The part highlighted in blue was describing the situation with the current effort in creating bitcoin, it seems digital signatures only provided part of the solution but the double spend issue was still there.
In the next sentence they start to describe the solution which addresses the double spend problem -
"We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.
The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of
hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing
the proof-of-work."
No mention of “Bitcoin will make you rich” yet I’ll continue.
1. Introduction
Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as
trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for
most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model.
Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot
avoid mediating disputes.
So satoshi seems to be talking about electronic payments being managed exclusively by a group of banks.
Still no mention of “Buy bitcoin it will make you rich” It’s an interesting read and I advise people to read it if they really want to understand what bitcoin is.
And here we have it, the goal of bitcoin written by the creator of it himself:
What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust,
allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted
third party.
So we get an idea of where the whitepaper is going, reading this white paper is simply showing me a tool I can use as an alternative payment system for my customers to use if I have a business selling mangos or other exotic fruits for example.
So now we have to ask ourselves why exactly do we want to invest in this in order to “double our money”, I’m only a few lines in and it’s not showing me anything I can use to generate money, In fact it seems to be showing me a tool I can use to manage and organise existing money…
I’m very happy to read the whitepaper with some of you and we can discuss it every few paragraphs and see if we can all gain a better understanding, speaking honestly I only skimmed through it and got the jist of it. I’m still yet to gain a solid understanding myself.
Satoshi speaks truth, it’s true that there is a “trusted” group of people who process digital payments and this was the worlds only option until Bitcoin. This is interesting because when a monopoly occurs on anything in society that seems to be where we find huge problems as well, Should there be a value transfer network belonging to the public?, these are very interesting subjects which I’m sure economists and many other professionals have written about.
