Bitcoin Talk 003: Satoshi Doesn't Mind Being Misread

Satoshi doesn’t mind being misread, just as Confucius didn’t. Confucius wasn’t afraid of being misread either — he had three thousand disciples, seventy-two of them accomplished. Are we to believe there wasn’t a single rotter among those seventy-two, or that every one of them understood and carried out Confucius’s thought one hundred percent?

Even Craig Wright and Jihan Wu are spreading Satoshi’s ideas according to their own understanding of the white paper. Buddhism has a saying: “If the Dharma is to flourish, monks must praise monks.” Why must monks praise monks? In Journey to the West, when Ananda and Kasyapa hand over the scriptures, they set conditions and openly shake down Monkey for a protection fee — and it’s clearly not their first time. Yet they sit secure in Thunderclap Monastery§. What religion in history hasn’t seen blood flow like rivers, inside and out?

A powerful idea doesn’t fear being misunderstood, doesn’t fear being deliberately distorted. It fears only that it cannot spread, and that there is no soil for it to spread in.

Bitcoin, and the 12,801 cryptocurrencies derived from it (as of 02:42, 18 October 2021), will spread through this world like a virus. For a virus, what matters is not whether the direction of mutation is the one it wanted — what matters is whether there are new hosts to infect.

Confucius died, but he left a trillion people as his stand-ins: Ethereum, SHIB, TRON… If any one of them manages to usurp Bitcoin’s throne, I will welcome it at any time — that would mean Bitcoin has completed its mission. A stand-in being made official is the most normal thing in the world.

These 12,801 assorted cat-coins, dog-coins and pig-coins, and the countless rising stars yet unborn, are all Bitcoin’s stand-ins. If Bitcoin dies one day, then it deserved to die, and I will say: good riddance!