4 ms·

This is almost certainly wrong. If you spend any time at all reading about history of Bitcoin and other related currencies, it's clear that Satoshi was a cyphe

by clarkm 13y ago

This is almost certainly wrong. If you spend any time at all reading about history of Bitcoin and other related currencies, it's clear that Satoshi was a cypherpunk. And at least an active lurker, if not a well-known participant, in the cypherpunks mailing list during the 1990s and early 2000s. Just look at the sources in the bitcoin paper. Satoshi cites lots of cypherpunks, and not many mainstream academics. The code borrows time-stamping ideas from Usenet and takes inspiration from command-and-control architectures of IRC botnets. The pieces of the puzzle are: - (1997) Adam Back's hashcash proof of work system - (1998) Wei Dai's b-money - (1998-2005) Nick Szabo's writings about git gold - (2004) Hal Finney's reusable proof of work (RPOW) Satoshi brought these ideas -- cypherpunk ideas -- together to make Bitcoin, not the ideas about improving Chaumian blind signatures and anonymous e-cash that were being discussed in the academic crypto literature of the time. Remember, cypherpunks (and others inspired by Tim May's crypto-anarchy) have a long history of communicating anonymously. Anonymous remailers and pseudonyms were expected on the list, so it's not unusual to see Satoshi Nakamoto come out of this tradition. There are probably people that know who the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, but they're not going to tell. They're cypherpunks, after all. And if Satoshi stays anonymous, it just means that everything is going exactly as planned.

kanzure 13y ago
Here are some emails and headers that you might be interested in: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/ http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/ phrases: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/phrases.txt http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/phrases.txt He might be one of these people: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/p2p-research-members.txt http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/p2p-research-mem... Here are some forum posts timestamps: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/datetimes.yaml http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/datetimes.yaml I also feel it is necessary to point out that it is completely possible to spoof forum posts to match his writing style and C++ idioms. So there might be someone posing as a "second satoshi" waiting to be discovered by phrase analysis. This is one of the vulnerabilities of his pseudonym. Happy hacking.
- clicks 13y ago
  Wait, what, why are you guys ascribing so much importance to the dating format? yyyy-mm-dd is the format I've been using for a long, long time, and I have no affiliation with cypherpunks nor have I ever had any. I know a lot of non-programmers who use it too. It's just a good, solid, sensical time format (largest to smallest, just like we already tell time: hh:mm:ss). I think I first came across the idea of using it in everyday situations like 5 years ago on some gaming forums. You should all use it too, because it just makes too much sense. :) No, seriously, please start using yyyy-mm-dd whenever wherever you can. It is most especially useful when you're doing text analysis, makes life very easy there.
  - clarkm 13y ago
    It's so people can guess what time zone he's in! Casual analysis points to "not Japan".
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - kanzure 13y ago
    Well, no. The file "datetimes.yaml" contains a list of serialized ISO 8601 timestamps because that's how you represent timestamps in yaml. These timestamps represent the different timestamps that bitcointalk.org gives to the posts made by the Satoshi pseudonym. I am not implying that anyone who uses ISO 8601 might be Satoshi. Rather, I am providing you with a list of timestamps in ISO 8601 format. I am making no claims about how Satoshi tends to write timestamps (and I don't remember if I even looked at that, I think I got bored). These timestamps can be used to determine which timezone he is a member of, or which timezone he wanted you to think he was a member of, or to compare against other email headers. For example, I would love to compare this data against a historically-accurate cypherpunk email archive. (I do not have one at the moment.) However, he could have written some small amount of software to delay the posts he wrote to the forum, but some of them look very timely. He could also have written software to delay the times that his posts were posted, to make it sync up with the timestamps of another cypherpunk member (which would be hilarious and evil). I think a more thorough analysis would have to look at each individual Satoshi forum post and determine whether or not it was written "probably delayed", because sometimes the delta between the post he wrote and the post he was replying to was very tiny, which would improve the chances that he was not on a delay timer (unless he spoofed all questions he replied to, which I also doubt).
rdl 13y ago
Ian Grigg's Ricardo system (1990s to present) also belongs on the list of precursors due to smart contracts, non blinded pseudonyms, etc.
- clarkm 13y ago
  Yes, good point! Satoshi was definitely familiar with discussions of smart contracts and smart property. You can see this in the design of Bitcoin transaction scripts. While most of the opcodes were disabled in late 2012 due to security concerns, the overall design shows some incredible forethought.
rdl 13y ago
This article seems reasonable: http://qz.com/86255/the-mysterious-creator-of-bitcoin-could-be-japanese-mathematician-shinichi-mochizuki-says-the-inventor-of-hypertext/ http://qz.com/86255/the-mysterious-creator-of-bitcoin-could-...
- codezero 13y ago
  Of course it does, they quoted you! :)
socrates1024 13y ago
Satoshi didn't cite it, but the Byzantine consensus protocol underlying Bitcoin is very similar to a paper: - (2005) Aspnes and Jackson. Exposing Computationally Challenged Byzantine Impostors. Yale Tech Report. http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/papers/tr1332.pdf http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/papers/tr1332.pdf This is (more) evidence that Satoshi isn't a distributed systems academic.
hucker 13y ago
Where are these cypherpunk mailing lists? Is there any where I can subscribe?
- tjaerv 13y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk#Cypherpunk_mailing_list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk#Cypherpunk_mailing_l...

