that will drain that one dry. And it is important to educate people about things like Bitcoin not being a static conservative concept. It was ment to be innovated upon, to be able to progress. While some business person, lets call him mister Craig Wrong, wants to centralize control by creating huge blocks, getting banks and governments in, that is crazy, or somebody having an agenda of their own. That is what this whole hostile Bitcrap Cash business take-over of Bitcoin is about!", Natoshi now looked somewhat exchausted. "Take a break Natoshi, get back into ZEN man.", never seen him like this before, this kind of stress level could not be healthy for any human. When he got back on the barstool besides me he seemed more calm when he said: "If they had the balls and honor they would have started a clean blockchain from scratch. Now they are just like a bunch of thieves, claiming they had to do it, because the system made them do it."
"But people buying into it, is part of the challenge. Yet, they are not able to get more than about 15% of the Bitcoin value. It shows in mining numbers too, so I guess consensus still does its thing, right?", I said, in the hope I could help him feel a bit more ZEN. "Yes, that is true, when you consider how this whole Bitcrap Cash scam was setup, all they are able to cabbage is 15 percent of the BTC value at the most.", he said, while his face turned back to its more natural color. "Bitcoin Cash Lite, the Dogecoin rebrand, it is fast and cheap, true to the real vision of Sakamoto Natoshi, hahaha." We both laughed outloud, like some drunk out of their skull pair of skunks."You know what Coop? Let's do it, Dogecoin is fast and cheap, it has a huge community supporting it and there is a lot of room for innovation. Developers are working hard to get DOGE running up to the next level, maybe this could work!", and I thought I saw a twinkle in his eyes when he almost shouted out that line.
"Nah, Dogecoin is fun, it is unique, it will innovate and progress, but the name is part of its charm and important for its marketing. To me multiple hard forking blockchain split cloning the shait out off that Bitcrap Cash scam would be the way to go. Yet, maybe that is just a waste of time, effort and energy. Maybe we should get out off the division and put our energy into things we want to succeed, instead of losing it in a fight that could go on for ever." Natoshi handed me my brownpaper-dogebag and said: "That is a wise thought to end this day with Coop San. Instead of losing ourselves in a useless fight, we better put our energy in building what we want." It was time to head back home and at least get some hours of sleep, before the sun would rise in the East again. "Sleep well Sensei, such beer, very headache, hahaha."
Much fast, such cheap!
Image CC0 licensed.
This satirical story is republished to celebrate an Open Source community court victory and that the true creator of Bitcoin {BTC} remains a mystery.
