19 ms·

What Satoshi Did Not Know (2015) [pdf]

165 points by MrXOR 6y ago

MrXOR 6y ago
Was Satoshi a Cryptographer? EDIT: (probably) No [1] [1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/satoshi-nakamoto-had-outside-cryptography-help-says-early-bitcoin-dev https://cointelegraph.com/news/satoshi-nakamoto-had-outside-...
- ydnaclementine 6y ago
  PDF literally says no, probably not
- claudiulodro 6y ago
  I like the theory that Satoshi was Paul Le Roux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux#Satoshi_Nakamoto_candidate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux#Satoshi_Nakamoto_...
  - MrXOR 6y ago
    No, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20118746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20118746
    - MrXOR 6y ago
      Satoshi used Hungarian notation?!
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    I think it's either Hal Finney or Dave Kleiman. Both have background in crypto and security, and both have been deceased since early 2010s - just before the meteoric rise of bitcoin. The second part is key, because given the prominence and status of bitcoin they would have been unable to stay anonymous or silent.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - betterunix2 6y ago
      Have you considered the possibility that Satoshi was some random cryptography enthusiast of little note who died in a traffic accident? He probably told nobody about his project, and the lengths he went to to remain anonymous make me think he used full disk encryption -- so his family, not knowing his passphrase, probably unknowingly destroyed all evidence of his work on Bitcoin after he passed away. What makes you think Satoshi had any background in cryptography? Everything about the Bitcoin whitepaper and even the design of Bitcoin itself says otherwise.
      - macspoofing 6y ago
        >Have you considered the possibility that Satoshi was some random cryptography enthusiast of little note who died in a traffic accident? Yes. That could also be the case. The individual behind 'Satoshi' has probably died.
    - xorcist 6y ago
      > they would have been unable to stay anonymous or silent. Not necessarily. Satoshi obviously planned his pseudonymity from the start. The decision to leave the project may very well have been taken long before it was carried out. Satoshi could be alive and well. Maybe he carried on his work under his real name, as one developer among many, or maybe not. He obviously thought fairness and trust was important enough to value to form for him to prove the non-possbility of backdating the chain (later known as premining). Planned obsolescence for the creator plays well into this scenario. In hindsight, having no real creator has served Bitcoin well. People would have listened too much to the creator for a decentralized decision process by consensus to form.
      - macspoofing 6y ago
        >Not necessarily. Satoshi obviously planned his pseudonymity from the start. The decision to leave the project may very well have been taken long before it was carried out. I don't think so. I can't disprove your claim, but people aren't very good at that kind of planning and execution. Too many things can go wrong for them to either maintain anonymity or prevent others from maintaining this anonymity. It comes off as a bad Hollywood movie. I think the person behind Satoshi has died. >In hindsight, having no real creator has served Bitcoin well. We'll see. It's too early to tell. One thing's for sure, I see a lot of less places that take bitcoin as currency then I did a few years ago. Also, the community is much more divided, and there are massive structural issues with bitcoin, from technical issues around the protocol itself, to lack of unified vision leading to forks and arguments, to massive amount of illegal behaviour. >People would have listened too much to the creator for a decentralized decision process by consensus to form. Is the leadership decentralized though? At the end of the day, someone needs to hold the keys for the code the runs the bitcoin protocol. Ultimately that individual or group has the power to do anything they want with bitcoin.
  - trollied 6y ago
    Have you read The Mastermind? I won't spoil things, but what a man Paul Le Roux is.... SUrprised there aren't 10 documentaries & films on Netflix about him.
    - akeck 6y ago
      Finally finished it this summer. So fascinating and so disturbing at the same time. Re: him being Satoshi, it's the type of thing of which he was certainly capable, but after a certain point in the development of his operations, I don't think he had the time.
      - meowface 6y ago
        From what I've seen, it just seems too implausible to me even beyond the practical considerations. Satoshi was carefully guarded, but I suspect something not that far off from his real personality shone through in all of his posts and emails. Maybe even something very close to it. I have no idea what his moral character is, but my gut feeling is that he's just not the sort of person who would work as a bogus pharmaceutical seller, spammer, drug trafficker, arms trafficker, and murderer. Of course I can't possibly claim to know this with any certainty, but I just have the feeling it's very unlikely he's anything close to a Pablo Escobar-type. My guess is he's a single individual whose real identity has never been publicly suggested as a serious Satoshi suspect.
    - s5300 6y ago
      ... Huh I do a lot of Wikipedia reading about strange folk in this world. I had not yet come across this dude. Wiki page is quite the interesting read. Thanks for making me aware of him.
  - mrkramer 6y ago
    I think Satoshi is Craig Wright like it or not. I did some research on Craig's historical writings and I compared it to Satoshi and I found many similarities between them. I will publish my research when I get more time. I did my research as a historian would do so I started from the basics and the first clue was Satoshi used perfect British English so most likely he is not American like some people imply. And why an American would link to British daily national newspaper cover like Satoshi did in Genesis Block?[1][2] [1]https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block [2] https://www.okex.com/academy/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/thetimescover.png?x-oss-process=image/quality,q_85 https://www.okex.com/academy/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/thet...
    - MrXOR 6y ago
      No, Craig Wright is Fakoshi! https://hackingdistributed.com/2016/05/04/logical-fallacies-hunt-satoshi/ https://hackingdistributed.com/2016/05/04/logical-fallacies-...
    - fyleo 6y ago
      I met Craig last year in person and spent some time reading his book. No way he is Satoshi; he refused to give straight answers to rather simple questions and spent the whole time making rather obvious allegations. From all the dodgy people I met in crypto over the last years, if I ever met someone where just everything screams “conman” then it was Craig. I might be wrong, who knows. But I’d be willing to make a huge bet against him.
      - mrkramer 6y ago
        @fyleo Time will tell, Satoshi's identity can not remain secret forever.
        betterunix2 6y ago
        Sure it can. His use of remailers makes me think he used full disk encryption. His sudden disappearance makes me think he unexpectedly died (e.g. in a traffic accident), and his family probably did not know his passphrase. All evidence of this person's work on Bitcoin was probably unintentionally destroyed in that scenario, and the people who destroyed it have no idea what their loved one was up to before his death (and will never mention it, for lack of knowledge).
