Satoshi Nakamoto quotes from the Cryptography Mailing List

I've been reading some of the early correspondence between Satoshi Nakamoto and famed cryptographers, right around the time of the publication of the Bitcoin white paper and pre-release of the client software, and it's just epic.

I actually did this kind of backwards. I had to write all the code before I could convince myself that I could solve every problem, then I wrote the paper. I think I will be able to release the code sooner than I could write a detailed spec. You're already right about most of your assumptions where you filled in the blanks. »

Replying to the claim "You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography":

Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own. »

Because for cutting off the heads of pure P2P networks, they just don't have the technology.

On chargebacks:

Instantant [sic] non-repudiability is not a feature, but it's still much faster than existing systems. Paper cheques can bounce up to a week or two later. Credit card transactions can be contested up to 60 to 180 days later. Bitcoin transactions can be sufficiently irreversible in an hour or two. »

And my favorite...

I'm better with code than with words though. »