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This is so bizarre. For those that aren't aware, Craig Steven Wright has publicly claimed to be Satoshi but failed to provide cryptographic proof as such, and

This is so bizarre. For those that aren't aware, Craig Steven Wright has publicly claimed to be Satoshi but failed to provide cryptographic proof as such, and uses his supposed identity as Satoshi to justify having a bunch of sketchily-acquired Bitcoin (I forget the full details here, it's been years). Even someone without much prior knowledge should be able to trivially deduce that this guy is a fraud: - The real Satoshi (assuming they're one individual as CSW is essentially implying) took care to maintain their anonymity, and is almost certainly aware that they would be the target of intelligence agencies around the world, in addition to your more run-of-the-mill "let's kidnap this guy and force him to transfer his enormous wealth to us" criminals. So releasing his identity publicly would be just painting a massive target on his back. - If Satoshi ever did want to reveal themselves, they would do it in a cryptographically undeniable way (moving coins from their wallet or signing a message with a known keypair of theirs). Also, given they dedicated at least a huge chunk of their life to giving birth to Bitcoin, which unified a bunch of cryptographic primitives and Austrian-economics type theories into a system that found the right balance of technology and economic incentives to be viable, they wouldn't be issuing frivolous lawsuits and trying to get their (anonymously distributed, freely released) whitepaper pulled from websites. - The fact that Bitcoin Core would even consider taking the whitepaper down is lunacy. Note: There's a (mostly) unrelated whole dramatic history of the great Bitcoin fork, where Bitcoin split into BTC and BCH. Supporters of BTC believe it's the one true bitcoin, and likewise for BCH. Personally, since I actually have used bitcoin as a currency, I'm team BCH because BCH is the fork that increased the blocksize limit, which was arbitrarily limiting the global transaction rate to a level so small that it led to fees in the $20-80 range at its worst (and the way BTC works is the fees are related to the bytes in the blockchain, not the amount of bitcoin itself transferred, so you'd pay an $80 fee on a $5 tx just as much as a $500 one). That transaction fee insanity was also necessary for Blockstream (a private company supporting the BTC side of the fork) to be able to profit off the delta between an idealized $0 tx fee and the actual $80+ fees, by creating systems like the lightning network which basically reinvents the whole credit card system in Bitcoin and moves transactions off chain, which as far as I'm concerned misses the point and destroys the value completely. I'm only mentioning all this because at least at one point, CSW threw his support behind BCH, which was unfortunate because now you have an actual fraud backing the coin which was actually the better coin, but made it appear like a total joke. Lastly, it's worth mentioning that even though this guy is a charlatan and fraud, he has some ideas that aren't bunk. He had a fairly compelling paper that argued that Bitcoin's proof-of-work model was not some inefficient, climate-change-inducing wasteful system, but rather was a system that incentivized private firms to invest in the security of the network (resistance to double-spend, etc). I believe that paper was this one for the curious: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2993312 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2993312

arcticbull 6y ago
The real satoshi is probably Paul Le Roux, and currently in federal prison. > He had a fairly compelling paper that argued that Bitcoin's proof-of-work model was not some inefficient, climate-change-inducing wasteful system, but rather was a system that incentivized private firms to invest in the security of the network (resistance to double-spend, etc). Well that’s obviously and trivially wrong so... I mean you can’t pretend away one Chile of electricity use to play multiplayer excel.
- yao420 6y ago
  Not a chance, all the evidence for theory that is very weak and circumstantial.
- benlivengood 6y ago
  > Well that’s obviously and trivially wrong so... I mean you can’t pretend away one Chile of electricity use to play multiplayer excel. It's horribly wasteful now. As the block reward decays it may transition to being less wasteful; it depends on how high transaction fees rise. Last time I tried to work it out the total electrical+transaction fee cost of bitcoin compared to spend volume (not including obvious change to self) was at about 1%. Almost comparable to current credit/debit network overhead, probably a lot more expensive than interbank transfer.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Currently about $80 of electricity and goes into each transaction, which is socialized across all holders as inflation. It’s this incentive which keeps miners mining. Once the reward drops to zero, transaction fees will be born directly by parties to the transaction and will have to be high enough to stave off a 51% attack directly.
    - paulgb 6y ago
      > Once the reward drops to zero, transaction fees will be born directly by parties to the transaction and will have to be high enough to stave off a 51% attack directly. This is something I don’t see talked about much, but the asymptotic state of Bitcoin when mining fees are zero is interesting to think about. It’s not obvious to me that the economic incentives against running a 51% attack will exist in the “terminal” stage of Bitcoin in the way that they do in the “inflationary” (positive mining reward) stage.

arcticbull 6y ago

The real satoshi is probably Paul Le Roux, and currently in federal prison. > He had a fairly compelling paper that argued that Bitcoin's proof-of-work model was not some inefficient, climate-change-inducing wasteful system, but rather was a system that incentivized private firms to invest in the security of the network (resistance to double-spend, etc). Well that’s obviously and trivially wrong so... I mean you can’t pretend away one Chile of electricity use to play multiplayer excel.

yao420 6y ago
Not a chance, all the evidence for theory that is very weak and circumstantial.
benlivengood 6y ago
> Well that’s obviously and trivially wrong so... I mean you can’t pretend away one Chile of electricity use to play multiplayer excel. It's horribly wasteful now. As the block reward decays it may transition to being less wasteful; it depends on how high transaction fees rise. Last time I tried to work it out the total electrical+transaction fee cost of bitcoin compared to spend volume (not including obvious change to self) was at about 1%. Almost comparable to current credit/debit network overhead, probably a lot more expensive than interbank transfer.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Currently about $80 of electricity and goes into each transaction, which is socialized across all holders as inflation. It’s this incentive which keeps miners mining. Once the reward drops to zero, transaction fees will be born directly by parties to the transaction and will have to be high enough to stave off a 51% attack directly.
  - paulgb 6y ago
    > Once the reward drops to zero, transaction fees will be born directly by parties to the transaction and will have to be high enough to stave off a 51% attack directly. This is something I don’t see talked about much, but the asymptotic state of Bitcoin when mining fees are zero is interesting to think about. It’s not obvious to me that the economic incentives against running a 51% attack will exist in the “terminal” stage of Bitcoin in the way that they do in the “inflationary” (positive mining reward) stage.