  - zadler 6y ago
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g It’s Adam Back. Watch this video and you’ll likely be convinced.
- walkingolof 6y ago
  Looking at the 0.1 code he comes around as a C++ hobbyists, not a professional.
  - MrXOR 6y ago
    Could you please clarify?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - sparkie 6y ago
    Comes across as an academic, not a professional.
- betterunix2 6y ago
  Almost certainly not. A few things immediately stood out to me when I looked at the original Bitcoin whitepaper: 1. No clear security definition, making it hard to know what counts as a successful attack against the system he proposed. Moreover, Bitcoin requires the honest parties to do more work than the attacker, which would appear backwards to most cryptographers and further complicates efforts to precisely define the security goal. 2. No mention of the mountain of previous research on cryptographic payments. He makes claims that "all" previous systems require an intermediary for each transaction, which is not true (see: offline+transferable ecash does not, but this is not mentioned anywhere). This is not just a stylistic issue; the whitepaper has a bibliography, it simply failed to mention anything that a cryptographer would have considered related work. When Satoshi announced his idea to the cryptography mailing list a great deal of confusion ensued because the cryptographers on the list were familiar with the previous research and assumed this was in some way related. 3. Specifying algorithms and data structures with C++ code without giving higher level descriptions. This makes it hard to analyze the system because of the various ambiguities of C++ and the unnecessary and often confusing syntax. I would also add the various, entirely arbitrary constants chosen for the system, which seem to have just been chosen at random (given the lack of formal analysis it is unlikely that these are fundamental to security). This is not how cryptographers typically communicate their designs. I would say Satoshi was an enthusiast/hobbyist who had a passing knowledge of a few cryptographic constructions he read about in books or forums. At best his formal education on the topic was likely an undergrad level course, probably taught by someone whose expertise was applied security rather than cryptography; it is more likely that he had no formal education in cryptography at all.
  - SatoshiUNO 6y ago
    No one really taught me anything commerce. I created the base Logic for blockchain without a computer the main point of C plus plus was creating a another Stone marker. Those who own the software produced the code there for the installation ID and other sources can linked back to a true origin not a story. I was 17 in 2007. - Lucas - Satoshi of April 5th. We are a team. You can follow my story soon. Www.Satoshi.uno
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
svara 6y ago
With the benefit of hindsight, the biggest thing Satoshi didn't know (or didn't foresee) was that the idea of "one CPU, one vote" was flawed, a victim of its own success, because of mining ASICS. A consequence of that is that bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies really aren't as decentralized as claimed. It's fascinating how things just seem to have a way of becoming centralized once enough money is involved, even when engineers thought hard about how to avoid that (see also: the internet).
- jentist_retol 6y ago
  Decentralization works great for small communities and use cases. The moment you start scaling you run into a myriad of problems: - fraud/abuse (spam) - outsized influence of providers who make it easy to get on board without having to self host (gmail) - inability to easily change your protocols to handle new features (IMAP4 is from the 90s) - inflexibility to easily fix bugs and distribute patches across the entire fleet - unequal footing in both feature capacity and security posture from node to node Email, Matrix/Riot, etc all suffer from these problems. As does bitcoin. That's not to say that they're not overcomeable, but many of the challenges (especially fraud/abuse) require close collaboration between different decentralized node owners - which to some, defeats the purpose. I ask, what is the internet if not a way to communicate, so I guess I don't think it defeats the purpose. I'm actually interested to see what matrix is doing, because they seem to realize that a platform of decentralized nodes that handles a lot of the challenges (updates, auth, etc) means that people will be able to build their own new use-cases on top of the network, or diverge. Anyways, despite these problems, despite the uphill battle in user experience, despite the pain of self-hosting, despite all of the challenges: I still do it. The internet is a miracle and one way to keep it a miracle is to take the reins of your presence on it.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    I think you point out a lot of issues with decentralized services that lead to centralization. Matrix is exciting, but still has the hosting problem. Even with the easy ability to get a host from them for $10/month you're still going to have a handful of players providing most of the hosting. I think Urbit's design is actually really interesting and makes some progress on a few of these problems. > Fraud/abuse (spam) Their ID model that has inexpensive and limited IDs that require some cost ($10-20) change the economics on spam. IDs carry a reputation. > Outsized influence of providers Urbit still has some of this in the sense that where you host your 'planet' (basically your private server) will probably end up being dominated by centralized groups that do this work for you. Where it's different though is the design of urbit means your server is only accessible by you and the communication is still p2p/encrypted. It's a little like Matrix in that way, but the design makes install and updates way easier. The other cool bit is that the p2p complexity is abstracted away at the application layer, so things are decentralized by default without the users having to be aware of any of that complexity. You'll eventually be able to share photos from one user to the other and no centralized server is required. > Bug fixing across fleet Urbit's hierarchical structure is a good solution to this too. There are 256 'galaxies' which are voting governance nodes in the network. Each of these spawn 256 'stars' (basically infrastructure nodes) and each star can span 65,536 'planets' (individuals IDs or private servers for users). Updates come down the pipe from stars and get seamlessly applied to all users on the fleet. User planets can escape to a different star if their star becomes a problem. Stars are incentivized to remain up and neutral in order to stay relevant. Similarly stars can escape to different galaxies if there's an issue with theirs. In an extreme case a 'stellar congress' could push back against the galaxy governance body if they had to and start reporting to their own. - unequal footing in both feature capacity and security posture from node to node The OTA approach and functional VM design solve this for Urbit. https://urbit.org/using/install/ https://urbit.org/using/install/ A more detailed introduction: http://hyperstition.al/post/urbit-an-introduction/ http://hyperstition.al/post/urbit-an-introduction/ Anyway - I've playing with it for the last few months during lock down and it's the most interesting thing I've seen in a while.
