Why I don't trust Bitcoin

As Bitcoin has been fluctuating in price recently, I thought it was finally time to air my concerns about its security. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while, but I never got around to it. I believe that at its heart, Bitcoin shares the same vulnerability as every single coding system since the beginning of time.

I love the idea of Bitcoin, I love what people think it represents. The idea that the government no longer controls the supply of money, how people spend it, and its overall empowerment of the individual versus the State. In some ways, it is more practical than gold while still being a good store of value. There are some negatives, such as money laundering, that need to be addressed, but on the whole, nobody really needs to sell me the idea of Bitcoin; I’m already sold on the need for it or something similar.

"If you don't believe it or don't get it, I don't have the time to try to convince you, sorry."

Satoshi Nakamoto

While I'm not an expert on the coding of Bitcoin, I understand the general idea of how all the coding verifies other interactions on the blockchain. Bitcoin’s true value lies in its solution to the problem of double spending. Coins can’t be spent twice, and I believe that holds true. I don’t think Bitcoin can be hacked to allow coins to be copied or anything along those lines. There are questions about its resilience to quantum computing, and I don’t have a strong opinion on that matter. However, based on the current technology, the coding appears to fulfill its promises as advocated by those who believe in the project.

While I may overlook certain technical aspects of how the code interacts, the general principle I'm trying to convey should be clear enough for this blog post. For me, there is a fundamental issue with Bitcoin in that I believe it has a vulnerability hidden in its origins.

At some point in time, all of the code and all of the coins (blocks) must have been in the sole custody of the creator/character Satoshi Nakamoto on his computer.

Right before this Satoshi sent out the first coin/block into the wild. What if this creator copied all the codes, all the coins and all the keys and saved them. In effect, an image of his hard drive. In theory, if these blocks still exist, then an entire duplicated line of Bitcoin could be rerun in 2024 that mimicks that run in 2009, potentially resulting in the duplication of every single coin.

In effect, while it is true that you can't duplicate a single coin, you can duplicate the whole blockchain and run it in parallel if you have the original starting blocks.

But Satoshi Nakamoto destoyed the Genesis Blocks didn't he?

Didn't he?

Didn't he?

Who Knows? That's the best answer anyone can give at this point in time. For me, this means it is 50/50, either they have or they haven't.

My heart tells me that it can’t be this simple, surely people wouldn't collectively invest over a trillion dollars at this if the foundations were 50/50, but my head tells me that there is no way around it. If there is a mirror image of every line of code that existed in the second before Bitcoin was launched, it can all be rerun, perhaps on a powerful private network.

I've tried to research if my theory was true, but I've struggled to find anything that talks about it. No doubt others somewhere will have spotted the same issue, it's just that I haven't been able to find it.

I thought I'd try my luck with ChatGPT.

I've tried to research if my theory was true, but I've struggled to find anything that talks about it. No doubt others somewhere will have spotted the same issue, it's just that I haven't been able to find it.

I thought I'd try my luck with ChatGPT.

1) Can bitcoin be re-run with the orginal genesis blocks?

"No, Bitcoin cannot be "re-run" with the original genesis blocks. The genesis block, which is the first block in the Bitcoin blockchain, is hardcoded into the Bitcoin software. It serves as the foundation of the entire blockchain network. Once the Bitcoin network is established and operational, it cannot be rewound or restarted from the genesis block. Any attempt to do so would require consensus among the network participants, which is highly unlikely to happen due to the decentralized nature of the network and the massive computational power required to manipulate the blockchain."

That's not really what I meant, so I asked a follow up question.

2) But if I held all the keys myself (which the creator did at the time just before launch).

"If you possess all the private keys associated with every Bitcoin address ever created, theoretically, you could recreate the entire Bitcoin blockchain from its genesis block onwards."

Whilst not 100% proof of what I'm saying, it seems to be consistant with my concerns. I honestly don't see a way around this issue, and I believe that ChatGPT just confirmed the theory behind it. Of course there would be a lot of power needed to recreate every single BitCoin, but that's only the later blocks. The first couple of million coins didn't take that much power. Let's say $100 in electricity a coin to mine again, they are selling at £60,000. The financial motivation to do so would be there if the price of BitCoin stayed quite high.

It means that nobody has a coin built on the trust that the unbreakable code is able to stand up to the laws of physics. Instead, it means that they have a coin(s) built on the trust that the creator is who he says he was, did destroy the original blocks, if not, at least that they continue to have the same intentions that he said he did in 2008/9, and continues to have those intentions until his demise, and finally, that nobody finds that Genesis block on any of his old devices and knows what to do with it.

If any of that is no longer true, then every single coin could be recreated and nobody would ever know who is holding the legitimate coin. Plus there is no reason to duplicate it once, duplicate it 500 times and there would be 500 coins out there with the same code.

Whatever it is, that is a whole lot of possibilities that investors have zero control over and no amount of due diligence will be able to solve. It's all down to blind trust.

It could be that it turns out that this Satoshi character likes a bit of a laugh – and to be fair, some of like the odd media stunt from time to time, it’s good for SEO an all that - he could wipe out Bitcoin's $1.3 trillion market cap if he gets out of bed the wrong side and decides to release the original Genesis block keys and coding.

That’s assuming that this Satoshi Character is a “he/she”. I’ve heard many in cryptography say that it wasn’t possible for one person, with the help of 1-2 extra people, to build Bitcoin on their own. Again, I don’t have a view on this, but the real point they were getting at is, was Bitcoin created by a State Actor’s Intelligence services?

If it was, they have control over Bitcoin and the power to dump/rug pull it whenever they feel like it. I’m trying to think if dumping $1.3 trillion in Bitcoin would be inflationary or deflationary on the main Dollar linked economies. I’m going to have a guess and say deflationary, but in truth, it's well above my abilities to solve that one. It’s important because collapsing Bitcoin by a State Actor could be an act of economic warfare on the Petro Dollar countries, or it could be an act of economic war on the rest of the world by the Petro Dollar Countries. I don’t think it’s important whilst it has a market cap of $1.3t, but if it is adopted globally by different countries to settle trades – the market cap could be $500 trillion and then things become very interesting. Either way, Bitcoin is not built on just the laws of Mathematics; it’s built on trust that the creator isn’t the Russian FSB, US's CIA, UK's GCHQ or just some random Uni Bomber Genius type on a mission to slap the heck out of Capitalism and those who buy into it,. After all, this Satoshi character is sitting on 1 million Bitcoin that they have never touched – capitalism doesn’t seem to be his/her end goal here – so far. This goes for every coin out there, not just Bitcoin.
I might be wrong, but until someone can explain to me how I'm wrong, I'll stay away from it.