The founders of Bitcoin were transhumanists

Satoshi Nakamoto is the creator of Bitcoin. The problem is that no one seems to know if Satoshi is real, still alive or a collection of tech nerds who have made a currency that could make them a law enforcement and kidnapping target.

In a new documentary, ‘Seeking Satoshi: The Mystery Bitcoin Creator’, Gabriel Gatehouse set out to uncover the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.

One of the people Gatehouse interviewed was Mike Lorrey, one of the early engineers involved in the Cypherpunk mailing list that spawned Bitcoin.

Related: Mike Lorrey Interview: The Cypherpunk Fathers of Bitcoin (Video), Juan Galt, 8 February 2018

Lorrey posited that Satoshi Nakamoto isn’t an individual but a collection of people from the same online community who felt the same way and were used to collaborating on developing each other’s ideas.  What Lorrey said next was revealing.

“Myself and a few others we were all pretty much libertarians or anarchists and all transhumanists.  We were all on the extropians list that the Extropian Institute ran, a very individualistic, futurist think tank. They were pushing all of the ideas that are now what’s called transhumanism … like artificial intelligence, intelligence augmentation of humans, space colonisation, digital currencies, nanotechnologies, genetic engineering.”

Extropianism is also referred to as the philosophy of extropy.  According to the website, the Extropy Institute closed in 2006.  The website now serves as the “Library of Transhumanism, Extropy and the Future.”

There is no way of knowing when it was last updated but the webpage states “The Extropy e-mail list continues to be very active and is the main venue for transhumanists and one of the best places on the Internet to meet transhumanists for challenging and creative discussions about the future.”

Under the ‘Experts’ tab, the Extropy Institute states: “Extropy Institute has teamed up with Friends of the United Nations to talk about global issues” and “Extropy Institute is affiliated with UNICEF- Africa.”

Related:

• Meet the Extropians, Wired, 1 October 1994
• The Extropy Institute and the (Vita-)Mores extracted from the book ‘Virtual Immortality – God, Evolution, and the Singularity in Post- and Transhumanism’.

As Gatehouse noted, the extropians had a blind faith in technology, they believed it could make humans immortal.

“And we were all fans of Neal Stephenson,” Lorrey said. Stephenson’s books, ‘Cryptonomicon’, ‘Snow Crash’ and ‘The Diamond Age’, were described by Lorrey as the “books of the extropian bible.”

“For some of the most powerful men in Silicon Valley,  Neal Stephenson is like a prophet,” Gatehouse said.  The founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were influenced by him.  Jeff Bezos hired him to work at his space tourism company, Blue Origin.  When PayPal started Stephenson was required reading.  Who ran PayPal? Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

“It’s important that people understand where Bitcoin came from so that their fears about it can be allayed but at the same time, they can understand where we want to take society for the better,” Lorrey told Gatehouse.

The documentary premiered on YouTube as five, 20-minute films before being broadcast as a feature-length documentary this week on Channel 4.

Every episode of ‘Seeking Satoshi: The Mystery Bitcoin Creator’ is on the FREE tier of the Channel 4 streaming service. To access Channel 4 from abroad, you’ll need to download a good VPN.  Tech Radar has some advice on how to access Channel 4’s documentary via a VPN in an article HERE.