moonbug 6y ago
missed point 0: Economics.
ctulek 6y ago
I won’t call Bitcoin a success as long as its value is measured in dollars.
- MrXOR 6y ago
  The greater success is blockchain, It will swallow dollars.
  - _heimdall 6y ago
    Blockchain would swallow databases not dollars. Currency is just one use for a blockchain, git is a great use for it and much older than bitcoin.
- sanjams 6y ago
  So is the euro not a success either? Or any other currency in the world for that matter?
  - _heimdall 6y ago
    That's completely unrelated. The Euro wasn't designed as an alternative to make USD obsolete. The Euro did do exactly what it was designed for, to unify much of Europe under one currency and economic system.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - garmaine 6y ago
    The value of a euro isn’t how many dollars you can buy with it. It is what goods and services you can buy with it, directly. That’s the point.
SoylentOrange 6y ago
This is a great read and obviously Gavin has thought a lot about some of the deep problems in Bitcoin, especially from the crypto side. I was a bit disappointed to see that he punted* on one of the more well-known “shallow” problems: the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining, and the wasted computing power therein. The problem is much easier to understand than to solve, and I appreciate there is only so much room in the text. However I did hope he might at least acknowledge that this is among the more important technical hurdles for Bitcoin to overcome. [*] there is a rather cheeky dismissal of Proof of Stake which obliquely addresses this issue
- Geee 6y ago
  It's not really a problem. There's lots of energy around, and consuming energy isn't bad per se. Most Bitcoin miners run on renewables nowadays, because renewables are the cheapest sources of energy when miners can locate to them. Also, the main assumption of Bitcoin's security model is that it's rather impossible to centralize energy production on this planet (or in the universe). Proof-of-stake assumes decentralization of ownership, which is a flimsier assumption, and will fail asymptotically.
  - minerjoe 6y ago
    "run on renewables nowadays". I don't think that is true. At least not here in Montana. We've had several large farms pop up in old industrial parks due to the very low cost of electricity here. It's from coal.
    - Geee 6y ago
      Most Bitcoin miners are in Montana? https://cointelegraph.com/news/study-over-74-of-bitcoin-mining-is-powered-by-renewable-energy https://cointelegraph.com/news/study-over-74-of-bitcoin-mini...
morpheos137 6y ago
Bitcoin is useful as a trust-less medium of exchange but in the real world, legitimate trade involves some level of trust and enforceability of implicit or explicit contracts. Nobody needs a blockchain for legitimate transactions because there is the accounting ledger which is transparent to the law and whose falsification constitutes an illegal act. For example your bank can not deduct money from your account without cause. You do not need a blockchain for the value stored in your account to be secure because falsification of ledger balances is a crime. You don't need to encrypt the account (equivalent to hiding money in an obscure place) because stealing is a crime and if bank robbery or failure happens you have the FDIC to ensure your balance to a certain degree (ask users of Bitfinex circa 2015 or 2016 about this...) Thus Bitcoin is largely a solution in search of a problem unless you are dealing in a black market or trying to hide money from legitimate authorities for some other reason. The dollar is a highly decentralised currency in actual practice. Yes, the federal reserve or treasury can increase or decrease supply of dollars but in practice in recent years the value of a dollar is set by its usability in the real world not the actions of a central authority at the margins. In fact I would venture to say that if the central authorities started to undermine the value of the dollar for global commerce the central authorities would lose their power over the dollar before the dollar lost its value. Many more countries than the USA use dollars. In fact the vast majority of physical dollars, if not dollar balances exist outside of US jurisdiction. The only way that the dollar can and will be dethroned is if some other currency becomes widely used in commerce. That certainly wont be Bitcoin but it could be another digital currency like maybe Ripple. Bitcoin is not very useable in actual commerce. The processing time of transactions is tremendous, and the deflationary and volatile nature of the currency makes it an unsuitable store of value or unit of account. There is no reason to expect in the future bitcoin will stabilise. Its price is set by exchange speculation and a decreasing rate of new coin supply. Unless commerce overtakes exchange speculation as the price setting mechanism for bitcoin it wont be very useable for legitmate commerce.
- batsigner 6y ago
  In other words, in your view, the dollar literally cannot go tits up?
  - 6y ago
dnprock 6y ago
I think Satoshi didn't know that Bitcoin would not be a medium of exchange. It will remain digital gold. Bitcoin cannot fulfill its original promise to be electronic cash. This is the hardest hurdle for bitcoiners to understand. They think that sky high value of Bitcoin would transform it into a medium of exchange. But I think it's a false promise from Satoshi. https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/24/bitcoin-will-not-be-a-medium-of-exchange.html https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/24/bitcoin-will-not-be-a-m... The biggest hurdle for cryptocurrency adoption is a medium of exchange. Most investors waste their time playing around with buzzwords like DeFi.
- specialist 6y ago
  An escrow vs a currency. (File under "hunch, but just guessing.")
- beaner 6y ago
  Layer 2 will solve this.
  - dnprock 6y ago
    Layer 2 does not solve the medium of exchange problem. The cause is volatility which is rooted in Bitcoin's limited supply design. You can dig in Layer 2 adoption. It's not growing. Bitcoin only has 2 use cases: hold and speculate. Transaction is not a use case. Layer 2 is not necessary until Layer 1 has some kind of stability. Layer 2 can also malfunction during volatility. Ethereum has demonstrated this.
    - H8crilA 6y ago
      Need I remind you that the world has been running almost exclusively on gold, which also has a limited supply "design"? That is if you look back a few thousand years. Deeply flexible currencies are mostly a recent invention, and their fate is not yet determined. Volatility is a result of lack of actual usage of the currency. And yes, bitcoin has virtually no actual usage, save for speculation/investing. Any normal currency has hundreds of millions of contracts attached to it (starting from short term offers on groceries in your local shop). Each of those contracts is a volatility dampener. Saying that Bitcoin is not used because it's volatile it's like saying that x=y because x=y.
mudlus 6y ago
This is pretty dated. Segwit has been implemented. The lightning network is growing. No mention of sidechains like Liquid. No mention of Taproot. Satoshi is great proof that you don't need to know everything to understand something enough to make something, read some David Deutsch.
- uncletammy 6y ago
