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Eli Ben-Sasson, Starknet founder and Zcash cofounder, sparked a fresh wave of discussion about the legacy of Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. The trigger was an archival screenshot from the Bitcoin Talk forum dating back 16 years, which partly confirms that early Bitcoin developers not only allowed but also welcomed the creation of alternative blockchains.
Back then, Hal Finney, the first recipient of Bitcoin, was actively discussing the BitDNS project, the future Namecoin, and proposed launching it as a Bitcoin fork, a separate blockchain whose coins could be purchased with BTC.
Was Satoshi indeed open for alternatives to Bitcoin?
The thesis that Satoshi backed altcoins, as Ben-Sasson says, can be built on several real historical facts. For example, Satoshi personally participated in the BitDNS discussion and opposed the idea of recording domain name data on Bitcoin’s main blockchain.
Moreover, Satoshi once proposed a technology that would allow new projects to survive without losing security, enabling miners to mine Bitcoin and an alternative coin simultaneously. This suggests he sought network symbiosis rather than the elimination of competitors.
Finally, both Satoshi and Finney saw Bitcoin as a foundation on which other services could be built. The concept of buying tokens with BTC, mentioned by Finney, effectively laid the groundwork for the entire modern crypto economy.
Today’s Bitcoin maximalists often claim that any coin other than BTC is either a mistake or a scam. However, Ben-Sasson argues that the ideology of the early years was different. Satoshi was a pragmatist, and if a task such as DNS required a different blockchain, then it had to be created.
So, in the early days of the crypto industry, forks were viewed as an expansion of the ecosystem rather than a threat to its dominance.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
