Satoshi Nakamoto Nominated for Nobel Prize

Bhagwan Chowdhry, a professor of finance at UCLA, has nominated Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, for a Nobel prize in economics. It’s an excellent choice. Nakamoto made a fundamental breakthrough that combined cryptography and a distributed database to create the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Moreover, Nakamoto implemented his theoretical breakthrough to create a working cryptocurrency with real benefits to potentially billions of consumers.

Chowdry writes:

The invention of bitcoin — a digital currency — is nothing short of revolutionary….It offers many advantages over both physical and paper currencies. It is secure, relying on almost unbreakable cryptographic code, can be divided into millions of smaller sub-units, and can be transferred securely and nearly instantaneously from one person to any other person in the world with access to internet bypassing governments, central banks and financial intermediaries such as Visa, Mastercard, Paypal or commercial banks eliminating time delays and transactions costs.

But beyond demonstrating the possibility of creating a reliable digital currency, Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin Protocol has spawned exciting innovations in the FinTech space by showing how many financial contracts — not just currencies — can be digitized, securely verified and stored, and transferred instantaneously from one party to another.

…Not only will Satoshi Nakamoto’s contribution change the way we think about money, it is likely to upend the role central banks play in conducting monetary policy, destroy high-cost money transfer services such as Western Union, eliminate the 2-4% transactions tax imposed by intermediaries such as Visa, MasterCard and Paypal, eliminate the time-consuming and expensive notary and escrow services and indeed transform the landscape of legal contracts completely. Many industries such as Banking, Finance, Law will see a big upheaval. The consumers will be big beneficiaries and indeed the poor and marginal sections of the society will reap the benefits of financial and social inclusion in the coming decades. I can barely think of another innovation in Economic and Finance in the last several decades whose influence surpasses the welfare increases that will be engendered by Satoshi Nakamoto’s brilliant, path-breaking invention. That is why I am nominating him for the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Since no one knows who Nakamoto is it might seem difficult to award him a prize but Chowdry notes that bitcoin itself provides a solution:

The Nobel committee can easily buy bitcoins for the award money from any reputed online Bitcoin exchange and transfer it to him instantaneously. A very early bitcoin transaction suggests that the bitcoin address 1HLoD9E4SDFFPDiYfNYnkBLQ85Y51J3Zb1 likely belongs to him. Of course, he could easily and verifiably let the committee know which address he wants the money to be transferred to.