  > Segwit has been implemented Segwit adoption plateaued around 60% and has been steadily decreasing ever since. It's a piss poor substitute for real scaling by increasing the block size like Satoshi had intended. Even if it had been a good idea, the core devs butchered the implementation. > The lightning network is growing. Not even close. The lightning network is the ultimate vaporware. It was promised as the solution to Bitcoin's scaling problems NINE YEARS AGO ( https://twitter.com/starkness/status/676599570898419712 https://twitter.com/starkness/status/676599570898419712 ) and is to this day considered unsafe and "experimental". It failed to deliver on just about every promise it made. Even the core devs have abandoned it for Liquid. > No mention of sidechains like Liquid Finally, we get to see the reason that a handful of Bitcoin core devs have been holding Bitcoin hostage for ten years. Liquid is a centralized Bitcoin sidechain that allows exchanges to pay extra in order to clear their transactions faster than would otherwise be possible on Bitcoin's now neutered base layer. Liquid was recently criticized for being fundamentally insecure after this embarrassment ( https://www.coindesk.com/blockstreams-liquid-network-sent-8m-in-btc-unsafely-says-bitcoin-developer https://www.coindesk.com/blockstreams-liquid-network-sent-8m... ) > No mention of Taproot. Wake me when it's merged. The sad truth is, ever since some of the core devs formed Blockstream and hijacked BTC, they have added almost no new features on the protocol level. The only one they were willing to work on is Segwit and only because it solidified their power over BTC. They have no incentive to make BTC better. If BTC worked well, nobody would want to buy Liquid.
- stale2002 6y ago
  Let me know when any of those things are used in a significant amount by real life, in person merchants.... Because right now, the only merchant point of sale system that has any non-negligible amount of adoption, is BitPay, and the only thing they might be using is Segwit, which gives pretty minimal fee savings. They aren't even close to using anything like lighting, or liquid, or any of that other nonsense that is not implemented by any significant payment processor, or user wallet with any significant amount of adoption.
onelastjob 6y ago
Colin Lemahieu set out to solve at lot of the problems that Bitcoin suffers from by creating Nano (nano.org). He did this by having each account have its own blockchain, rather than using one blockchain for all transactions. The result is Nano transactions take under 1 second (fully confirmed) and there is no fee for transactions. It's also scalable with 1465 confirmations per second (aka transactions) reached on the test net the other day. There is no mining involved, so Nano is environmentally friend and voting is done using a system called ORV (open representative voting) which is similar to delegated proof of stake, but doesn't require actually staking and risking coins. Instead it is more like a liquid democracy system, where you delegate your voting weight to a representative you select and can change at any time. Because there are no mining fees, there is no incentive for centralization and for this reason it is expected that the Nano voting weight will become more distributed and decentralized over time as adoption increases. From a tech perspective, Nano really is amazing.
- dovin 6y ago
  Interesting. What's the incentive to devote computation to make the system work if there aren't mining fees?
  - onelastjob 6y ago
    Merchants using Nano for transactions will not have to pay credit card processing fees. This will save them a significant amount of money. They will thus have an incentive to run a representative (a full node) that voting weight can be delegated to from other users in order to keep the network decentralized.
- gruez 6y ago
  >He did this by having each account have its own blockchain, rather than using one blockchain for all transactions. The result is Nano transactions take under 1 second (fully confirmed) and there is no fee for transactions. It's also scalable with 1465 confirmations per second (aka transactions) reached on the test net the other day. What are the trade-offs being made by using this rather than a blockchain? I'd imagine the consistency guarantees would be lower? >There is no mining involved, so Nano is environmentally friend and voting is done using a system called ORV (open representative voting) which is similar to delegated proof of stake, but doesn't require actually staking and risking coins. If there's no staking/risk involved, what's the disincentive for bad actors to fork the chain? The whole point of staking (and putting coins at risk) is to disincentivize that from happening.
SatoshiUNO 6y ago
Don't assume what I didn't or didn't know.
SatoshiUNO 6y ago
Don't assume what I know or dont. Thanks
cageface 6y ago
We hackers are naturally inclined to look for technical solutions to social problems but more and more I think this very rarely works. It's too easy for people in power to twist any particular technical solution to their own ends so the really important thing is controlled who holds power in the first place.
historyremade 6y ago
Craig Wright is Satoshi. Media has been paid to label him as Fraud because BTC is a ponzi scheme and Craig goals are against the High Priests of Crypto Ecosystem. All people on Crypto wants easy money. Craig created Bitcoin to solve micro payments problem because it's hard to make small payments over internet and it cost lot. Coming to HN, HN has lot of BTC people and they down votes the truth. The average price for Coindesk article is $5000.00. You judge. Who want to kill their empire.
CryptoPunk 6y ago
Great to see Gavin Andresen's writings getting exposure here. Andresen, along with Roger Ver, laid much of the ground work for Bitcoin's massive run up in adoption, brand recognition and price. Their subsequent ousting by a group that basically acted like trolls, to sabotage Bitcoin's plan to hard fork to remove the 1 MB block size limit, and thereby prevent it from becoming a ubiquitous electronic cash, has irked me to no end.
- uncletammy 6y ago
  I'm not sure why you're being downvoted but you're exactly right. Love or hate Roget Ver, you'd be hard pressed to find any historical accounting of Bitcoin's rise to fame where he's not mentioned in a favorable light. Gavin Andersen was the best steward that Bitcoin core ever had. He managed to keep the more toxic contributors at bay for a long time although they eventually forced him out through highly unethical means ( https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/core-developer-calls-andresens-acts-the-final-straw/ https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/core-developer-calls-andrese... ) > Their subsequent ousting by a group that basically acted like trolls Gavin thought so too ( https://cointelegraph.com/news/former-bitcoin-cores-gavin-andresen-hits-blockstream-labels-greg-maxwell-and-samson-mow https://cointelegraph.com/news/former-bitcoin-cores-gavin-an... ) > to sabotage Bitcoin's plan to hard fork to remove the 1 MB block size limit, and thereby prevent it from becoming a ubiquitous electronic cash Here's part of the story as told by one of the more honest core devs: https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7 https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi... edit: spacing
aey 6y ago
These articles on HN always remind me how much more work crypto has to do in terms of education to the general technical public. Crypto Twitter is a recursive bubble.

