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So this article is six years old. Any update on the supposition? I guess no one's figured out yet whether the recommended magic number is a back door or not. My

So this article is six years old. Any update on the supposition? I guess no one's figured out yet whether the recommended magic number is a back door or not. My money is definitely on corrupted. Odd the article doesn't mention the obvious conclusion; that Bitcoin was designed by NSA, or folks with intimate knowledge of NSA's back doors. I've long maintained that a US government agency is the most likely developer of Bitcoin (mostly because no one else could sit on that kind of $$$ forever). NSA is the most obvious agency. The question is.. why? I can speculate on lots of reasons.

cyphertruck 7y ago
Bitcoin was designed by an individual with intimate knowledge of the state of the art in suspicions of NSA backdoors. You are assuming Satoshi is sitting on money. Satoshi took care to hide it’s identity, and thus would have switched mining to different addresses very early in bitcoins history. It would have been obvious to Satoshi that spending from a known address would blow it’s identity, so only did so for testing. Satoshi may well be a billionaire and spending bitcoin every day. People seem to take comfort in this idea that bitcoin was created by a government... because bitcoin seems radical when you first learn about it. However the attempts to create it date back a couple decades before it was created. Satoshi combined existing inventions with just the new element of his time chain. But even if the NSA were behind it, what could they do? Anything they could do could also be done by someone with a math breakthrough. So whether the attacker is the NSA or not bitcoin has to be robust against it. So where is bitcoin vulnerable? It’s easy to imagine vulnerabilities in the cryptography, but hard to produce them. Further, if you did, it doesn’t necessarily affect bitcoin. This is bitcoin’s genius. It’s not software, it’s a set of incentives. Show an error in the software, it will be patched and bitcoin will carry on. Worst case is a hard fork.
- real_satoshi 7y ago
  > Bitcoin was designed by an individual with intimate knowledge of the state of the art in suspicions of NSA backdoors. Insiders at the NSA (or any other TLA, foreign or domestic) also fit this description. The strongest position is to know both the truth, and the most compelling misconceptions.
  - cyphertruck 7y ago
    I think it is a mistake for me to fight the “NSA created bitcoin” narrative. I am gleeful at Nelson not owning any bitcoin and want all like him who reject it for ideological reasons to continue to misunderstand it. Freedom and human rights need financial backing, and bitcoin does that.
    - NelsonMinar 7y ago
      Nothing like personalized comments coming from a brand new pseudonym.
      - cyphertruck 7y ago
        It took quite awhile to understand what narcissists are and to recognize that attempting to talk to them is pointless. They are simply incapable of valuing any other human being, let alone comprehending that such human being might have superior knowledge in any area. After all, the narcissist is the supreme being. At least in their reality. To be fair, “Unabashedly elitist” was a confession — if one were wise enough to recognize it.
    - dang 7y ago
      That crosses into personal attack. We ban accounts that do that on HN. No more of this, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
wil421 7y ago
My thoughts exactly regarding the NSA creating Bitcoin. My theory is the blockchain gives them a way to do analysis on dirty money. Instead of having to hack or compel the next dirty bank they can look at the open ledger and figure it out. At first I thought it could be the CIA as a way to fund off the books ops but NSA makes more sense. Either way there’s no way a single person holds on to a wallet that size. It’s also less likely someone/some group in China or Russia could hold on to wallet that size without it being pilfered.
- cyphertruck 7y ago
  You’re projecting your temptation into people based on your values, as is Nelson. But you are not Satoshi. Satoshi faces risk worse than Edward Snowden. The central bankers are far more formidable. And the solution is easy: Satoshi mined initially to bootstrap bitcoin. He was the only one mining in the early days. But then once there were enough other miners, all he had to do was destroy his private key. If he’s greedy he just waited until he had enough bitcoin mined in other addresses that were never associated with him, before doing so. Zero temptation. And hard to feel much regret... because he had opportunity to mine a great deal in those early years.
  - nullc 7y ago
    > He was the only one mining in the early days. This is untrue-- we know other people who mined in the first days. The way the initial released software worked, it wouldn't mine unless another peer was connected. So it's possible that there has never been a moment when there was only one party mining.
    - chrismeller 7y ago
      I know nothing of the Bitcoin structure now or then, but there’s a logic flaw there... 1) At some point during development he would have absolutely been the only one mining because the code only existed on his machine. 2) Requiring that another peer be available doesn’t mean that both peers couldn’t be run by the same person, even if they were run with different sets of keys. A peer in this case is a software construct, not a physical one.

