9 ms·
What Satoshi Did Not Know (2015) [pdf]
- eimrine 3y agoI enjoyed the paper but Satoshi definitely is a cryptographer. Who else can decide to use the double-SHA for not letting to use Blockchain as a source for finding collisions in the SHA.
- makeworld 3y agoPretty sure the accepted justification for double-SHA is to prevent length-extension attacks.
- eimrine 3y agoHow is it possible if a length of input data going to SHA-256 is one of the required inputs for SHA-256?
- adastra22 3y agoYou are correct in general, but all bitcoin data structures are self-synchronized, so length extension is not possible.
- eimrine 3y agoAre you sure he is correct in general? I suppose he supposed the length extension attack not on Bitcoin (because all Bitcoin data are self-synchronized) but on anything else using blockchain as a rainbow-table.
- adastra22 3y agoYes, in general anything being hashed that is subject to length extension ought to be double hashed. And most things are subject to length extension, often in surprising ways. So a good rule of thumb is to always double hash. But in this case, after 15 years of analysis, we can say with confidence that the double hashing bitcoin does is redundant.
- TheBlight 3y agoI don't think they were a cryptographer exactly but someone very familiar with cryptography tools. One of the most interesting aspects of the original code to me is how they lifted the sha256 algorithm from the CryptoPP library when the project already had an OpenSSL dependency.
- mortallywounded 3y agoWas it lifted prior to the dependency on OpenSSL? Perhaps, and never retro-fixed?
- TheBlight 3y agoI suspect the inclusion of just the sha2 file from CryptoPP was the fix. Although I've never benchmarked them, my suspicion is the CryptoPP code outperformed OpenSSL at the time. Having the most optimal implementation would have been critical.
- rib3ye 3y agoWas the “uncesorable money” declaration part of the original vision or marketing tacked on to bitcoin.org? If the former, Satoshi at least thought many governments would try to make it illegal.
- josu 3y agoGiven that Satoshi was moving in cypherpunk circles making bitcoin uncensorable (unlike Liberty Reserve) was probably part of the design. Also, the article is written by Gavin Andresen who join Bitcoin before bitcoin.org really took off.
- bawolff 3y agoI mean kind of a requirement if you are going to be decentralized with no trusted authority.
- lyind 3y agoWhy do so many just assume he'd be a single real person? Could be a whole dev team at a company (Twitter Inc. for example) or a government agency just as well.
- polishdude20 3y agoWhat's the motivation for the secrecy though?
- TheBlight 3y agoIt certainly wasn't clear if what they did would be considered legal or not by all locales. And if the project was successful you wouldn't want to make yourself a potential target. There isn't really much advantage to being famous.
- mortallywounded 3y agoThe motivation? It clearly has roots somewhere in the cypherpunk crew, which was already obsessed with privacy, secrecy, etc.
- TheBlight 3y agoIt's unlikely a large dev team would be able to keep this secret. The code was also very consistent and not that large of a code base. It reads to me very much like a single person wrote it.
- mortallywounded 3y agoNot only was the early code consistent with itself, it was messy as hell and full of "Windows-isms" which reaked of academia/not-a-fulltime-engineer.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TheBlight 3y ago
- mortallywounded 3y agoPersonally, I believe Len Sassaman is the likely candidate for Satoshi. I know the "evidence" is largely circumstantial and coincidental timing... but when you take it all in it's a bit much.
- anonporridge 3y agoRef, https://evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c85c2b10 https://evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c8...
- jobead 3y agoNope, if it's one person, it's gotta be Szabo. Only person in the world who wouldn't cite his work would be himself. (If it's more than one person, of course it could include Len.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bmulcahy 3y agoI vote Hal Finney.
- mortallywounded 3y agoI don't believe Hal was Satoshi (there's no evidence to suggest it), but Bitcoin never would have succeeded without Hal. He deserves as much credit as Satoshi.
- Stevvo 3y agoI find it stunning when people claim Satoshi to be anyone other than Nick Szabo. Any reasonable person sould come to the conclusion that it is him. There is plenty of direct evedence that points to him.
- mortallywounded 3y ago
- kmeisthax 3y ago> But he was wrong about that. The way it bootstrapped was a guy buying a couple of pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins and people taking that leap of faith that it could actually be successful and might be worth a dollar or two at some point in the future No, it was bootstrapped by ransomware companies encrypting your data in order to demand a ransom paid only in Bitcoin. This is how literally all money starts - not as a facilitator of existing economic transactions but as a conduit for imposing coercive taxation. e.g. the US Dollar is money because the US government demands you pay taxes in that currency. The first historical examples of money were invading tyrants and conquerors paying their soldiers in coins they could mint and demanding payment of taxes in the same money. Since the people being subjugated didn't have the coins they needed to pay, they had to sell their useful goods and services to soldiers in exchange for worthless discs of metal that indicated that they had sufficiently funded their oppressor's further military expansion. Ok, sure, that's a nice history fact, but how does that relate to cybercrime? Ransomware vendors can't print Bitcoin! They can, in the same way everyone else does: mining it. Except because we're already breaking into other people's computers to encrypt files, we can also just mine the Bitcoin on their computers that they will later have to buy to pay us. A huge amount of cybercrime is just mining Bitcoin, because you can then sell that Bitcoin - which is free to you - to your victims in exchange for useful goods and services[0]. What Satoshi didn't know is is not would it bootstrap, but how. Money bootstraps not by being more private, more inflation-resistant, or just by being better money, but by the use of coercive force[1]. Bitcoin is objectively worse money than US dollars - there's expensive transaction fees, high confirmation times, price volatility, etc. People use it anyway because they have to - otherwise, the person who broke into their servers is going to either delete or leak all their valuable business data. [0] Ok, yes, US Dollars. [1] This implies the only acceptable economy under the NAP[2] is a barter economy, because barter and payments-in-kind is what people choose to use in contexts where there is no coercion. [2] "Non-aggression principle", a thing right-libertarians like to talk about as if it's so self-evident we don't even need to talk about it.
- midmagico 3y agoThe first payments in bitcoin were not the pizzas. Malmi sold bitcoins for money prior to that. The first people using Bitcoin were not ransomware users; the first bootstrappers were not involved with Silk Road at all. It is quite the insult to those people, many of whom were highly ethical, to insist that their efforts, development, and research were motivated by illegal intent. Mining on broken-into-computers is not possible. Satoshi predicted significantly specialized mining operations, which is exactly what happened. He didn't predict pooling, which happened to be a massive accelerator. Pool mining is also not criminal in nature, intent, nor progress. There is no coercive force in Bitcoin. The use of Bitcoin by people is entirely non-coercive. If ransomware were its only use, and were not merely a parasitic opportunistic drain on Bitcoin momentum, then its overall value would be zero; thus, your assertion that ransomware is some kind of driving force which imparts value to Bitcoin is self-inconsistent on its face.