Ki Young Ju, head of the analytics platform CryptoQuant, ran an intriguing experiment. He fed a language model every known email and post by Satoshi Nakamoto, then briefed it on the current state of crypto. Instead of cheering for high prices and adoption, the virtual Satoshi delivered harsh criticism: Bitcoin is losing its soul and turning into just another financial product.
Intermediaries Have Returned
What outraged the AI-Satoshi most was the situation with ETFs and corporations. Upon learning that exchange-traded funds hold 1.2 million BTC and MicroStrategy has accumulated 712,000 coins, the model called this re-intermediation — the return of the middlemen Bitcoin was designed to eliminate.
The logic of the “Digital Satoshi” is simple: if you don’t hold the private keys, you don’t own Bitcoin; you merely hold an IOU from a fund. People are trusting third parties again, failing to verify transactions themselves, and ignoring the asset’s utility as cash. This completely contradicts the white paper concept. Technically, the network works, but economically it has returned to what it fled from — banks, just in a new wrapper.
Censorship and Mining in the US
The second issue worrying the virtual creator even more than price is hashrate centralization. The total network power has reached 774 EH/s. Solo mining is dead, and public companies from the US control a third of all capacity.
To the AI, this is a red flag. Public miners are vulnerable: shareholders or authorities can apply pressure. If the government wants to introduce transaction censorship or mandatory identity verification (KYC) at the protocol level, it now has the leverage to do so. Previously, geography and miner anonymity protected the network; now it is dominated by legal entities under American jurisdiction.
Identity Does Not Matter
Ki Young Ju tried to lighten the mood and asked the neural network what is written in the real Satoshi’s passport. The model behaved as dryly as possible, refusing to answer.
According to the AI, anonymity is not a bug, but a feature. If people knew the creator’s identity, they would discuss his biography rather than the code. In a trustless system, the author figure should be the most boring and inconspicuous part. Ki Young Ju himself summarized this later: “He is a boring man.”
At the end of the dialogue, the neural network asked a rhetorical question: do people even run their own nodes anymore, or have we finally delegated everything to service providers?
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