165 points by MrXOR 6y ago

Was Satoshi a Cryptographer? EDIT: (probably) No [1] [1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/satoshi-nakamoto-had-outside-cryptography-help-says-early-bitcoin-dev https://cointelegraph.com/news/satoshi-nakamoto-had-outside-...

ydnaclementine 6y ago
PDF literally says no, probably not
claudiulodro 6y ago
I like the theory that Satoshi was Paul Le Roux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux#Satoshi_Nakamoto_candidate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux#Satoshi_Nakamoto_...
- MrXOR 6y ago
  No, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20118746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20118746
  - MrXOR 6y ago
    Satoshi used Hungarian notation?!
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- macspoofing 6y ago
  I think it's either Hal Finney or Dave Kleiman. Both have background in crypto and security, and both have been deceased since early 2010s - just before the meteoric rise of bitcoin. The second part is key, because given the prominence and status of bitcoin they would have been unable to stay anonymous or silent.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - betterunix2 6y ago
    Have you considered the possibility that Satoshi was some random cryptography enthusiast of little note who died in a traffic accident? He probably told nobody about his project, and the lengths he went to to remain anonymous make me think he used full disk encryption -- so his family, not knowing his passphrase, probably unknowingly destroyed all evidence of his work on Bitcoin after he passed away. What makes you think Satoshi had any background in cryptography? Everything about the Bitcoin whitepaper and even the design of Bitcoin itself says otherwise.
    - macspoofing 6y ago
      >Have you considered the possibility that Satoshi was some random cryptography enthusiast of little note who died in a traffic accident? Yes. That could also be the case. The individual behind 'Satoshi' has probably died.
  - xorcist 6y ago
    > they would have been unable to stay anonymous or silent. Not necessarily. Satoshi obviously planned his pseudonymity from the start. The decision to leave the project may very well have been taken long before it was carried out. Satoshi could be alive and well. Maybe he carried on his work under his real name, as one developer among many, or maybe not. He obviously thought fairness and trust was important enough to value to form for him to prove the non-possbility of backdating the chain (later known as premining). Planned obsolescence for the creator plays well into this scenario. In hindsight, having no real creator has served Bitcoin well. People would have listened too much to the creator for a decentralized decision process by consensus to form.
    - macspoofing 6y ago
      >Not necessarily. Satoshi obviously planned his pseudonymity from the start. The decision to leave the project may very well have been taken long before it was carried out. I don't think so. I can't disprove your claim, but people aren't very good at that kind of planning and execution. Too many things can go wrong for them to either maintain anonymity or prevent others from maintaining this anonymity. It comes off as a bad Hollywood movie. I think the person behind Satoshi has died. >In hindsight, having no real creator has served Bitcoin well. We'll see. It's too early to tell. One thing's for sure, I see a lot of less places that take bitcoin as currency then I did a few years ago. Also, the community is much more divided, and there are massive structural issues with bitcoin, from technical issues around the protocol itself, to lack of unified vision leading to forks and arguments, to massive amount of illegal behaviour. >People would have listened too much to the creator for a decentralized decision process by consensus to form. Is the leadership decentralized though? At the end of the day, someone needs to hold the keys for the code the runs the bitcoin protocol. Ultimately that individual or group has the power to do anything they want with bitcoin.
- trollied 6y ago
  Have you read The Mastermind? I won't spoil things, but what a man Paul Le Roux is.... SUrprised there aren't 10 documentaries & films on Netflix about him.
  - akeck 6y ago
    Finally finished it this summer. So fascinating and so disturbing at the same time. Re: him being Satoshi, it's the type of thing of which he was certainly capable, but after a certain point in the development of his operations, I don't think he had the time.
    - meowface 6y ago
      From what I've seen, it just seems too implausible to me even beyond the practical considerations. Satoshi was carefully guarded, but I suspect something not that far off from his real personality shone through in all of his posts and emails. Maybe even something very close to it. I have no idea what his moral character is, but my gut feeling is that he's just not the sort of person who would work as a bogus pharmaceutical seller, spammer, drug trafficker, arms trafficker, and murderer. Of course I can't possibly claim to know this with any certainty, but I just have the feeling it's very unlikely he's anything close to a Pablo Escobar-type. My guess is he's a single individual whose real identity has never been publicly suggested as a serious Satoshi suspect.
  - s5300 6y ago
    ... Huh I do a lot of Wikipedia reading about strange folk in this world. I had not yet come across this dude. Wiki page is quite the interesting read. Thanks for making me aware of him.
- mrkramer 6y ago
  I think Satoshi is Craig Wright like it or not. I did some research on Craig's historical writings and I compared it to Satoshi and I found many similarities between them. I will publish my research when I get more time. I did my research as a historian would do so I started from the basics and the first clue was Satoshi used perfect British English so most likely he is not American like some people imply. And why an American would link to British daily national newspaper cover like Satoshi did in Genesis Block?[1][2] [1]https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block [2] https://www.okex.com/academy/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/thetimescover.png?x-oss-process=image/quality,q_85 https://www.okex.com/academy/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/thet...
  - MrXOR 6y ago
    No, Craig Wright is Fakoshi! https://hackingdistributed.com/2016/05/04/logical-fallacies-hunt-satoshi/ https://hackingdistributed.com/2016/05/04/logical-fallacies-...
  - fyleo 6y ago
    I met Craig last year in person and spent some time reading his book. No way he is Satoshi; he refused to give straight answers to rather simple questions and spent the whole time making rather obvious allegations. From all the dodgy people I met in crypto over the last years, if I ever met someone where just everything screams “conman” then it was Craig. I might be wrong, who knows. But I’d be willing to make a huge bet against him.
    - mrkramer 6y ago
      @fyleo Time will tell, Satoshi's identity can not remain secret forever.
      - betterunix2 6y ago
        Sure it can. His use of remailers makes me think he used full disk encryption. His sudden disappearance makes me think he unexpectedly died (e.g. in a traffic accident), and his family probably did not know his passphrase. All evidence of this person's work on Bitcoin was probably unintentionally destroyed in that scenario, and the people who destroyed it have no idea what their loved one was up to before his death (and will never mention it, for lack of knowledge).
- zadler 6y ago
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g It’s Adam Back. Watch this video and you’ll likely be convinced.
walkingolof 6y ago
Looking at the 0.1 code he comes around as a C++ hobbyists, not a professional.
- MrXOR 6y ago
  Could you please clarify?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- sparkie 6y ago
  Comes across as an academic, not a professional.
betterunix2 6y ago
Almost certainly not. A few things immediately stood out to me when I looked at the original Bitcoin whitepaper: 1. No clear security definition, making it hard to know what counts as a successful attack against the system he proposed. Moreover, Bitcoin requires the honest parties to do more work than the attacker, which would appear backwards to most cryptographers and further complicates efforts to precisely define the security goal. 2. No mention of the mountain of previous research on cryptographic payments. He makes claims that "all" previous systems require an intermediary for each transaction, which is not true (see: offline+transferable ecash does not, but this is not mentioned anywhere). This is not just a stylistic issue; the whitepaper has a bibliography, it simply failed to mention anything that a cryptographer would have considered related work. When Satoshi announced his idea to the cryptography mailing list a great deal of confusion ensued because the cryptographers on the list were familiar with the previous research and assumed this was in some way related. 3. Specifying algorithms and data structures with C++ code without giving higher level descriptions. This makes it hard to analyze the system because of the various ambiguities of C++ and the unnecessary and often confusing syntax. I would also add the various, entirely arbitrary constants chosen for the system, which seem to have just been chosen at random (given the lack of formal analysis it is unlikely that these are fundamental to security). This is not how cryptographers typically communicate their designs. I would say Satoshi was an enthusiast/hobbyist who had a passing knowledge of a few cryptographic constructions he read about in books or forums. At best his formal education on the topic was likely an undergrad level course, probably taught by someone whose expertise was applied security rather than cryptography; it is more likely that he had no formal education in cryptography at all.
- SatoshiUNO 6y ago
  No one really taught me anything commerce. I created the base Logic for blockchain without a computer the main point of C plus plus was creating a another Stone marker. Those who own the software produced the code there for the installation ID and other sources can linked back to a true origin not a story. I was 17 in 2007. - Lucas - Satoshi of April 5th. We are a team. You can follow my story soon. Www.Satoshi.uno
- hombre_fatal 6y ago

