First reply by Sepp Hasslberger:

Satoshi: The key problem of early Chaumian mints is centralisation.

Minor clarification by Joerg Baach.

Now it gets interesting: Sepp picks up on Bitcoin’s fixed supply and the resulting elasticity problem.

Satoshi acknowledges the need for an elastic currency supply, depending on population (user) numbers. (There are other reasons, like the demand of trade, but Satoshi’s answer proves he is aware.)

Sepp elaborates on the elasticity requirement for a stable value of money. As a method, he suggests a relation to number of nodes. (Not adopted, it would have been imperfect at best.

Russ Nelson adds minor detail on the technical matter of currency in circulation.

Here – for thread completeness only – an irrelevant advertising post of Rheingold project already a year later. (Read on though.)

I conclude my persisting of Satoshi’s announcement thread with a Robert Searle’s reference to LETS, a defective approach at credit money as Russ points out immediately. This is highly relevant, as credit money is now (March 2025) a key topic if we want to get to a self-stabilising exchange value of bitcoin. PS: That’s where Bitcredit Protocol comes in. If you understand all this, please be invited to trial the alpha version of Bitcredit Core v0.2.

Download

Bitcredit Core 0.2.3 (MVP alpha) Attention: This is a mainnet version for test purposes only - use with high care and smallest amounts of Bitcoin ...

The P2P Foundation board announcement of Bitcoin is sadly gone. Here is Satoshi’s first thread and a short fundamental debate about Bitcoin from 2009. Bitcredit Protocol picks up on the elasticity problem discussed almost right away. We think it can be solved. View quoted note →