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I'm curious as to why you consider brilliant, production ready code. I also read through the original codebase and I came to a different conclusion. To me it l

by feelix 9y ago

I'm curious as to why you consider brilliant, production ready code. I also read through the original codebase and I came to a different conclusion. To me it looks like something that was hacked at for a year or so, and was all just glued together. It looked like the first iteration of a codebase, the thing that you usually don't release, but then re-work so it is presentable to the outside world and then release. To me that says a couple of things. One is that Satoshi is one, normal, human. Another is that he is very human. For example, a lot of the OP codes have had to be disabled because they were totally insecure. In early versions of bitcoin there were bugs that allowed anyone to spend anyone's bitcoins, and so forth. Not that I mean to attack Satoshi, he was a good coder who started what could become a revolution. But he was a human like the rest of us, and it shows. What is it about his code that makes you consider it brilliant and production ready?

keymone 9y ago
in a codebase of tens of thousands of non trivial C++ after 8 years there was found one critical protocol bug. one. if this doesn't blow your mind - i don't know what will.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mike_hearn 9y ago
  There was more than one critical protocol bug. But yes, it was an impressive effort. It used the STL well, was tightly written, and of the security bugs that did exist none were buffer overflows, stack smashes or double frees from what I recall. There were some issues in the interpreter opcodes but I think they may have been crashes (DoS). The code was clearly the work of one person though. There were not enough comments or other forms of code documentation for it to have been a team effort, even if the Satoshi personality was a composite. The idiosyncratic code is another hint: Windows only and Hungarian notation in 2008 is not something commonly seen. The early Bitcoin code gave me the feeling of an experienced developer who learned their craft in the 1990s and had probably been around for quite a long time, but who probably hadn't worked in large professional development teams in recent years. For example, there were no unit tests. Common in the 1990s, not so much in 2008.
  - ploggingdev 9y ago
    Since you were around in the early days, how did you get involved with Bitcoin and how did Satoshi get people interested in it since he was anonymous and did not have any social media following or email list? It's incredible that he has managed to stay anonymous for so long, how on earth did he manage to do that? Any thoughts on the scaling debate?
    - mike_hearn 9y ago
      I had a long term interest in internet money, from before Bitcoin existed. The path to Bitcoin was kind of convoluted. About 20 years ago I was interested in environmentalism. I was persuaded by arguments that humanity was damaging the environment because of the system of money it used, in which sustainably managing a forest might be profitable at, say, interest rates of 2%, but if interest rates went up to 5% then the rational thing to do was clear cut the forest and invest the returns. This led me to a book called The Future of Money by Bernard Leitaer. This book talked about "community currencies". The idea you could design currencies to achieve particular social goals was very interesting to me. The book referenced a publication called the International Journal of Community Currency Research. This organisation turned out to have a Yahoo Group, which I joined. I felt that if there were other people discussing this idea, they would surely be found on the internet. One day the Yahoo Group received a mail talking about a project called Ripple. This was an initiative by Ryan Fugger to create a system that could locate and manage debt in a decentralised way. It proposed an economic system without cash, in which all payments were in the form of debt in whatever units people found convenient (dollars, hours of work, loaves of bread baked etc). So I joined the Ripple mailing list too, and engaged in much fruitful discussion with Ryan about the nature of money. The Ripple mailing list eventually received a mail that pointed to the bitcoin website and suggested we check it out. This was a few months after the project was launched. I did so, and started emailing Satoshi. I don't know how Satoshi remained anonymous for so long. I suspect that if his identity is ever revealed, people will think: it was so obvious? Why didn't anyone see that? When the operator of the Silk Road was revealed, it turned out he'd made basic and obvious errors very early on and anyone could have figured out the Dread Pirate's identity through basic web searches. But only the FBI actually bothered to do it. I suspect Satoshi hasn't been looked for as thoroughly as people tend to imagine. I discussed Bitcoin's scaling extensively two years ago. You can find those discussions on my blog if you like. Nothing has changed and I have nothing further to say on the matter.

by feelix 9y ago

keymone 9y ago

in a codebase of tens of thousands of non trivial C++ after 8 years there was found one critical protocol bug. one. if this doesn't blow your mind - i don't know what will.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mike_hearn 9y ago
There was more than one critical protocol bug. But yes, it was an impressive effort. It used the STL well, was tightly written, and of the security bugs that did exist none were buffer overflows, stack smashes or double frees from what I recall. There were some issues in the interpreter opcodes but I think they may have been crashes (DoS). The code was clearly the work of one person though. There were not enough comments or other forms of code documentation for it to have been a team effort, even if the Satoshi personality was a composite. The idiosyncratic code is another hint: Windows only and Hungarian notation in 2008 is not something commonly seen. The early Bitcoin code gave me the feeling of an experienced developer who learned their craft in the 1990s and had probably been around for quite a long time, but who probably hadn't worked in large professional development teams in recent years. For example, there were no unit tests. Common in the 1990s, not so much in 2008.
- ploggingdev 9y ago
  Since you were around in the early days, how did you get involved with Bitcoin and how did Satoshi get people interested in it since he was anonymous and did not have any social media following or email list? It's incredible that he has managed to stay anonymous for so long, how on earth did he manage to do that? Any thoughts on the scaling debate?
  - mike_hearn 9y ago
    I had a long term interest in internet money, from before Bitcoin existed. The path to Bitcoin was kind of convoluted. About 20 years ago I was interested in environmentalism. I was persuaded by arguments that humanity was damaging the environment because of the system of money it used, in which sustainably managing a forest might be profitable at, say, interest rates of 2%, but if interest rates went up to 5% then the rational thing to do was clear cut the forest and invest the returns. This led me to a book called The Future of Money by Bernard Leitaer. This book talked about "community currencies". The idea you could design currencies to achieve particular social goals was very interesting to me. The book referenced a publication called the International Journal of Community Currency Research. This organisation turned out to have a Yahoo Group, which I joined. I felt that if there were other people discussing this idea, they would surely be found on the internet. One day the Yahoo Group received a mail talking about a project called Ripple. This was an initiative by Ryan Fugger to create a system that could locate and manage debt in a decentralised way. It proposed an economic system without cash, in which all payments were in the form of debt in whatever units people found convenient (dollars, hours of work, loaves of bread baked etc). So I joined the Ripple mailing list too, and engaged in much fruitful discussion with Ryan about the nature of money. The Ripple mailing list eventually received a mail that pointed to the bitcoin website and suggested we check it out. This was a few months after the project was launched. I did so, and started emailing Satoshi. I don't know how Satoshi remained anonymous for so long. I suspect that if his identity is ever revealed, people will think: it was so obvious? Why didn't anyone see that? When the operator of the Silk Road was revealed, it turned out he'd made basic and obvious errors very early on and anyone could have figured out the Dread Pirate's identity through basic web searches. But only the FBI actually bothered to do it. I suspect Satoshi hasn't been looked for as thoroughly as people tend to imagine. I discussed Bitcoin's scaling extensively two years ago. You can find those discussions on my blog if you like. Nothing has changed and I have nothing further to say on the matter.