Bitcoin works because you can prove it mathematically without Satoshi's involvement. He made a quote in the recent email dump that reinforces this: "self-evident proof of the majority consensus”. [1]
The world doesn't need Satoshi for Bitcoin to continue working. And so the reason people want to find his identity is because there exist people in the world who lie, cheat, steal and ultimately kill. Those people want to find Satoshi, to punish him for inventing a fair system of economic trade that doesn't cut them into it.
That's probably the most ridiculous answer there is.
1. The chance that something like Bitcoin is a logical virus and being though of is.not that far fetched. All of it's tec was already here.
2. Just because people believe in Bitcoin and don't understand it doesn't make it fair.
3. People like to think about it because he is still the inventor even if his invention is responsible for a tremendous amount of CO2 and he should be very rich which makes this 'mystery' interesting
And as said in a thread yesterday: Bitcoin doesn't even solve the trust issue.
If you do something on the block chain with your Bitcoins it's save.
Just that the only thing it does is making sure you can send or retrieve a Bitcoin securely but that you need other security mechanism to make sure the trade is protected gets ignored.
Like every trade involving something outside the chain is still not save.
Buying Bitcoin, selling Bitcoin, trading a Bitcoin for a service.
The purpose of banking is to allow people to store their money safely. It is not to allow finance bros to gamble with customer deposits without consent.
The purpose of banking for most people is to put their money in so they don't need to carry cash around, but the purpose of banking for banks has been to make profit by gambling the money people are giving you for safekeeping.
A bit like the relationship between Gmail and personal data, really.
Inflation is an exploit used to grant more money to the bank admins any time they feel like it. A correctly functioning trading economy has zero net inflation.
Bitcoin? Fair, I am a proponent of the tech, but there should be an institutional, government backed (by a non-corrupt government, not our current one) with processes in place to handle problems.
I lose my keys, I lose my coins. I can't go to the local BTC bank branch and I also don't have FDIC insurance on my cold wallet.
It ain't done yet.