Wright’s late friend David Kleiman, failed to produce convincing evidence that his brother had co-invented Bitcoin.
Wright begins by answering a different question, speaking about his current annoyance at how developers are overcomplicating things and focusing on problems that don’t need to be fixed.
He summarizes that he is trying to disrupt the business model they make money from, and he wants to create a world where individuals own their own data.
“We have three or four companies that open all the data globally,” he says, pointing out that these companies are vulnerable to hacks and breaches from rogue actors like Iran and North Korea.
On such a network, it wouldn’t be possible for large companies to buy, store, and sell data, and so the breaches that lead to data leaks would also cease to be a problem.
Wright begins by mentioning that Adam Smith, one of history’s renowned proponents of capitalism and author of The Wealth of Nations, also had another book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Wright points out that philosophers like Aldous Huxley predicted that we would be flooded with information to the extent that we wouldn’t be able to focus on anything.
He lays part of the blame at the feet of companies like Facebook and Google and the move away from foundational subjects like philosophy, English literature, and other subjects with depth.
He handed over control of the main site in 2010 and didn’t pay much attention to it, not noticing that it referred to Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency.
I envisioned movie tickets, train tickets, digital tokens for accessing computers, etc,” he said.
He gives the example of how if every British train ticket minted an NFT at one cent per ticket, it would add up to well over £18 million per year.