If Satoshi’s real name were known, where would he (or she) be today?
If Satoshi’s real name were known, would he be with Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, or Alexey Pertsev? Or would he be with Elon Musk and Balaji Srinivasan? Maybe somewhere in between like Brad Garlinghouse? Of course, we don’t know the answer, because the legacy legal system is simply not equipped to deal with the pace of technological developments. Today’s technology provides both new threats and new freedoms. In dealing with the threats, the regulators have often erred on the side of taking away too many of people’s freedoms.
We believe Satoshi chose to be anonymous because he wanted people to judge the creation rather then the creator and we think he was right doing so.
The tomi project is about restoring people’s freedoms.
The eight founders of tomi are senior executives, team members, developers and seed investors of notable crypto projects listed in the top 50 in terms of market cap and longevity. Using our names can be beneficial in many ways but can also risk the core values of the project.
We wish to follow Satoshi’s path. The Creation is more important than its creator.
tomi is an alternative to the World Wide Web, and if successful, it creates a clean slate, one where Google and Facebook do not have power over people’s identities, where Amazon does not crush small businesses and host more than a third of the data in the world, where people can buy and sell freely and privately using cryptocurrency, and where government and corporate surveillance is impossible. It would also create a web where the citizens of the web are those who decide what should and shouldn’t be censored, where the large media companies no longer determine what we can and can’t see. It creates a web where cryptocurrency is welcome, because we believe in people’s rights to transact freely and invest freely, using whatever type of money they choose.
That type of success threatens quite a number of large businesses, some of the fiat currency systems, power brokers, and data brokers. As a result, there are many ways in which the 80+ tomi team members feel their safety may be at stake. For that reason also, we remain anonymous.
However, tomi is not like other anonymously-led projects. We have already built most of the tomiNet in the past year and you will be able to download our browser (or create a browser that points to tomiNet tDNS) and see that it is fully functional and synchronized with our alternative blockchain DNS service (tDNS), buy .tomi domain names and vote on the DAO that controls everything.
The project is well-resourced (by the founders) and has already built a fully-functional product before issuing a token. This is how you know who we really are: by our performance rather than our names.
Another benefit of anonymity is that we will not be able to influence the voting in the DAO. Just like all other tokenholders, the tomi team will be held as equals in voting about the community guidelines and censorship. We will hold enough tokens to have stronger influence on the technological direction of the projects for the first stages, but we have set up the system so that within three years, the core developers and technological leadership can be out-voted by the citizens of the web. This is intentional. We do not want to end up with the kind of power of the leaders of projects such as Ethereum and Cosmos.
Wait so who is Abraham Piha?
Because of the way current organization structures are built around the world and until our DAO is fully functional, we needed one person to be exposed for logistics, media and other purposes.
Abraham volunteered to be that person.
tomi needs to outlive the founders and take the direction that is best for its citizens. That is the full expression of a free, decentralized web.