Just wondering what you guys think was this just a project that he made whilst being drunk in univeristy and decided to release it and it caught on fast or did he know that it was going to get this big?
He has knowledge about writing science articles so he wasn't drunk while writing it. It was probably some university professor, that didn't think it will explode like it did.
We don't know if he had previously written scientific articles before. The name "Satoshi Nakamoto" appeared out of nowhere in 2008 and is absent in cryptography discussions before Bitcoin was announced. The whitepaper is quite well written and conforms with well-established practices for the most part which points towards some sort of scientific/academic background. However, there is also the possibility that he is more than one person and the Satoshi Nakamoto that devised the idea might not be the same Satoshi Nakamoto that wrote the actual paper.
It's also interesting to note that the paper was written in OpenOffice.org instead of the much more common LaTeX which some people have perceived as a sign that he might not come from a formal programmer/mathematician/physicist background (although this could also have been done on purpose to throw people off his trail):
I spoke to Matthew Green, an assistant research professor at Johns Hopkins who works in the field of cryptology. Green said that the original Bitcoin paper bore the marks of a non-academic who, for whatever reason, decided to write his ideas down in an academic format. Green pointed out the fact that the paper had been written in Open Office as opposed to LaTeX, the word processing system used by academics in the CS field, and said that there were certain quirks in the original Bitcoin code that pointed to a “hobbyist.” He noted that this did not necesarrily rule out the possiblity that an academic might have used a different format, but said that the evidence mostly pointed towards a non-academic. (This assessment has been corroborated by other CS academics.)
Source:
https://medium.com/@jaycaspiankang/dorian-satoshi-nakamoto-what-do-we-really-know-ec57f44b6a01Just wondering what you guys think was this just a project that he made whilst being drunk in univeristy and decided to release it and it caught on fast or did he know that it was going to get this big?
He has knowledge about writing science articles so he wasn't drunk while writing it. It was probably some university professor, that didn't think it will explode like it did.
I agree he probably didn't know it would take off. I would venture to guess that most people who actually create something revolutionary really don't realize it at first. And I could see a professor with a background in computers AND economics!
I agree he probably didn't know it would take off.
No, I'm pretty sure, regarding the style of his posts, that he realized what he was doing, and was confident it would be successful.
Satoshi was around and active for a good 2 years before he began fading away from the forums. 2009 was a pretty lackluster year for Bitcoin adoption but by 2010, things really started to take off. Satoshi probably became more confident in his creation as time went on, especially as interest continued to grow and no major flaws were discovered.