Point 1: Bitcoin was not “released on a cypherpunk mailing list.” The list where the white paper was announced included government officials, academics, cryptographers, and assorted practitioners. It was a professional, mixed audience. Get your facts straight. Point 2: “We.” That pronoun is standard academic usage in single-author technical papers. It’s not a clue, not a conspiracy, and not a mistake. It’s house style. Point 3: The system is a timestamp server first and foremost. Read the abstract. The entire construction exists to create an immutable, time-ordered ledger of transactions—digital cash anchored by time, not a cult commodity. Point 4: Adam Back’s Hashcash was a proof-of-work example, not Bitcoin’s design. Hashcash (and copies of it) were not used in Bitcoin as a drop-in component, nor were they aligned with the transaction model, incentives, or network rules of Bitcoin. Citing Hashcash as “what Bitcoin is” is lazy gloss. Point 5: “Permission.” No. The paper describes a public system where miners validate and build blocks and where users transact directly (IP-to-IP) using fresh addresses for small casual transactions and micropayments. That is not a blank cheque for spam, sybil theatre, or retrofitted custodial choke points. Point 6: If you had read the paper, you’d know the roles are defined: nodes (miners) create blocks; users spend; the timestamp chain orders and secures. It was built to scale usage, not to enshrine artificial scarcity or outsource everything to exchanges. You haven’t read the paper, have you.

I just tried sending my friend $100 with Western Union.

Nice work, @anil_bharrat!! Can’t wait to hear from @CsTominaga! 🎃

let's make bitcoin the currency

Government loves BTC because it behaves. It’s a system of intermediaries wearing digital masks. Exchanges. Custodians. Gateways. Trusted third parties — the very parasites Bitcoin was meant to kill. It gives the illusion of rebellion while quietly rebuilding the same empire of control. They don’t fear BTC because they already own it. They can tax it, blacklist it, surveil it, freeze it. The chain is public, the gateways are licensed, and every trade passes through the same bureaucratic sieve. It’s not peer-to-peer; it’s bank-to-bank with extra steps. What they fear is real exchange — two individuals transacting directly, without permission, without record, without middlemen. They fear a world where money moves like speech, where ownership isn’t a checkbox on a compliance form but a fact of computation. True Bitcoin was digital cash: fast, final, direct. It was not meant to be a speculative asset for trading desks or a product for custody firms. It was designed as competition to government currency, not as another chip on their table. The betrayal came when people traded sovereignty for convenience. They mistook price for principle. They built soft layers over hard rules, just like governments do. And the result is the same — control disguised as innovation. Governments don’t crush rebellion anymore. They buy it, list it, and sell it on an exchange. #PeerToPeerOrNothing #DigitalCash #NoMoreMiddlemen #FreedomNotCustody