On September 18, 2000, a 23 year-old Jack Dorsey wrote in his journal: “connections connections connections. it’s all about how things relate to me. the why, who, where, and what. with me as the reference point. it’s my new project and is accelerating rapidly. i have the interface thoughts down and evolving. a few more iterations and i’ll start coding…”
Two months later, the entirety of “me as a reference point” began to take shape when he wrote: “I have a good start on the network. It’s mainly a collaboration of existing free programs that, when put together, make a very powerful statement. i’ve taken everything i’ve learned from all my sources: cognitive science, ant and bee colonies, couriers, friends, journals, neural nets, food not bombs, tao.ca, immediatism, traveling, veganism, chaos, chuck palahniuk, mozart and bach, DIY, viruses, and mutation and meshed them all up into one big (but rather small core) soup. free for all, if you’ll take it. so, that’s where my head has been the past months. heck. i’ve been leading up to this my whole life.”
While it’s very unlikely he was talking about creating Bitcoin at the time, those entries, along with a few others he wrote in hope of putting this work together, are evidence of a desire to put the stamp of himself onto something big. To use his own words, “i’ve been leading up to this my whole life.”
It’s a key piece of the “why would Jack Dorsey incorporate so much of himself” into Bitcoin if he really is Satoshi Nakamoto, a very strong theory considering this evidence which recently got a lot of attention on X.
This duality of planning to “make a mark without leaving a trace” (a mantra he espoused on multiple occasions) while building something where “it’s all about how things relate to me. the why, who, where, and what. with me as the reference point” really enhance the Satoshi Bitcoin story as an artful masterpiece if he is indeed Satoshi.
Of course one could make the argument that perhaps he already achieved that outcome with Twitter and that Twitter was the culmination of himself.