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The Bitcoin Crypto-Currency Mystery Reopened (2011)

19 points by dsrguru 13y ago

kylelibra 13y ago
Before you write this off as old news, it features a lengthy update from May 2013.
- dsrguru 13y ago
  Yeah I wish the HN mods didn't change my title. Saying it's from 2011, or that the mystery is now reopened, doesn't do the article justice. It provides highly compelling evidence for the exact identification of Satoshi Nakamoto, most of the tech public is not aware of this hypothesis, and the oddity of the responses in the May 2013 update, if anything, suggest the story really has legs.
- sp332 13y ago
  Sorry but where is the update? I just see a correction about a LinkedIn profile.
  - dsrguru 13y ago
    Oh good pick-up. Only the correction was May 2013. But no update, i.e. no new information that refutes this hypothesis, is if anything an indicator that this isn't "old news" and is a promising hypothesis that has yet to gain currency (pardon the pun).
betterunix 13y ago
I do not think it is unbelievable that a cryptographer would not have heard of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is just not that interesting to cryptography researchers or professionals; there is a polynomial time attack (for a vague notion of what it means to attack Bitcoin), no security definition, and a requirement that the honest parties scale their work with the work done by the attacker. It is almost certainly not the case that Bitcoin was created by an expert cryptographer or by a team of experts; one need not look any further than the original Bitcoin paper to see why (no references to previous work on digital cash? no reference to security multiparty computation? an expert cryptographer would most likely have mentioned at least some related work).
- mindslight 13y ago
  > requirement that the honest parties scale their work with the work done by the attacker You're always repeating this as if it's an indictment. But you're applying the cryptography standard (comfortable asymptotic complexity results) to a coordination problem. If you aren't willing to use trusted (untrustable :P) third parties, something else has to define authority. And control of this will always be a struggle between competing groups, whether it's minor disagreements on protocol, or full fledged slash-and-burn attackers. (And I say this as someone who thinks Bitcoin is an unfortunate distraction).
  - betterunix 13y ago
    What you are saying is not true. It is possible in other settings to create fully decentralized protocols that are secure even if all but one of the parties is malicious (i.e. the attacker can control all but one of the parties in the system). Those protocols are secure in the cryptographic sense: the attacker's effort grows exponentially with the work done by the honest parties (even if there is only one honest party). The issue with Bitcoin is not a coordination problem. Sure there is a team of developers who act as a central authority in Bitcoin, but that's irrelevant; some other person can implement Bitcoin. The problem is fundamental and inherent in Bitcoin's design. Ignoring the poorly formed notion of "security" in Bitcoin, at a high level the work needed to attack Bitcoin scales linearly with the work needed to run Bitcoin, regardless of the implementation details. That is not a coordination problem, it is a fundamental problem in the design of Bitcoin.
    - mindslight 13y ago
      I'm using coordination problem in purely technical protocols sense. Can you be specific about which other decentralized protocols you're referring to? I agree that many protocols fit your description, but I can't see how any of them could be both partition-tolerant and prevent conflicting transactions (double spends in this case). It seems like partitions lead to honest disagreements about what happened first, and these are indistinguishable from an attacker. To reconcile these disagreements, we need some majority-metric so both sides can agree which one wins out.
kintamanimatt 13y ago
Why would the creator want to remain anonymous?

19 points by dsrguru 13y ago

kylelibra 13y ago

Before you write this off as old news, it features a lengthy update from May 2013.

dsrguru 13y ago
Yeah I wish the HN mods didn't change my title. Saying it's from 2011, or that the mystery is now reopened, doesn't do the article justice. It provides highly compelling evidence for the exact identification of Satoshi Nakamoto, most of the tech public is not aware of this hypothesis, and the oddity of the responses in the May 2013 update, if anything, suggest the story really has legs.
sp332 13y ago
Sorry but where is the update? I just see a correction about a LinkedIn profile.
- dsrguru 13y ago
  Oh good pick-up. Only the correction was May 2013. But no update, i.e. no new information that refutes this hypothesis, is if anything an indicator that this isn't "old news" and is a promising hypothesis that has yet to gain currency (pardon the pun).

betterunix 13y ago

I do not think it is unbelievable that a cryptographer would not have heard of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is just not that interesting to cryptography researchers or professionals; there is a polynomial time attack (for a vague notion of what it means to attack Bitcoin), no security definition, and a requirement that the honest parties scale their work with the work done by the attacker. It is almost certainly not the case that Bitcoin was created by an expert cryptographer or by a team of experts; one need not look any further than the original Bitcoin paper to see why (no references to previous work on digital cash? no reference to security multiparty computation? an expert cryptographer would most likely have mentioned at least some related work).

mindslight 13y ago
> requirement that the honest parties scale their work with the work done by the attacker You're always repeating this as if it's an indictment. But you're applying the cryptography standard (comfortable asymptotic complexity results) to a coordination problem. If you aren't willing to use trusted (untrustable :P) third parties, something else has to define authority. And control of this will always be a struggle between competing groups, whether it's minor disagreements on protocol, or full fledged slash-and-burn attackers. (And I say this as someone who thinks Bitcoin is an unfortunate distraction).
- betterunix 13y ago
  What you are saying is not true. It is possible in other settings to create fully decentralized protocols that are secure even if all but one of the parties is malicious (i.e. the attacker can control all but one of the parties in the system). Those protocols are secure in the cryptographic sense: the attacker's effort grows exponentially with the work done by the honest parties (even if there is only one honest party). The issue with Bitcoin is not a coordination problem. Sure there is a team of developers who act as a central authority in Bitcoin, but that's irrelevant; some other person can implement Bitcoin. The problem is fundamental and inherent in Bitcoin's design. Ignoring the poorly formed notion of "security" in Bitcoin, at a high level the work needed to attack Bitcoin scales linearly with the work needed to run Bitcoin, regardless of the implementation details. That is not a coordination problem, it is a fundamental problem in the design of Bitcoin.
  - mindslight 13y ago
    I'm using coordination problem in purely technical protocols sense. Can you be specific about which other decentralized protocols you're referring to? I agree that many protocols fit your description, but I can't see how any of them could be both partition-tolerant and prevent conflicting transactions (double spends in this case). It seems like partitions lead to honest disagreements about what happened first, and these are indistinguishable from an attacker. To reconcile these disagreements, we need some majority-metric so both sides can agree which one wins out.

kintamanimatt 13y ago

Why would the creator want to remain anonymous?