Martien van Steenbergen (1958–)

On February 12, 2009, a Dutch P2P-research community member named Martien van Steenbergen asked Satoshi whether Bitcoin had a limited money supply or created money on each transaction. Satoshi Nakamoto replied the same day:

There is a limited supply of money. Circulation will be 21,000,000 coins. Transactions only transfer ownership.

Satoshi had already stated the same 21-million-coin cap five weeks earlier, in the January 8, 2009 release announcement (“Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins”); this reply was the first time he confirmed it in direct response to someone asking whether the supply was capped at all.

Van Steenbergen is a Dutch agile and lean trainer and founder of AardRock, an organisational-transformation consultancy.

Interaction with Satoshi

Van Steenbergen’s question came in response to Satoshi Nakamoto’s announcement of Bitcoin on the P2P Research mailing list, the same announcement that drew Michel Bauwens’s questions hours earlier that same day. Van Steenbergen asked two things: whether Bitcoin resembled David Chaum’s anonymous digital money system, and whether it had a limited money supply or created money at the moment of transaction — the second of which drew the reply quoted above, reconfirming the fixed cap (explained in full in the monetary design entry). To the first, Satoshi wrote of Chaum’s systems that “when the central company shut down, so did the currency,” the same line that ends the page on networks shut down by stopping their one central operator.

In a follow-up exchange on February 13, van Steenbergen asked about Ripple, protocol specifications, and whether Bitcoin could support self-organizing monetary models. Satoshi responded by describing Bitcoin as “a foundation and first step” for programmable P2P social currencies, and discussed Bitcoin’s relationship to Pekunio and reputation-based systems.

Significance

The question came from an agile coach, not a cryptographer — and from a peer-to-peer research list, not a cypherpunk venue. Barely a month after Bitcoin’s first release, its monetary design was already being probed from well outside the circles where it started, and it was a plain question like his that prompted Satoshi to restate, in a direct one-on-one exchange, the cap he had first announced publicly a month earlier.