Satoshi Nakamoto nominated for Nobel Prize in Economics

Yesterday, Bhagwan Chowdhry, a finance professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, tweeted that he had nominated Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, as a candidate for the 2016 Nobel Prize in Economists. He then elaborated on his ideas in the Huffington Post.

The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was established by the Swedish Bank in 1968 in memory of Alfred Nobel. It is not one of the five award fields mentioned in Nobel's will. Its full name is "The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel", commonly known as the Nobel Economics Prize, also known as the Swedish Bank Economics Prize. The Economics Prize was not established according to Alfred Nobel's will, but the selection process and award ceremony are similar to the Nobel Prize.

The award is given annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and is based on the principle of giving the greatest contribution to the benefit of humanity. The first award was given in 1969 (the 300th anniversary of the Swedish Bank), and was jointly won by Norwegian Frisch and Dutchman Jan Tinbergen. American economists Samuelson and Friedman have also won this award.

The process of selecting the 2016 Nobel Prize candidates begins in September this year, when confidential nomination forms will be sent to approximately 3,000 carefully selected individuals, including professors from universities around the world.

Nominations are by invitation only and according to Chowdhry, this is the first time he has been invited to nominate.

The selection process will begin at the beginning of this quarter, before they start awarding the prizes for 2015. Nominations usually close in January, and since the prizes are awarded in December, the Bitcoin community may have to wait a year to find out if their mysterious founder has won the prize.

Professor Chowdhry went into great detail about the reasons behind his decision, although he admitted that no one knew who Satoshi Nakamoto was and no one could contact him.

“I strongly recommend that this award be given to Satoshi Nakamoto. The invention of Bitcoin — digital currency — is nothing short of revolutionary.”

——Professor Chowdhry

The professor said he didn’t make the decision lightly, unlike the usual candidates like Paul Romer of New York University, Doug Diamond of the University of Chicago, or Steve Ross of MIT, who all made contributions in the 1970s and 1980s. But once he started thinking about what ideas were “having a huge disruptive impact,” Chowdhry said the name of the Bitcoin inventor “jumped into my head, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.”

“Not only will Satoshi’s contribution revolutionize the way we think about money, it will likely upend the role of central banks in monetary policy, and it will disrupt high-cost remittance services like Western Union, completely eliminate the 2-4% middleman transaction tax charged by Visa, MasterCard and Paypal, eliminate the cumbersome and expensive notary and intermediary services, and in fact completely change the way legal contracts are conducted.”