The Hunt for Satoshi Nakamoto; A Tool for Innovation
Alex Preukschat recently presented his project Bitcoin: *The Hunt for Satoshi Nakamoto*, at Innobasque,Global Innovation Day 2015 hosted in Basque, Spain. Preukschat discusses with Brave New Coin the inspiration and intent behind the graphic novel.
Alex Preukschat is the Co-Creator of Bitcoincomic.org and first heard about Bitcoin in 2011. His introduction to digital currency was a video produced by Amir Taaki, the creator of the Dark Wallet. “I got really hooked.” said Preukschat, “I found the whole concept really interesting. That’s how I got started, but I didn’t really look into it again until early 2013.”
Preukschat works mainly as a freelancer in the FinTech field, and now Bitcoin consulting. From 2004 to 2006 he lived in China and often discussed the possibility of an upcoming financial crisis with a friend.
Alex decided it was important to explore the impending turmoil further. “I wanted to know how people survived financial crises in the past and how they dealt with big changes in financial systems.” He purchased multiple books and started researching about money, the financial system and gold.
Preukschat’s research on the impending financial shake up was the inspiration behind Bitcoin: The Hunt for Satoshi Nakamoto. “The key is how can we make a better world? I have two children now and it is one of the key reasons for creating the comic book. I wanted to create tools to help people better understand money.”
“One of the reasons we created the graphic novel is because images are much quicker to transmit complex information. You can get your point across in an emotional and much quicker way.”
— – Preukschat
Through his research, Alex concluded that money can only be as good as the people using it. In his view knowledge is power. “Money is a key aspect about how we manage society, and create incentives in society. If those incentives are not fully understood, they can be manipulated. If people don’t understand money, certainly someone will try to abuse them.”
Initially Alex wanted to write a graphic novel which informs the reader about the mechanics of money. However, he believes that people are not interested in learning about the complex details, “they are interested in spending money, but not in how money works.”
"One year after being involved in Bitcoin I thought, ‘this is it! I need to do a comic.’ I can create this tool that will hopefully help people to learn about and try to understand money.”
— – Preukschat
Preukschat leveraged the negative perception of Bitcoin to garner interest from the public. “Bitcoin is like a matrix story. You have the origins, you have the Silk Road story, you have secret services, you have some criminal activity that has surrounded Bitcoin at some point.”
The Socialization director of Innobasque, Alberto Bokos, recognized the importance of Bitcoin to future innovation. Since its launch in January 2008 Innobasque has been attempting to change economic and social models. The stated goal is to convert the Basque Country into “the European benchmark in Innovation,” by 2030. To support their effort the group holds an annual Global Innovation Day.
“We have chosen Alex´s project because it is capable of communicating something highly complex and disruptive, like a cryptocurrency, in an accessible way through his comic. Undoubtedly, it is a good practice of how to disseminate innovation.”
— – Alberto Bokos, Socialization director of Innobasque
At the Global Innovation Day 2015 Preukschat explained bitcoincomic.org is an education tool designed to be fun and accesible to everyone. He explained key concepts of Bitcoin to the crowd including p2p, decentralized vs. centralised, the protocol, Bitcoin vs. bitcoin and open source.
“I explained that one of the reasons why Silicon Valley and the big venture capitalists in the US are investing into Bitcoin startups is because they believe that it can become the future innovation platform in the same way it has been for the Internet. The Internet was an open platform for information and Bitcoin might become an open platform to disrupt the financial system and banks in the same way media and telecom was disrupted by the Internet,” concluded Preukschat
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