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BTC Back challenges Satoshi Nakamoto's authority
Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream, has sparked heated discussions recently when he pointed out that Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, should not be regarded as an absolute authority in network development. Satoshi Nakamoto himself later admitted the limitations of expansion and turned to discussing second-tier solutions and even the concept of "Bitcoin banking," but Back called on the industry to stop delving into forum posts from 15 years ago. Back pointed out that Satoshi Nakamoto "said a lot of things, many of which were contradictory." He specifically mentioned Satoshi Nakamoto's early vague defense of Bitcoin's scalability and later comments on blockchain's unscalability, second-layer networks and Bitcoin banks, and concluded bluntly: "Sometimes he is wrong."
This statement carries particular weight given Back's place in Bitcoin history. He was an original cypherpunk who invented Hashcash in 1997-a system that was directly cited in the 2008 Bitcoin white paper. He is the only person cited by individuals in Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin white paper. This close connection with the origin of Bitcoin makes his courage to criticize Satoshi Nakamoto's early assumptions even more eye-catching.
First principles trump founder myth
The expanding debate mentioned by Back has a long history. On the first day of the network's launch, Satoshi Nakamoto defended himself quite uncertainly, refuting James A. Donald's criticism-the latter predicted a scalable collapse of Bitcoin due to the huge bandwidth demands and resource consumption faced by all nodes. Satoshi Nakamoto did later discuss a tiered approach, admitting that blockchain itself cannot scale to global transaction volume, and hinted at a higher-level system. But Back's point is that those thoughts are exploratory rather than golden rules, and the Internet has since developed far beyond its original context. Back urges developers and the wider community to build Bitcoin based on currently applicable mathematical and security fundamentals, rather than blindly believing in authority. For a network that is now worth trillions of dollars and supports a growing number of institutional asset classes, the argument is straightforward: treat Bitcoin's development as an engineering discipline, not a religion.
