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What Satoshi Did
- mgalka 11y agoConsidering they just arrested someone rumored to be Satoshi, I thought this was going to be about why he was arrested. Good post though, well explained.
- EGreg 11y agohttp://badsatiretoday.com/satoshi-nakamoto-founder-bitcoin-arrested-identity/ http://badsatiretoday.com/satoshi-nakamoto-founder-bitcoin-a...
- tedks 11y agoThat's from a year ago. An Australian rumored to be Satoshi was raided recently.
- speaker5 11y agoIs there a link to something about this?
- ddeck 11y agoI would suggest googling the three words "bitcoin Australian raided" Every result on the first two pages points to this.
- metamet 11y agoThe backstory: http://www.wired.com/2015/12/bitcoins-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-this-unknown-australian-genius/ http://www.wired.com/2015/12/bitcoins-creator-satoshi-nakamo... The raid: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/world/australia/sydney-bitcoin-raid.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/world/australia/sydney-bit...
- ryanlol 11y agoThey didn't arrest him, they searched his house for reasons unrelated to bitcoin (according to the AFP). The fact that he's most likely a hoaxer supports the AFPs claim.
- liamzebedee 11y agoOne minor error, but the implementation of difficulty in proof-of-work is not based on the number of leading zeroes, rather whether an integer is below or above a target.
- lisper 11y agoThose are the same thing when the target is a power of 2.
- misterdata 11y agoThe number of leading zeroes as read in binary notation, that is.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- vog 11y agoSure, but the PoW mechanism is more fine grained, and I think it is important to point that out. Otherwise, people might indeed think that the difficulty will always be a power of 2, which would mean that adjusting it would have been harder (and more inaccurate) than it really is.
- lisper 11y agoI dunno, that seems like a pretty small nit to me. But I suppose reasonable people could disagree.
- arcatek 11y agoI've worked on a coin, and this kind of inexactitude are what make it really hard to understand how the implementation works (that, and the fact that the code was hell at the beginning). If the code uses a "less-than" operator, just tell it. It makes no sense to use a different terminology (in this particular case, the "number of leading zero" concept was probably used to make it easier to understand for business guys - it doesn't work quite well).
- HappyTypist 11y agoFor the record, this is quite a simplified overview of proof-of-work. It ignores the complexities of network propagation speeds and orphaning, which can result in withholding attacks being more effective. Proof of work is not a magical bullet -- although, arguably it is the best one we know of so far.
- grabcocque 11y agoOne of things I find fascinating is exactly why Satoshin has proven so hard to identify. In truth there's probably only about twenty people on Earth who have the requisite skills, knowledge and obsessive personality to pull off what they did, and you'd think somebody like that would be well known in the security community. It should be EASY. But the mystery endures.
- k__ 11y agoon the other hand such mad security skills can be used to hide oneself too.
- aakilfernandes 11y agoI think ideological conviction played a large part as well. You have to have a certain set of political beliefs to forsee interest in a deflationary currency without government backing.
- silverbax88 11y agoYou are assuming that the best security/coding/encryption people in the world are all well-known. I would suggest that's likely not the case.
- nhaehnle 11y agoSurely there are thousands of people on Earth who had the required skill and knowledge at the time, probably much more. Hash cash and Merkle trees had been a thing for a while. On the other hand, a comparatively smaller number of people seeks out the public stage in a way that makes them well known. Furthermore, I think what's easy to miss in hindsight is that somebody with that knowledge would certainly be asking themselves how such a thing as a Bitcoin could ever have value. Certainly I know that if I'd been thinking about digital money at the time, I would have rejected the idea of Bitcoin as obviously infeasible because why would it ever have value? Whatever the required properties are for somebody to actually believe that something like Bitcoin could take off, they are in the political/social/economic domain and therefore unlikely to correlate much with being known in the security community. And to top it all off, the mining arms-race inherent in Bitcoin requires an extreme amount of computing power. On the other hand, crypto researchers are always looking for protocols that are efficient to implement. In that sense, there is even an anti-correlation between being likely to invent Bitcoin and being well known in the security community. You could easily imagine a Torvalds-Tanenbaum-style argument happening in the early days of Bitcoin between the inventor of Bitcoin and, say, DJB. The parallel is actually kind of eery ;)
- jgalt212 11y agoWhat's the economic incentive for the ledger keepers and verifiers once all 21MM bitcoins have been mined?
- garrettr_ 11y ago> By ensuring that no person could obtain an advantage over others, and by ensuring that anyone could join without exclusion, Satoshi created the Nash equilibrium to permit normally byzantine parties to enter and share safely in the definition of a shared network of contested assets. This is roughly true, although Nakamoto's original paper only proves this for the case where no single entity controls > 50% of the mining power in the network (weak incentive compatibility). Nakamoto argued it was also true for the case where a single entity controls > 50% of the mining power (strong incentive compatibility) but failed to prove this, instead providing a vague argument based on some difficult-to-prove assumptions. For more information, including an interesting theoretical attack based on this idea, see http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/BFGKN14-bitcoin_bribery.pdf http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/BFGKN14-bitcoin_bribery.pdf.