3 ms·

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 ha

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
Some other interesting bits, to me: - Bitcoin (and the remarkably-written whitepaper) does enough things right that it's hard to imagine a single programmer delivering that whole package (writing, math, cryptography, programming). Calling it enthusiast or hobbyist level work really downplays it. - Great attention to detail, like base58 and the checksum (even Ethereum years later went with hex and no checksum like most people would). Or proving he didn't premine by including the newspaper headline in the genesis block. - Really good picks of crypto primitives off the beaten path. e.g. at the time, sha-1 was more popular and has since fallen apart, the same with the more popular elliptic curves. - Even just the script system is interesting to include in a v1 like Bitcoin. You'd expect most of us HNers to just hardcode a pay-to-pub/privkey system, not detour with a script system. - Obsession with compression. Made his own lil compressed floating point spec. How many people would include their own FP compression to save a few bits in a v1? Especially when it just saves like one byte per block. Usually the sort of programmer who goes down these paths isn't the one shipping software. - World-class opsec. I mean, c'mon. We're still left to folk-theory and superstitions about who Satoshi could be. Never let his guard down. No one has caught him not using Tor. Even bought his domains with cash in the mail. People doing some of the most illegal things in the world couldn't be bothered to go to half of his measures. It's mind-bending. Text analysis hasn't even found good matches on his writing or programming style. All for a project that was overwhelmingly likely to get zero traction. It's like the project was partially compelled by a time traveler from the future. - Though there are fuck ups too in Bitcoin, like the sequence number in transaction input. Has no point, an idea that didn't pan out. It's hard to have a real theory here. Mine is that Satoshi was a pet project that someone with some political capital at NSA or something was able to get funded for a couple years. Either way, the mysterious origin story is exactly what a project like Bitcoin needs and deserves, I think. It's hard to imagine any other origin being quite as compelling.
- cat199 6y ago
  > at the time, sha-1 was more popular but also had known limitations; the 'writing was on the wall' at the time that it would be obsolete 'soon' by most people reasonably up to date on the current state of the art - I wouldn't take this as too much of a 'sign' on its own.

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

Some other interesting bits, to me: - Bitcoin (and the remarkably-written whitepaper) does enough things right that it's hard to imagine a single programmer delivering that whole package (writing, math, cryptography, programming). Calling it enthusiast or hobbyist level work really downplays it. - Great attention to detail, like base58 and the checksum (even Ethereum years later went with hex and no checksum like most people would). Or proving he didn't premine by including the newspaper headline in the genesis block. - Really good picks of crypto primitives off the beaten path. e.g. at the time, sha-1 was more popular and has since fallen apart, the same with the more popular elliptic curves. - Even just the script system is interesting to include in a v1 like Bitcoin. You'd expect most of us HNers to just hardcode a pay-to-pub/privkey system, not detour with a script system. - Obsession with compression. Made his own lil compressed floating point spec. How many people would include their own FP compression to save a few bits in a v1? Especially when it just saves like one byte per block. Usually the sort of programmer who goes down these paths isn't the one shipping software. - World-class opsec. I mean, c'mon. We're still left to folk-theory and superstitions about who Satoshi could be. Never let his guard down. No one has caught him not using Tor. Even bought his domains with cash in the mail. People doing some of the most illegal things in the world couldn't be bothered to go to half of his measures. It's mind-bending. Text analysis hasn't even found good matches on his writing or programming style. All for a project that was overwhelmingly likely to get zero traction. It's like the project was partially compelled by a time traveler from the future. - Though there are fuck ups too in Bitcoin, like the sequence number in transaction input. Has no point, an idea that didn't pan out. It's hard to have a real theory here. Mine is that Satoshi was a pet project that someone with some political capital at NSA or something was able to get funded for a couple years. Either way, the mysterious origin story is exactly what a project like Bitcoin needs and deserves, I think. It's hard to imagine any other origin being quite as compelling.

cat199 6y ago
> at the time, sha-1 was more popular but also had known limitations; the 'writing was on the wall' at the time that it would be obsolete 'soon' by most people reasonably up to date on the current state of the art - I wouldn't take this as too much of a 'sign' on its own.