by clarkm 13y ago

kanzure 13y ago

Here are some emails and headers that you might be interested in: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/ http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/ phrases: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/phrases.txt http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/phrases.txt He might be one of these people: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/p2p-research-members.txt http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/p2p-research-mem... Here are some forum posts timestamps: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/datetimes.yaml http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/datetimes.yaml I also feel it is necessary to point out that it is completely possible to spoof forum posts to match his writing style and C++ idioms. So there might be someone posing as a "second satoshi" waiting to be discovered by phrase analysis. This is one of the vulnerabilities of his pseudonym. Happy hacking.

clicks 13y ago
Wait, what, why are you guys ascribing so much importance to the dating format? yyyy-mm-dd is the format I've been using for a long, long time, and I have no affiliation with cypherpunks nor have I ever had any. I know a lot of non-programmers who use it too. It's just a good, solid, sensical time format (largest to smallest, just like we already tell time: hh:mm:ss). I think I first came across the idea of using it in everyday situations like 5 years ago on some gaming forums. You should all use it too, because it just makes too much sense. :) No, seriously, please start using yyyy-mm-dd whenever wherever you can. It is most especially useful when you're doing text analysis, makes life very easy there.
- clarkm 13y ago
  It's so people can guess what time zone he's in! Casual analysis points to "not Japan".
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- kanzure 13y ago
  Well, no. The file "datetimes.yaml" contains a list of serialized ISO 8601 timestamps because that's how you represent timestamps in yaml. These timestamps represent the different timestamps that bitcointalk.org gives to the posts made by the Satoshi pseudonym. I am not implying that anyone who uses ISO 8601 might be Satoshi. Rather, I am providing you with a list of timestamps in ISO 8601 format. I am making no claims about how Satoshi tends to write timestamps (and I don't remember if I even looked at that, I think I got bored). These timestamps can be used to determine which timezone he is a member of, or which timezone he wanted you to think he was a member of, or to compare against other email headers. For example, I would love to compare this data against a historically-accurate cypherpunk email archive. (I do not have one at the moment.) However, he could have written some small amount of software to delay the posts he wrote to the forum, but some of them look very timely. He could also have written software to delay the times that his posts were posted, to make it sync up with the timestamps of another cypherpunk member (which would be hilarious and evil). I think a more thorough analysis would have to look at each individual Satoshi forum post and determine whether or not it was written "probably delayed", because sometimes the delta between the post he wrote and the post he was replying to was very tiny, which would improve the chances that he was not on a delay timer (unless he spoofed all questions he replied to, which I also doubt).

rdl 13y ago

Ian Grigg's Ricardo system (1990s to present) also belongs on the list of precursors due to smart contracts, non blinded pseudonyms, etc.

clarkm 13y ago
Yes, good point! Satoshi was definitely familiar with discussions of smart contracts and smart property. You can see this in the design of Bitcoin transaction scripts. While most of the opcodes were disabled in late 2012 due to security concerns, the overall design shows some incredible forethought.

rdl 13y ago

This article seems reasonable: http://qz.com/86255/the-mysterious-creator-of-bitcoin-could-be-japanese-mathematician-shinichi-mochizuki-says-the-inventor-of-hypertext/ http://qz.com/86255/the-mysterious-creator-of-bitcoin-could-...

codezero 13y ago
Of course it does, they quoted you! :)

socrates1024 13y ago

Satoshi didn't cite it, but the Byzantine consensus protocol underlying Bitcoin is very similar to a paper: - (2005) Aspnes and Jackson. Exposing Computationally Challenged Byzantine Impostors. Yale Tech Report. http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/papers/tr1332.pdf http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/papers/tr1332.pdf This is (more) evidence that Satoshi isn't a distributed systems academic.

hucker 13y ago

Where are these cypherpunk mailing lists? Is there any where I can subscribe?

tjaerv 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk#Cypherpunk_mailing_list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk#Cypherpunk_mailing_l...