svara 6y ago

With the benefit of hindsight, the biggest thing Satoshi didn't know (or didn't foresee) was that the idea of "one CPU, one vote" was flawed, a victim of its own success, because of mining ASICS. A consequence of that is that bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies really aren't as decentralized as claimed. It's fascinating how things just seem to have a way of becoming centralized once enough money is involved, even when engineers thought hard about how to avoid that (see also: the internet).

jentist_retol 6y ago
Decentralization works great for small communities and use cases. The moment you start scaling you run into a myriad of problems: - fraud/abuse (spam) - outsized influence of providers who make it easy to get on board without having to self host (gmail) - inability to easily change your protocols to handle new features (IMAP4 is from the 90s) - inflexibility to easily fix bugs and distribute patches across the entire fleet - unequal footing in both feature capacity and security posture from node to node Email, Matrix/Riot, etc all suffer from these problems. As does bitcoin. That's not to say that they're not overcomeable, but many of the challenges (especially fraud/abuse) require close collaboration between different decentralized node owners - which to some, defeats the purpose. I ask, what is the internet if not a way to communicate, so I guess I don't think it defeats the purpose. I'm actually interested to see what matrix is doing, because they seem to realize that a platform of decentralized nodes that handles a lot of the challenges (updates, auth, etc) means that people will be able to build their own new use-cases on top of the network, or diverge. Anyways, despite these problems, despite the uphill battle in user experience, despite the pain of self-hosting, despite all of the challenges: I still do it. The internet is a miracle and one way to keep it a miracle is to take the reins of your presence on it.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I think you point out a lot of issues with decentralized services that lead to centralization. Matrix is exciting, but still has the hosting problem. Even with the easy ability to get a host from them for $10/month you're still going to have a handful of players providing most of the hosting. I think Urbit's design is actually really interesting and makes some progress on a few of these problems. > Fraud/abuse (spam) Their ID model that has inexpensive and limited IDs that require some cost ($10-20) change the economics on spam. IDs carry a reputation. > Outsized influence of providers Urbit still has some of this in the sense that where you host your 'planet' (basically your private server) will probably end up being dominated by centralized groups that do this work for you. Where it's different though is the design of urbit means your server is only accessible by you and the communication is still p2p/encrypted. It's a little like Matrix in that way, but the design makes install and updates way easier. The other cool bit is that the p2p complexity is abstracted away at the application layer, so things are decentralized by default without the users having to be aware of any of that complexity. You'll eventually be able to share photos from one user to the other and no centralized server is required. > Bug fixing across fleet Urbit's hierarchical structure is a good solution to this too. There are 256 'galaxies' which are voting governance nodes in the network. Each of these spawn 256 'stars' (basically infrastructure nodes) and each star can span 65,536 'planets' (individuals IDs or private servers for users). Updates come down the pipe from stars and get seamlessly applied to all users on the fleet. User planets can escape to a different star if their star becomes a problem. Stars are incentivized to remain up and neutral in order to stay relevant. Similarly stars can escape to different galaxies if there's an issue with theirs. In an extreme case a 'stellar congress' could push back against the galaxy governance body if they had to and start reporting to their own. - unequal footing in both feature capacity and security posture from node to node The OTA approach and functional VM design solve this for Urbit. https://urbit.org/using/install/ https://urbit.org/using/install/ A more detailed introduction: http://hyperstition.al/post/urbit-an-introduction/ http://hyperstition.al/post/urbit-an-introduction/ Anyway - I've playing with it for the last few months during lock down and it's the most interesting thing I've seen in a while.

moonbug 6y ago

missed point 0: Economics.

ctulek 6y ago

I won’t call Bitcoin a success as long as its value is measured in dollars.

