It is almost strange to read that they are handling the project as something very big and important. At that time it was absolutely not obvious that it would become big and mainstream.
There was a lot of resentment towards bailouts at the time and making an alternative system
Many people would have been passionate about their quests towards a solution. Many people still make redundant things without knowing the hurdles involved and are just as passionate. I have a client thinking they are going to “bank the unbanked” with a mobile app not using crypto at all, in 2024
One reason why Satoshi would have been extremely passionate is because they had solved one of the unsolved problems of computer science up until 2008 which was the Double Spend Problem, and 2009 was his first production implementation of it called Bitcoin
so you have a person that was seeing everything that the field of computer science had touched over the last half century, and knowing a solution for a unsolved aspect that prevented it from touching other industries and seeing how expansive that would be
The Double Spend Problem was not unsolved in 2008.
The likes of Wei Dai, David Chaum, and Stephan Brands had working anonymous "digital cash" cryptosystems solving the double spending problem within a federated banking model in the late 80s and early 90s
yes and bitcoin builds on top of that, I believe the white paper may cite that effort, it cites W Dai’s b-money paper from 1998
The bitcoin white paper specifies that this is a solution without a trusted intermediary
the first line of the abstract entails not using a financial institution
I agree that ‘unsolved’ was inaccurate, I try to also say bitcoin 2008 is one implementation and essentially all distributed ledgers are following this branch of solution