cyphertruck 7y ago

Bitcoin was designed by an individual with intimate knowledge of the state of the art in suspicions of NSA backdoors. You are assuming Satoshi is sitting on money. Satoshi took care to hide it’s identity, and thus would have switched mining to different addresses very early in bitcoins history. It would have been obvious to Satoshi that spending from a known address would blow it’s identity, so only did so for testing. Satoshi may well be a billionaire and spending bitcoin every day. People seem to take comfort in this idea that bitcoin was created by a government... because bitcoin seems radical when you first learn about it. However the attempts to create it date back a couple decades before it was created. Satoshi combined existing inventions with just the new element of his time chain. But even if the NSA were behind it, what could they do? Anything they could do could also be done by someone with a math breakthrough. So whether the attacker is the NSA or not bitcoin has to be robust against it. So where is bitcoin vulnerable? It’s easy to imagine vulnerabilities in the cryptography, but hard to produce them. Further, if you did, it doesn’t necessarily affect bitcoin. This is bitcoin’s genius. It’s not software, it’s a set of incentives. Show an error in the software, it will be patched and bitcoin will carry on. Worst case is a hard fork.

real_satoshi 7y ago
> Bitcoin was designed by an individual with intimate knowledge of the state of the art in suspicions of NSA backdoors. Insiders at the NSA (or any other TLA, foreign or domestic) also fit this description. The strongest position is to know both the truth, and the most compelling misconceptions.
- cyphertruck 7y ago
  I think it is a mistake for me to fight the “NSA created bitcoin” narrative. I am gleeful at Nelson not owning any bitcoin and want all like him who reject it for ideological reasons to continue to misunderstand it. Freedom and human rights need financial backing, and bitcoin does that.
  - NelsonMinar 7y ago
    Nothing like personalized comments coming from a brand new pseudonym.
    - cyphertruck 7y ago
      It took quite awhile to understand what narcissists are and to recognize that attempting to talk to them is pointless. They are simply incapable of valuing any other human being, let alone comprehending that such human being might have superior knowledge in any area. After all, the narcissist is the supreme being. At least in their reality. To be fair, “Unabashedly elitist” was a confession — if one were wise enough to recognize it.
  - dang 7y ago
    That crosses into personal attack. We ban accounts that do that on HN. No more of this, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

wil421 7y ago

My thoughts exactly regarding the NSA creating Bitcoin. My theory is the blockchain gives them a way to do analysis on dirty money. Instead of having to hack or compel the next dirty bank they can look at the open ledger and figure it out. At first I thought it could be the CIA as a way to fund off the books ops but NSA makes more sense. Either way there’s no way a single person holds on to a wallet that size. It’s also less likely someone/some group in China or Russia could hold on to wallet that size without it being pilfered.

cyphertruck 7y ago
You’re projecting your temptation into people based on your values, as is Nelson. But you are not Satoshi. Satoshi faces risk worse than Edward Snowden. The central bankers are far more formidable. And the solution is easy: Satoshi mined initially to bootstrap bitcoin. He was the only one mining in the early days. But then once there were enough other miners, all he had to do was destroy his private key. If he’s greedy he just waited until he had enough bitcoin mined in other addresses that were never associated with him, before doing so. Zero temptation. And hard to feel much regret... because he had opportunity to mine a great deal in those early years.
- nullc 7y ago
  > He was the only one mining in the early days. This is untrue-- we know other people who mined in the first days. The way the initial released software worked, it wouldn't mine unless another peer was connected. So it's possible that there has never been a moment when there was only one party mining.
  - chrismeller 7y ago
    I know nothing of the Bitcoin structure now or then, but there’s a logic flaw there... 1) At some point during development he would have absolutely been the only one mining because the code only existed on his machine. 2) Requiring that another peer be available doesn’t mean that both peers couldn’t be run by the same person, even if they were run with different sets of keys. A peer in this case is a software construct, not a physical one.