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Comment by zghst | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting name for a decimal. What an intricate community

It's the name of the creator of Bitcoin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto. You can imagine them as little pennies with Satoshi's head imprinted on them, if you like.

And it's not really a decimal; it's more properly "1 bitcoin" in the technical sense. 1BTC was later defined to be equal to 10^8 Satoshis because that seemed like a useful amount of money to track exchange rates for (though now it's about 10^4 too high.)

"Name" is maybe not quite right, "Satoshi Nakomoto" is the creator's pseudonym. The actual author of the bitcoin whitepaper is unknown and the subject of much speculation.

I'm sure OP knows this, I'm just being pedantic.

Strictly speaking, it's not known if the name is a pseudonym either. There are people in the world that have that name and they haven't denied being the creator.

If it is said author's name, why have they not publicly claimed to be this Satoshi? Name one such individual who has credibly been considered to have invented bitcoin.

You want the name of the Satoshi Nakomoto who is most likely to be the Satoshi Nakomoto? The name? That's what you want? Are you sure you've thought this through?

A pseudonym is a kind of name, so “name” is entirely correct, if not entirely complete (though, AFAIK, it is as complete as is known to be correct, since it is only widely presumed, rather than known, that the name is a pseudonym.)

Wait until you see the nomenclature used for Ethereum units: Wei, Kwei, Szabo, etc https://etherconverter.online

Buterin couldn't possibly have made it more complicated.

It looks like standard SI prefixes to me, what's so complicated about that?

They don't use SI prefixes. They use wei, ada, babbage, shannon, szabo, finney, ether, and einstein. facepalm

(Satoshi is the inventor of bitcoin, in case you don't know)

Not quite. The central ideas underpinning bitcoin are very old, tracing back to hashcash and bitgold. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hashcash#History

It's not really an important distinction, but maybe someone will find the history interesting.

See also this 1996 NSA paper "How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash", predating both Hashcash and Bit gold.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money...

(and OP seems factually correct: Satoshi was the inventor of Bitcoin).

The idea of electronic money is old. What this describes is a Chaum blind-signature style centrally-cleared coin, which dates back to his 1983 paper. There is no protection against double-spends in this scheme (without the clearing agency taking an active role), and no protection against the central agency creating unlimited amounts of coin.

Proof-of-work schemes like hashcash and bitgold are much closer to hitting on the central ideas that led to Bitcoin. It's like crediting Democritus with atomic theory -- yes, he's talking about the same thing, but in such a way that the final realization is so different as to be unrecognizable.

Lots of people try to take credit for the ideas in Bitcoin (especially Adam Back, who you linked to), but Satoshi was its clear inventor.

Satoshi Nakamoto referenced Adam Back in his Bitcoin white paper. I don't see that as Adam Back ‘trying to take credit’, rather the reverse.

HashCash's contributions were fairly small. PoW was already invented and RPoW quickly improved upon it. I have no idea why Satoshi even referenced it.

In that case, Ben Franklin is the inventor of the internet.

The US Dollar has the penny, nickle, dime, and quarter, and Bitcoin has the satoshi. It's not really that hard to understand.

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