Michael Goldstein is the founder and president of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute (SNI), a nonprofit dedicated to preserving and promoting the intellectual foundations of Bitcoin.
Satoshi Nakamoto Institute
Goldstein co-founded SNI to collect and curate the writings, emails, and forum posts of Satoshi Nakamoto, as well as key works from the cypherpunk movement and related fields. The institute’s website hosts the complete Satoshi Nakamoto corpus, important cryptography papers, and essays on Bitcoin’s economic and philosophical foundations. It has become an essential reference for anyone studying Bitcoin’s origins and the ideas behind it.
Writing
Goldstein is known for his writing on Bitcoin maximalism and the intersection of Austrian economics and Bitcoin. His essay “Everyone’s a Scammer” is one of the most widely shared pieces of early Bitcoin culture writing, arguing that altcoins and token projects distract from Bitcoin’s core value proposition.
Background
Goldstein has been active in the Bitcoin community since the early 2010s and is based in Austin, Texas, where he has been involved in the local Bitcoin meetup scene.