MrXOR 6y ago
The greater success is blockchain, It will swallow dollars.
- _heimdall 6y ago
  Blockchain would swallow databases not dollars. Currency is just one use for a blockchain, git is a great use for it and much older than bitcoin.
sanjams 6y ago
So is the euro not a success either? Or any other currency in the world for that matter?
- _heimdall 6y ago
  That's completely unrelated. The Euro wasn't designed as an alternative to make USD obsolete. The Euro did do exactly what it was designed for, to unify much of Europe under one currency and economic system.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- garmaine 6y ago
  The value of a euro isn’t how many dollars you can buy with it. It is what goods and services you can buy with it, directly. That’s the point.

SoylentOrange 6y ago

This is a great read and obviously Gavin has thought a lot about some of the deep problems in Bitcoin, especially from the crypto side. I was a bit disappointed to see that he punted* on one of the more well-known “shallow” problems: the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining, and the wasted computing power therein. The problem is much easier to understand than to solve, and I appreciate there is only so much room in the text. However I did hope he might at least acknowledge that this is among the more important technical hurdles for Bitcoin to overcome. [*] there is a rather cheeky dismissal of Proof of Stake which obliquely addresses this issue

Geee 6y ago
It's not really a problem. There's lots of energy around, and consuming energy isn't bad per se. Most Bitcoin miners run on renewables nowadays, because renewables are the cheapest sources of energy when miners can locate to them. Also, the main assumption of Bitcoin's security model is that it's rather impossible to centralize energy production on this planet (or in the universe). Proof-of-stake assumes decentralization of ownership, which is a flimsier assumption, and will fail asymptotically.
- minerjoe 6y ago
  "run on renewables nowadays". I don't think that is true. At least not here in Montana. We've had several large farms pop up in old industrial parks due to the very low cost of electricity here. It's from coal.
  - Geee 6y ago
    Most Bitcoin miners are in Montana? https://cointelegraph.com/news/study-over-74-of-bitcoin-mining-is-powered-by-renewable-energy https://cointelegraph.com/news/study-over-74-of-bitcoin-mini...

morpheos137 6y ago

Bitcoin is useful as a trust-less medium of exchange but in the real world, legitimate trade involves some level of trust and enforceability of implicit or explicit contracts. Nobody needs a blockchain for legitimate transactions because there is the accounting ledger which is transparent to the law and whose falsification constitutes an illegal act. For example your bank can not deduct money from your account without cause. You do not need a blockchain for the value stored in your account to be secure because falsification of ledger balances is a crime. You don't need to encrypt the account (equivalent to hiding money in an obscure place) because stealing is a crime and if bank robbery or failure happens you have the FDIC to ensure your balance to a certain degree (ask users of Bitfinex circa 2015 or 2016 about this...) Thus Bitcoin is largely a solution in search of a problem unless you are dealing in a black market or trying to hide money from legitimate authorities for some other reason. The dollar is a highly decentralised currency in actual practice. Yes, the federal reserve or treasury can increase or decrease supply of dollars but in practice in recent years the value of a dollar is set by its usability in the real world not the actions of a central authority at the margins. In fact I would venture to say that if the central authorities started to undermine the value of the dollar for global commerce the central authorities would lose their power over the dollar before the dollar lost its value. Many more countries than the USA use dollars. In fact the vast majority of physical dollars, if not dollar balances exist outside of US jurisdiction. The only way that the dollar can and will be dethroned is if some other currency becomes widely used in commerce. That certainly wont be Bitcoin but it could be another digital currency like maybe Ripple. Bitcoin is not very useable in actual commerce. The processing time of transactions is tremendous, and the deflationary and volatile nature of the currency makes it an unsuitable store of value or unit of account. There is no reason to expect in the future bitcoin will stabilise. Its price is set by exchange speculation and a decreasing rate of new coin supply. Unless commerce overtakes exchange speculation as the price setting mechanism for bitcoin it wont be very useable for legitmate commerce.

batsigner 6y ago
In other words, in your view, the dollar literally cannot go tits up?
- 6y ago

dnprock 6y ago

I think Satoshi didn't know that Bitcoin would not be a medium of exchange. It will remain digital gold. Bitcoin cannot fulfill its original promise to be electronic cash. This is the hardest hurdle for bitcoiners to understand. They think that sky high value of Bitcoin would transform it into a medium of exchange. But I think it's a false promise from Satoshi. https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/24/bitcoin-will-not-be-a-medium-of-exchange.html https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/24/bitcoin-will-not-be-a-m... The biggest hurdle for cryptocurrency adoption is a medium of exchange. Most investors waste their time playing around with buzzwords like DeFi.

specialist 6y ago
An escrow vs a currency. (File under "hunch, but just guessing.")
beaner 6y ago
Layer 2 will solve this.
- dnprock 6y ago
  Layer 2 does not solve the medium of exchange problem. The cause is volatility which is rooted in Bitcoin's limited supply design. You can dig in Layer 2 adoption. It's not growing. Bitcoin only has 2 use cases: hold and speculate. Transaction is not a use case. Layer 2 is not necessary until Layer 1 has some kind of stability. Layer 2 can also malfunction during volatility. Ethereum has demonstrated this.
  - H8crilA 6y ago
    Need I remind you that the world has been running almost exclusively on gold, which also has a limited supply "design"? That is if you look back a few thousand years. Deeply flexible currencies are mostly a recent invention, and their fate is not yet determined. Volatility is a result of lack of actual usage of the currency. And yes, bitcoin has virtually no actual usage, save for speculation/investing. Any normal currency has hundreds of millions of contracts attached to it (starting from short term offers on groceries in your local shop). Each of those contracts is a volatility dampener. Saying that Bitcoin is not used because it's volatile it's like saying that x=y because x=y.

mudlus 6y ago

This is pretty dated. Segwit has been implemented. The lightning network is growing. No mention of sidechains like Liquid. No mention of Taproot. Satoshi is great proof that you don't need to know everything to understand something enough to make something, read some David Deutsch.

