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Forget the news today. Forget the price. Today. I want to take you back to the very beginning, to the man, the moment, and the message hidden in the first block of bitcoin. This is the story they should be teaching in schools, and almost nobody's heard it. Let's go. What is up, everybody? Welcome to the Daily Wolf on Yahoo. Finance. I'm your host, Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of Allstreets. Now, usually we cover the news every single day, but we've gotten in the habit of doing some deep dives on important topics. And today I want to tell you the story of how bitcoin was born. Not the simplified version or the Wikipedia version, the real one. Because once you know the story, once you understand who built it and when they built it and what was happening in the world the day they pressed the button and what they buried inside the very first piece of code, you'll understand that bitcoin was not a technology experiment. Bitcoin was a response. And the person or people who built it made sure before they disappeared that nobody could ever forget why. So let me set the scene. The fall of 2008. The American financial system was collapsing in real time. Bear Stearns was already gone. And then Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on September 15, which at the time was the largest corporate bankruptcy in US History. Aig, the giant insurance company, was hours from imploding. The same week, Washington Mutual failed, which was the biggest bank failure in American history. Within 72 hours, the entire global financial system was teetering on the edge of total collapse. The world had never seen anything like it. And what happens next, as we all remember, was one of the largest transfers of wealth from the public to the financial sector in human history. The bailouts, the TARP program. $700 billion handed to Wall street to clean up a mess Wall street had made. AIG got bailed out by the Federal Reserve and turned around and paid Goldman Sachs $13 billion at 100 cents on the dollar. The Fed opened the printer. Trillions of dollars created out of thin air. Risk and reward fully decoupled. The banks that caused it got rescued, and the taxpayers who'd funded the rescue got a slow grind of inflation and lost savings stretched over the next two decades. So that was the world. Late 2008, faith in the financial system was at the lowest point since the Great Depression. Anybody paying attention could see what was happening. The rules of the game had just been rewritten in plain sight to favor the people who already won. And there was nothing anyone could do about it. Because the system was the system. There was no exit. There was no alternative. You lived inside the dollar or you lived nowhere. And then, on October 31st of 2008, on Halloween, at 2:10 in the afternoon, a paper appeared on an obscure cryptography mailing list. Nine pages, written by someone who called himself Satoshi Nakamoto. The title was a peer to peer electronic Cash System. And this paper was dense. It was rigorous. It cited prior cryptographic work going back decades. And it described in elegant detail a system that had never existed before in human history. A digital money that could be sent from one person to another anywhere in the world without going through any bank and any government, any intermediary at all. A money that solved a problem computer scientists had been working on for decades and had never been able to crack. A money that couldn't be counterfeited, couldn't be printed by anyone, and operated on a fixed supply schedule that no one, not the inventor, not a government, not anyone, could ever change. And the thing about the paper that really hit when you read it was that there was no marketing. There was no hype. There were no promises of riches. There was no name attached, just a pseudonym. And it was just nine pages of cold, precise, almost academic prose describing a complete alternative to the financial system that was that exact week collapsing into the laps of the people who were about to be bailed out. It's one of the most extraordinary documents of the 21st century. And almost nobody at the time noticed. Then, on January 3rd of 2009, about two months later, Satoshi Nakamoto turned the system on. He mined the very first block of the bitcoin blockchain, the Genesis block. Block zero. The foundation. And every bitcoin transaction that has ever happened in the 17 years since ultimately traces back to that single block on that single day in January of 2009. And here's where the story becomes legend. Because inside that genesis block, Satoshi embedded a message, not in the protocol, not in a comment. He put it inside what's called the coinbase parameter of the first transaction, which is a field represent where the miner can put arbitrary data. And the data he put there that has been preserved forever in the immutable record of every bitcoin node on Earth. Read exactly the Times. 03, January 2009. Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. That was the headline from the front page of the Times of London that morning. A real newspaper, a real headline. The British government had just bailed out the banking system three months earlier, in October of 2008, with a 500 billion pound rescue package. The January 3 headline was about a second round being needed because the first one had not worked. So when Satoshi quoted that headline, the message was unmistakable. They did it once, now they were doing it again. This was exactly what he was building against. And he made sure that the very first transaction on the very first block of bitcoin's existence was timestamped with that headline permanently forever on every single copy of the bitcoin blockchain in the world. So just stop and think about what that actually means. The founder of bitcoin could have put anything in there. A poem, a quote, a philosophical statement, a signature. Literally anything. And instead, he chose a newspaper headline about bank bailouts. Which means bitcoin's birth certificate, the actual founding document of the entire system, is, by design, a permanent middle finger pointed directly at the central banking system. It is not subtle. It is not metaphorical. It is right there, encoded forever. And anyone who runs a bitcoin node anywhere in the world is technically hosting a copy of that headline. It is the most successful piece of protest art in human history. And it got even better, because there's one more detail in the genesis block that almost nobody talks about. The 50 Bitcoin that Satoshi mined as the reward for the first block. By a quirk of the code, those 50 coins can never be spent. They're locked forever. Whether Satoshi did it on purpose or whether it was an accident he chose not to fix, nobody knows. As if to say, this was not about the money. This was never about the money. And he made the point with the very first coins he ever created. This tells you everything you need to know about why bitcoin exists. It wasn't created so people could buy Lambos. It wasn't created so traders could speculate. It was created as a direct, deliberate, intentional response to a financial system that had just demonstrated to anyone willing to look that it was rigged in favor of the people running it. Bitcoin was the exit. And Satoshi made sure the exit was stamped with the reason it was needed. Now, let me tell you about Satoshi himself. Because the founder's story is just as remarkable as the founding itself, we still really have no idea who Satoshi Nakamoto is. None. Seventeen years later, after every journalist, every cryptography expert, every linguist, every government agency, every well funded investigation, every podcast theorist, nobody knows the name was obviously a pseudonym. Could have been one person, could have been a group, could have been a man, could have been a woman, could have been American, British, Japanese, European, Every theory has been investigated, and every theory has hit a wall. What we do know is this. For about two and a half years, from late 2008 through the spring of 2011, Satoshi was very active. He wrote thousands of forum posts and emails. He corresponded with the early developers who joined the project. He patiently answered questions, fixed bugs, refined the code, defended the design choices, by all accounts of people who interacted with him. He was absolutely brilliant, polite, and almost obsessively focused on getting the protocol right. And then on April 23rd of 2011, sent his final known email to a developer named Mike Hearn. And the email said, and I'm quoting directly, I've moved on to other things. It's in good hands with Gavin and everyone. And then he disappeared. He hasn't spoken since. Not once, not under his own pseudonym, not under any pseudonym anyone has ever verified, not anywhere. He just walked away. And here's the most extraordinary detail. In the early days of bitcoin, when almost nobody was mining, Satoshi mined a lot of bitcoin himself, just by being there, just by being the only one running the software for stretches of time. And researchers, through a forensic pattern in the early blockchain called the Potoshi pattern, have estimated that Satoshi mined approximately 1.1 million bitcoin in those early years, roughly 22,000 blocks, about 5% of all the bitcoin that will ever exist. Now, here's the part that gets me. When Satoshi walked away In April of 2011, those coins were worth almost nothing. Bitcoin was trading for a couple of dollars at the time. He didn't walk away from a fortune. He walked away from a project. The fortune came later. As bitcoin grew, those coins became worth thousands, then millions, then billions. Today, at current prices, that pile of coins is worth somewhere over $100 billion. It would make Satoshi one of the wealthiest people on the planet. And those coins are sitting in known bitcoin addresses on the public blockchain, traceable by literally anyone. And in 15 years, not a single one has ever moved. Not one. So Satoshi has had access to what is now 9, 10, 11 figures of personal wealth. He has never touched any of it, never spent it, never sold a single coin, never even moved it to a different address, just left it there, frozen, as if to say, this was never about the money. He said it with the first 50 coins in the genesis block, and he said it every day since, with his silence and his stillness for 15 years and counting. Think about what that signals. Because