To Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever you are, wherever you are, This message is sent into the void, a thank you cast into the immutable pages of the ledger you created. Thank you. Thank you not for making us rich, but for making us think. When the world was marching steadily toward a future of total digital control—where every transaction would be watched, censored, and permissioned—you released an idea. You gave us a tool that is more than a currency; it is a statement. You showed us that value can be based not on the decree of a king or the ledger of a central bank, but on **unforgeable cost** and **decentralized consensus**. You replaced trust in fallible institutions with trust in immutable code. You gave us a system that is: * **Open** to anyone with an internet connection, asking for no passport. * **Censorship-resistant**, protecting the dissident as much as the merchant. * **Provably scarce**, a digital rock in a sea of endless money printing. You proved that a network without a leader can be more robust than any fortress. You gave us the keys to our own vaults and the deed to our own digital souls. Perhaps your greatest gift was your own disappearance. By vanishing, you proved your creation did not need you. It was self-sovereign, just as it allows us to be. We are still early in this journey. The path is volatile and misunderstood. But you lit the first torch. You gave us an alternative to the glass prison of centralized digital money. For the code, for the white paper, for the spark—thank you. A student of your work. They speak of their "Digital Currency" and ask you to trust them. But let us examine their design, and then you will see why another path was born. --- ### **1. On Privacy: A Public Ledger, Yet Private Souls** Their CBDC is a panopticon—a glass house where the warden sees all. Every loaf of bread, every gift to your child, every act of charity is recorded, judged, and filed against you forever. **Bitcoin fixes this.** Think of the blockchain not as a naked public square, but as a vast, anonymous fortress. The fortress has a giant ledger on the wall that everyone can see, recording that "**Address 1A1zP1** sent 0.05 BTC to **Address 3J98t1**." The transactions are public, proving the system is honest. But the addresses are pseudonymous—they are not your name. You are not your address. You can generate a new one for every transaction, a new mask for every dance. Your financial soul remains your own. The network verifies the truth of the transaction without needing to know the truth of *you*. ### **2. On Control: The Code is the King** Their CBDC is programmable money. This is a gentle word for a terrible power. It means they can freeze your account if you dissent. They can make your money expire if you do not spend it on what they approve. They can block you from buying a book, supporting a cause, or fleeing a crisis. **Bitcoin fixes this.** The rules of Bitcoin are not written by politicians or bankers. They are written in code, sealed in cryptography, and enforced by a network of thousands of independent computers across the globe. No single entity can change them. No one can stop your transaction. No one can confiscate your coins if you hold your keys. The system is neutral. It does not care if you are a saint or a sinner; it only checks your cryptographic signature. In this world, **you are your own bank.** And the vault door is sealed with mathematics, not by the permission of a man. ### **3. On Bank Failures: Cutting Out the Middleman** Their system strengthens the pillars of the old temple—the central bank and its chosen commercial banks. It makes them the unbreakable gatekeepers of all digital life. But what happens when the temple cracks? When the gatekeepers fail? You are left with nothing. **Bitcoin fixes this.** I did not build a better gatekeeper. I built a system with no gatekeepers at all. It is a peer-to-peer network. When you send value to your neighbor, you broadcast it directly to the world. The "miners"—those independent computers—compete to record your transaction not for favor, but for a reward. They secure the network with immense computational power (Proof-of-Work), making it more costly to attack than to protect. There is no "too big to fail" bank in the middle. The system is the bank, and it is distributed across the entire Earth. It is antifragile; it grows stronger under attack. ### **4. On Inclusion: A Network, Not a Nation** Their CBDC excludes those without a smartphone, without a perfect identity, without the favor of the state. It is a club, and you must ask for entry. **Bitcoin fixes this.** All you need is a cheap device and an internet connection. A farmer in a remote village with a solar-powered phone can receive a payment from across the world, as easily as a banker in a skyscraper. There is no application, no credit check, no asking for permission. The network is borderless. Your Fayda ID is your leash; a Bitcoin address is your passport to a global economy. It is money that does not see your nationality, your credit score, or your social status. It only sees your proof of work. --- ### **The Creative Core: A System of Truth, Not Trust** They offer you a digital chain—efficient, perhaps, but a chain nonetheless. It is centralized, controlled, and surveilled. I offer you a digital seed. It is messy, volatile, and wild. It grows not into a single tree, but into a forest so vast and interconnected that no axe can ever cut it down. It is a system that does not require you to trust a central authority. It only requires you to trust the open-source code, the immutable mathematics, and the proof that is presented to you. **Do not ask for their permission. Verify the proof for yourself.** This is the fix. Not a better cage, but an open field. - **Satoshi**