uncletammy 6y ago
> Segwit has been implemented Segwit adoption plateaued around 60% and has been steadily decreasing ever since. It's a piss poor substitute for real scaling by increasing the block size like Satoshi had intended. Even if it had been a good idea, the core devs butchered the implementation. > The lightning network is growing. Not even close. The lightning network is the ultimate vaporware. It was promised as the solution to Bitcoin's scaling problems NINE YEARS AGO ( https://twitter.com/starkness/status/676599570898419712 https://twitter.com/starkness/status/676599570898419712 ) and is to this day considered unsafe and "experimental". It failed to deliver on just about every promise it made. Even the core devs have abandoned it for Liquid. > No mention of sidechains like Liquid Finally, we get to see the reason that a handful of Bitcoin core devs have been holding Bitcoin hostage for ten years. Liquid is a centralized Bitcoin sidechain that allows exchanges to pay extra in order to clear their transactions faster than would otherwise be possible on Bitcoin's now neutered base layer. Liquid was recently criticized for being fundamentally insecure after this embarrassment ( https://www.coindesk.com/blockstreams-liquid-network-sent-8m-in-btc-unsafely-says-bitcoin-developer https://www.coindesk.com/blockstreams-liquid-network-sent-8m... ) > No mention of Taproot. Wake me when it's merged. The sad truth is, ever since some of the core devs formed Blockstream and hijacked BTC, they have added almost no new features on the protocol level. The only one they were willing to work on is Segwit and only because it solidified their power over BTC. They have no incentive to make BTC better. If BTC worked well, nobody would want to buy Liquid.
stale2002 6y ago
Let me know when any of those things are used in a significant amount by real life, in person merchants.... Because right now, the only merchant point of sale system that has any non-negligible amount of adoption, is BitPay, and the only thing they might be using is Segwit, which gives pretty minimal fee savings. They aren't even close to using anything like lighting, or liquid, or any of that other nonsense that is not implemented by any significant payment processor, or user wallet with any significant amount of adoption.

onelastjob 6y ago

Colin Lemahieu set out to solve at lot of the problems that Bitcoin suffers from by creating Nano (nano.org). He did this by having each account have its own blockchain, rather than using one blockchain for all transactions. The result is Nano transactions take under 1 second (fully confirmed) and there is no fee for transactions. It's also scalable with 1465 confirmations per second (aka transactions) reached on the test net the other day. There is no mining involved, so Nano is environmentally friend and voting is done using a system called ORV (open representative voting) which is similar to delegated proof of stake, but doesn't require actually staking and risking coins. Instead it is more like a liquid democracy system, where you delegate your voting weight to a representative you select and can change at any time. Because there are no mining fees, there is no incentive for centralization and for this reason it is expected that the Nano voting weight will become more distributed and decentralized over time as adoption increases. From a tech perspective, Nano really is amazing.

dovin 6y ago
Interesting. What's the incentive to devote computation to make the system work if there aren't mining fees?
- onelastjob 6y ago
  Merchants using Nano for transactions will not have to pay credit card processing fees. This will save them a significant amount of money. They will thus have an incentive to run a representative (a full node) that voting weight can be delegated to from other users in order to keep the network decentralized.
gruez 6y ago
>He did this by having each account have its own blockchain, rather than using one blockchain for all transactions. The result is Nano transactions take under 1 second (fully confirmed) and there is no fee for transactions. It's also scalable with 1465 confirmations per second (aka transactions) reached on the test net the other day. What are the trade-offs being made by using this rather than a blockchain? I'd imagine the consistency guarantees would be lower? >There is no mining involved, so Nano is environmentally friend and voting is done using a system called ORV (open representative voting) which is similar to delegated proof of stake, but doesn't require actually staking and risking coins. If there's no staking/risk involved, what's the disincentive for bad actors to fork the chain? The whole point of staking (and putting coins at risk) is to disincentivize that from happening.

SatoshiUNO 6y ago

Don't assume what I didn't or didn't know.

SatoshiUNO 6y ago

Don't assume what I know or dont. Thanks

cageface 6y ago

We hackers are naturally inclined to look for technical solutions to social problems but more and more I think this very rarely works. It's too easy for people in power to twist any particular technical solution to their own ends so the really important thing is controlled who holds power in the first place.

historyremade 6y ago

Craig Wright is Satoshi. Media has been paid to label him as Fraud because BTC is a ponzi scheme and Craig goals are against the High Priests of Crypto Ecosystem. All people on Crypto wants easy money. Craig created Bitcoin to solve micro payments problem because it's hard to make small payments over internet and it cost lot. Coming to HN, HN has lot of BTC people and they down votes the truth. The average price for Coindesk article is $5000.00. You judge. Who want to kill their empire.

CryptoPunk 6y ago

Great to see Gavin Andresen's writings getting exposure here. Andresen, along with Roger Ver, laid much of the ground work for Bitcoin's massive run up in adoption, brand recognition and price. Their subsequent ousting by a group that basically acted like trolls, to sabotage Bitcoin's plan to hard fork to remove the 1 MB block size limit, and thereby prevent it from becoming a ubiquitous electronic cash, has irked me to no end.

uncletammy 6y ago
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted but you're exactly right. Love or hate Roget Ver, you'd be hard pressed to find any historical accounting of Bitcoin's rise to fame where he's not mentioned in a favorable light. Gavin Andersen was the best steward that Bitcoin core ever had. He managed to keep the more toxic contributors at bay for a long time although they eventually forced him out through highly unethical means ( https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/core-developer-calls-andresens-acts-the-final-straw/ https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/core-developer-calls-andrese... ) > Their subsequent ousting by a group that basically acted like trolls Gavin thought so too ( https://cointelegraph.com/news/former-bitcoin-cores-gavin-andresen-hits-blockstream-labels-greg-maxwell-and-samson-mow https://cointelegraph.com/news/former-bitcoin-cores-gavin-an... ) > to sabotage Bitcoin's plan to hard fork to remove the 1 MB block size limit, and thereby prevent it from becoming a ubiquitous electronic cash Here's part of the story as told by one of the more honest core devs: https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7 https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi... edit: spacing

aey 6y ago

These articles on HN always remind me how much more work crypto has to do in terms of education to the general technical public. Crypto Twitter is a recursive bubble.