almost every other major Technology of the last 50 years has a founder whose face you know, Apple has Jobs, Microsoft has Gates, Amazon has Bezos, Facebook has Zuckerberg. The founder becomes the brand. The founder cashes in. The founder writes the memoirs, takes the credit. Credit. Without exception, Satoshi did none of it. He built the most important monetary technology in 500 years. And then he walked away from the wealth, the fame, and the credit. All of it. He chose anonymity over billions. He chose disappearance over influence. He chose the protocol over the personality. And here's why that actually matters. And this is the part most people miss when they get hung up on the mystery of who Satoshi is. His disappearance is not a side note. It is one of the most important features of bitcoin itself. Because every other system you can think of has a leader, a CEO, a board, a central authority, a face that can be subpoenaed, pressured, threatened, bribed, killed, or simply convinced to change the rules. Every system has a point of failure that is ultimately human. The leader gets compromised, the board votes badly, the CEO sells out, the founder gives in. But satoshi removed himself from the equation by disappearing completely, voluntarily, permanently. He made bitcoin leaderless. There's nobody to subpoena, nobody to pressure, nobody to threaten, nobody to convince. The protocol just runs. The rules just hold. And no human being on earth, including the person who invented it, has the authority to change them. There has never been a major financial system in history that had no one in charge. Not one. Imagine if the dollar had no federal reserve chairman. Imagine if the global banking system had no central bankers, no treasury secretaries, no presidents of major banks, nobody to call when the system needed to be tweaked or rescued or rigged. Well, that's what bitcoin is. It's the first piece of monetary infrastructure on earth where there is structurally nobody to capture. And Satoshi's disappearance is what made that possible. Because if he had stayed, if he had become the public face, given interviews, taken speaking gigs, written the books, accepted the awards, Bitcoin would have a king, and every king eventually gets his crown stolen or sells the kingdom, or compromises with the empire he was trying to escape by vanishing. Satoshi made sure that could never happen. And it is, when you really sit with it, one of the most selfless and strategically brilliant acts in the history of any movement. Imagine inventing the most important thing of your century and then handing it to the world without a price tag, without a byline, without an ego, without a single dollar collected for yourself. Imagine the discipline of mining a million coins of your own creation, watching them eventually become worth over $100 billion, and never spending a cent of it just to make a point. That is the founder. That is the origin. That is the lore. So let me bring this all the way home, because when you look at Bitcoin today, the price charts, the ETFs, the Wall street firms now selling it to their clients, the political conversations around it, the trillions of dollars of value it now represents, it's easy to lose sight of what it actually is. It is easy to think of it as just another asset, just another investment, just another thing to speculate on, but it is not. It is the only money in human history that was deliberately designed by an anonymous founder who walked away from what became a fortune in the middle of the worst financial crisis in 80 years, with a permanent inscription in its very first transaction, reminding everyone who would ever use it exactly why it was. It was built in the middle of a bailout. It was inscribed with the headline of that bailout. Its founder vanished, so it could never be captured by the people who do the bailing out. Every single design decision, every line of the original protocol, every choice the founder made was aimed at one outcome. A money that could not be controlled, debased, frozen, or rewritten by the institutions whose failures had made it necessary. And 17 years later, the protocol still runs. The supply schedule has held exactly as designed. The cap of 21 million coins remains absolutely intact. Block 0 still sits there with the Times headline embedded inside it, immutable on every node on Earth. The 50 coins from that first block still sit there, too, permanently frozen. And this hundred billion dollars still sits untouched and addresses. Everyone can see and no one can move. So the next time somebody dismisses Bitcoin as a fad or a gamble or a meme or some kind of Internet curiosity, rather than remember the origin, remember what the founder put inside the very first block, remember what he walked away from, and remember that the most important monetary invention since the printing press was born on Halloween. Launched in the middle of a global bailout, and gifted to humanity by a person who refused to take credit for it. It's not a coincidence, it's a statement. And it is still being made every 10 minutes by every bitcoin block that gets mined on every node on Earth. Today, tomorrow, and for as long as anyone is left running the software. I'll see you on Monday.