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Bitcoin Inventor Satoshi Nakamoto Nominated For Nobel Prize
HughPickens.com writes: Nobel Prizes are given for making important — preferably fundamental — breakthroughs in the realm of ideas. That's just what Satoshi Nakamoto has done, according to Bhagwan Chowdhry, a professor of finance at UCLA. Chowdhry has nominated Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, for a Nobel prize in economics. The Prize Committee for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, popularly known as the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, has invited Chowdhry to nominate someone for the 2016 Prize. He started thinking about whose ideas are likely to have a disruptive influence in the twenty first century: "The invention of bitcoin — a digital currency — is nothing short of revolutionary," says Chowdhry. "It offers many advantages over both physical and paper currencies. It is secure, relying on almost unbreakable cryptographic code, can be divided into millions of smaller sub-units, and can be transferred securely and nearly instantaneously from one person to any other person in the world with access to internet bypassing governments, central banks and financial intermediaries." Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin Protocol has also spawned exciting innovations in the FinTech space by showing how financial contracts — not just currencies — can be digitized, securely verified and stored, and transferred instantaneously from one party to another.
There's only one problem. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Suppose the Nobel Committee is convinced that Satoshi Nakamoto deserves the Prize. Now the problem it will face is how to contact him to announce that he has won the Prize. According to Chowdhry, Nakamoto can be informed by contacting him online just the same way people have communicated with him in the past. He has anonymously communicated with the computer science and cryptography community. If he accepts the award, he can verifiably communicate his acceptance. Finally, there is the issue of the Prize money. Nakamoto is already in possession of several hundred million U.S. dollars worth of bitcoins so the additional prize money may not mean much to him. "Only if he wants, the committee could also transfer the prize money to my bitcoin address, 165sAHBpLHujHbHx2zSjC898oXEz25Awtj," concludes Chowdhry. "Mr Nakamoto and I will settle later."
There's only one problem. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Suppose the Nobel Committee is convinced that Satoshi Nakamoto deserves the Prize. Now the problem it will face is how to contact him to announce that he has won the Prize. According to Chowdhry, Nakamoto can be informed by contacting him online just the same way people have communicated with him in the past. He has anonymously communicated with the computer science and cryptography community. If he accepts the award, he can verifiably communicate his acceptance. Finally, there is the issue of the Prize money. Nakamoto is already in possession of several hundred million U.S. dollars worth of bitcoins so the additional prize money may not mean much to him. "Only if he wants, the committee could also transfer the prize money to my bitcoin address, 165sAHBpLHujHbHx2zSjC898oXEz25Awtj," concludes Chowdhry. "Mr Nakamoto and I will settle later."
Inventor of dynamite never intended it to be used to kill people... Bitcoin has the potential to change the world, but it's not the creator's fault that bad people abuse it early on.
And as we all know, traditional currency has never been used for criminal activity whatsoever.
You have made a currency for an underworld of drug & arms dealers, paedophile porn sites and murder for hire. Oh yes, a few people use it for normal transactions too, and it ruins the environment as you have to run computers for a long time to create it.
That's a pretty lame way to frame it. You forgot to mention that it rots your teeth and destroys family values.
American paper money is also the currency of underworld drugs and arms, pedophiles, and murder for hire.
Bitcoin is also the currency of freedom from oppression, freedom from centralized regulation based on political agendas, and massive surveilance.
The American dollar... not so much.
Did you think that the credit cards refusing to allow payments to WikiLeaks was a good thing?
Googling "BitCoin freedom" turns up just shy of a million links.
At least 2000 girls in Afghanistan are being paid in bitcoin for their blog writing and social media skills.
Bitcoin Will Thrust the World Towards Freedom
Do you think traditional transactions gets processed for free, or do they also need to be processed?
Bitcoin is also the only way to pay for many things without the banks getting a piece of it. Bought something on ebay? Paypal gets 3-4%. Paying with a different currency than the merchant? Make that 7%
Yes, but those don't pretend to be sciences.
nventor of dynamite never intended it to be used to kill people
Not true at all. Nobel was one of the biggest armament manufacturers and merchants of the nineteenth century. As he got older he felt guilty about all the people who were being killed as a result of his inventions and business so he turned to philanthropy.
What makes you think your digital trust chain will be in any way enforcable in a nation that has collapsed so far that it doesn't even have a "proper land registry"?
In that situation, a gun would be far more useful than some bits on a computer somewhere. And that's only if someone else doesn't have bigger and/or more guns.
BTW, Nakamoto didn't invent the idea of decentralised trust chains. He borrowed the idea from existing public key encryption.