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> As a result, most of the decisions that Satoshi Nakamoto made in 2008 we are essentially stuck with. Every single time I read something about what 'Satoshi N

> As a result, most of the decisions that Satoshi Nakamoto made in 2008 we are essentially stuck with. Every single time I read something about what 'Satoshi Nakamoto' did in designing, implementing and securing Bitcoin, I grow more skeptical that one person, or even a small group of people, created Bitcoin. It is very difficult to believe that something this sophisticated was developed by anyone other than a well financed, possibly nation-state backed organisation. This article suggests that Bitcoin was made difficult or impossible to fork by-design, which implies that the creator doesn't want to allow anyone to seize control of Bitcoin. Paradoxically, the more you learn about Bitcoin, the more mysterious it becomes. Who would go through all that trouble to create it? What can they gain from Bitcoin's existence?

mrb 13y ago
I think Bitcoin has been designed by a single person. The source code alone of version 0.1.0 was not very complex, see my post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6561079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6561079 And most of the crytographic choices are logical and could have been taken by a person reasonably well-educated in computer security and cryptography who pays attention to details. This is my opinion as a pentester / IT security researcher / developer with experience in cryptography. "This article suggests that Bitcoin was made difficult or impossible to fork by-design, which implies that the creator doesn't want to allow anyone to seize control of Bitcoin." Well, source code is easy to change and fork. But because this would create a fork in the block chain, you would end up with a different Bitcoin network that does not recognize transactions of the original Bitcoin network. "Who would go through all that trouble to create it?" Version 0.1.0 is only 13k lines of code. "What can they gain from Bitcoin's existence?" Someone wanted to experiment with his ideas about a revolutionary peer-to-peer currency/payment network, and maybe hoped to inspire others with his creation? Some people enjoy experimenting with cool ideas just for the heck of it. What was Linus Torvalds thinking he would gain from writing the first version of Linux? Anyway, the success of Bitcoin so far is probably beyond what Satoshi envisioned as probable (although he may have seen it as possible).
- throwhalloween 13y ago
  If there was one concrete point relevant to Satoshi Nakamoto's identity, especially that it is absolutely _not_ a single person, it's what he has never done... Not that nobody else has found him out (definitely possible/plausible, and some people claim to have successfully used web tracking bugs to get an IP). Satoshi Nakamoto: 1. never publicly claimed any credit for the idea of bitcoin... think about it, he doesn't claim he invented the idea, he just put it forward and kind of said, what if... ? 2. never spent or moved his massive holdings of BTC which are easy to identify because they are some of the oldest blocks in the blockchain 3. never exercised his power to shape bitcoin, especially after the end of 2011 - aside from code contributions and that doesn't count since everyone involved can think about it and decide to accept it or not - each code contribution is a potential fork so don't underestimate the care taken on the official bitcoin client 4. never slipped up and revealed his identity or even his _timezone_ ! That's a preponderance of evidence to me. I'll understand if you're not convinced but this is the kind of PR management that a single person just can't pull off! What can they gain from Bitcoin's existence? Only all the economic benefits from a _viable_ digital currency. All previous attempts at digital currency are weak in comparison. And currency market manipulation is by far the most profitable game, like that even needed to be said. Who would go through all that trouble? In a world where a US Agency (NSA) has successfully tapped almost the entire internet, maybe it's time to accept that this kind of advanced planning is within reach. It helps to point out some common misconceptions about Bitcoin. Bitcoin does not guarantee anonymity, despite the p2p elements of the protocol - far from it. Bitcoin is much more flexible than you think, for example the "1" prefix on all addresses currently. Bitcoin does not have to succeed or last forever, the idea has been planted and isn't going away. All markets are a mix of manipulation and organic behavior. Factor that into your plans and Bitcoin makes a lot more sense. - posted anonymously
  - mrb 13y ago
    I'd say points #1 through #4 promote the theory that Satoshi is a single person. The more persons would be behind the Satoshi identity, the more chances there would be for mistakes or leaks: one of them spending/stealing the BTC, one of them boasting about the secret Bitcoin project, or revealing it while intoxicated at a party, etc.
snitko 13y ago
So how come Bitcoin is so fundamentally opposed to the concept of state and regulations then? Doesn't make any sense. Where's the catch?
- vbuterin 13y ago
  The same way Tor is fundamentally opposed to the concept of regulations on speech but is still funded ~60% by the US military. The US government sees the cost of itself losing some control as worth it to deny China control.
gd1 13y ago
>very difficult to believe that something this sophisticated was developed by anyone other than a well financed, possibly nation-state backed organisation. Hilarious. A "well financed, nation-state backed organisation" just gave us the Obamacare website.
- throwhalloween 13y ago
  The same nation-state successfully operates the largest military organization in the world without accidentally detonating any nuclear bombs. It doesn't all have to be ACA websites.
  - npongratz 13y ago
    > The same nation-state successfully operates the largest military organization in the world without accidentally detonating any nuclear bombs. But this same large military organization did come "dramatically close", as "only one low-voltage switch" prevented what would have been an atomic explosion in North Carolina in 1961: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bomb-north-carolina-1961 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bom...
  - drcode 13y ago
    Hey- I haven't accidentally set off any nuclear bombs yet, either! Am I awesome, or what? I should add that as a bullet on my resume: - Hasn't accidentally set off any nuclear bombs.
betterunix 13y ago
"Every single time I read something about what 'Satoshi Nakamoto' did in designing, implementing and securing Bitcoin, I grow more skeptical that one person, or even a small group of people, created Bitcoin. It is very difficult to believe that something this sophisticated was developed by anyone other than a well financed, possibly nation-state backed organisation." Really, you think Bitcoin is that sophisticated? Can you even point to any clearly stated requirements, constraints, or security definition? The original Bitcoin paper did not even describe the system well enough for someone else to implement it; half the specification of the data formats was in the code itself. Nevermind the bad design; the original Bitcoin paper somehow failed to mention or even hint at (or even use the concepts from) the massive body of related work. All the evidence points to Bitcoin being the work of an amateur, just one hobbyist who hacked together a system based on an idea he had. My guess is that it was a college student who was fascinated by cryptography and had read a few books. This is not necessarily bad -- the same is true of the Linux kernel, after all -- but to claim that Bitcoin is some kind of highly sophisticated system that must have been the work of a government team is just silly.
conformal 13y ago
i think your suggestion that bitcoin was created by one or more government agencies is a pretty good bet. it could be some other large, shady organization, but the tech is pretty highbrow and uses a lot of crypto. i have been overseeing the development of the alternative full-node bitcoin implementation, btcd, and it seems pretty clear that there was an enormous amount of novelty, insight, planning and countermeasures included in the initial release. it is unlikely that the initial 0.1.0 code was coded by a single person, but it seems pretty obvious that all the comments were removed. without having this post balloon in size, i'll leave you with an interesting scenario: let's say you were a member of some shadowy group and you were tasked with moving funds around the world but you didn't want intelligence services to be able to watch those funds move, e.g. via the SWIFT system. your only alternative is to move funds some other way, using an alternate system. moving physical goods around always carries risks at customs checkpoints and it is slow. this leaves some kind of an electronic value-transfer system. since one of your own group members may be a spy or otherwise untrustworthy, the system must assume everyone is untrustworthy. the obvious way to deal with untrustworthy parties is cryptography. a classic way to pass messages semi-anonymously is to "write on a wall" somewhere that you tell your counterparty to look, but others do not know to check. if you had such a private / closed-loop value transfer system, the only real caveat is settlements in fiat currency, which all "normal" ppl use to settle transactions. if you aggregate these fiat settlements episodically using a fixed exchange rate, it effectively decouples actual meaningful transactions from the fiat transfers, obfuscating the actual transactions.
adamb_ 13y ago
Imagine if it really is just one individual hacker that got extremely lucky (both with Bitcoin's success & maintaining their secret identity)... What must that person be thinking right now?
- Smegger 13y ago
  probably wondering how long until the bitcoin economy is stable enough for him to spend any of his fortune without it immediately collapsing after all he is said to have a truly massive share of the bitcoins produced setting in his wallet.
frezik 13y ago
Design by Committee doesn't give you well-thought-out designs. It gives you crap like WEP and USB, where many competing voices try to drive the design in their own way. In fact, being well-conceived and svelte is evidence that it was just a few very smart people, perhaps just one.

