HomeBlockchainBitcoin creator "Kind of weird" according to Laszlo Hanyecz

Bitcoin creator “Kind of weird” according to Laszlo Hanyecz

A relationship that Hanyecz calls “Kind of weird

Leggi qui l’articolo in Italiano.

Satoshi Nakamoto is one of the most mysterious figures of our time.

The inventor of Bitcoin literally disappeared into thin air after 2011 and, although some people claimed to be Nakamoto, no one was able to prove it.

His only tracks are linked to a series of emails exchanged with him by the first developers of the project, or his comments on the technical forums.

Now one of the first developers of Bitcoin has decided to raise the veil of mystery on his relations with Satoshi Nakamoto.

This is Laszlo Hanyecz, the man who became known for making his first purchase with Bitcoin, giving rise to the famous “Pizza Day”.  

As a developer, Laszlo exchanged hundreds of emails with the creator of Bitcoin in the days when the project was born.

The report began when Hanyecz, who had already begun to experimentally mine BTC, expressed to the team a desire to contribute to the development of the cryptocurrency also with his own skills as a programmer.

Nakamoto accepted and for a year sent him some programming tasks.

Laszlo explained: “I thought bitcoin was awesome and I wanted to be involved, but I had a regular developing job, Nakamoto would send me emails like, ‘Hey, can you fix this bug? Hey, can you do this?’”.

In short, even if Bitcoin was a side job, and done for free, he felt treated by the BTC mastermind almost as if he were a full-time employee.

“I thought that it was approval from him, that maybe he accepted me as a member. But I didn’t want the responsibility. I didn’t really understand all of the forces that were going on at the time.”

Sometimes the demands were made with too much pressure and Hanyecz found himself having to answer, point-blank, that Nakamoto was not his boss but, at the time, he did not take things too seriously.

Nakamoto had clear ideas about the weight mining would have:

“He said, ‘Well, I’d rather not have you do the mining too much.’ He was trying to grow the community and get more commerce-use cases. He fully recognized that mining would become a thing where a few people would get wealthy.”

Usually, the developer wrote to the creator of BTC several times a week but received a single response at the weekend.

Despite the joint work, Nakamoto always refused to answer questions of a personal nature, so much so that Laszlo was unable to understand even if he or she was involved.

From the name he assumed, like others, that he was a strange man of oriental origin, very paranoid and sometimes a bit overbearing:

“There were a few times when I got messages that seemed off-base, I brushed them off because I was like, ‘Who cares if this guy tells me to go pound sand and go away?’ This wasn’t my job or anything, it was a hobby. I was trying to be friends with him. He seemed very paranoid about people breaking the software. He kept calling it ‘pre-release,’ and I was helping him get it to release.”

Nakamoto seemed to him always very eccentric, but, Hanyecz respects him deeply, also for his decision to disappear which, surely, had a part in the success of Bitcoin, because it gave him an aura of mystery.

Fabio Lugano
Fabio Lugano
Graduated with honors from Bocconi University, Fabio is a consultant for companies and wounded shareholders of the Banche Venete. He is also the author of "Scenari Economici", and lecturer and analyst of cryptocurrencies since 2016.
RELATED ARTICLES

MOST POPULARS

GoldBrick