mrb 13y ago

I think Bitcoin has been designed by a single person. The source code alone of version 0.1.0 was not very complex, see my post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6561079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6561079 And most of the crytographic choices are logical and could have been taken by a person reasonably well-educated in computer security and cryptography who pays attention to details. This is my opinion as a pentester / IT security researcher / developer with experience in cryptography. "This article suggests that Bitcoin was made difficult or impossible to fork by-design, which implies that the creator doesn't want to allow anyone to seize control of Bitcoin." Well, source code is easy to change and fork. But because this would create a fork in the block chain, you would end up with a different Bitcoin network that does not recognize transactions of the original Bitcoin network. "Who would go through all that trouble to create it?" Version 0.1.0 is only 13k lines of code. "What can they gain from Bitcoin's existence?" Someone wanted to experiment with his ideas about a revolutionary peer-to-peer currency/payment network, and maybe hoped to inspire others with his creation? Some people enjoy experimenting with cool ideas just for the heck of it. What was Linus Torvalds thinking he would gain from writing the first version of Linux? Anyway, the success of Bitcoin so far is probably beyond what Satoshi envisioned as probable (although he may have seen it as possible).

throwhalloween 13y ago
If there was one concrete point relevant to Satoshi Nakamoto's identity, especially that it is absolutely _not_ a single person, it's what he has never done... Not that nobody else has found him out (definitely possible/plausible, and some people claim to have successfully used web tracking bugs to get an IP). Satoshi Nakamoto: 1. never publicly claimed any credit for the idea of bitcoin... think about it, he doesn't claim he invented the idea, he just put it forward and kind of said, what if... ? 2. never spent or moved his massive holdings of BTC which are easy to identify because they are some of the oldest blocks in the blockchain 3. never exercised his power to shape bitcoin, especially after the end of 2011 - aside from code contributions and that doesn't count since everyone involved can think about it and decide to accept it or not - each code contribution is a potential fork so don't underestimate the care taken on the official bitcoin client 4. never slipped up and revealed his identity or even his _timezone_ ! That's a preponderance of evidence to me. I'll understand if you're not convinced but this is the kind of PR management that a single person just can't pull off! What can they gain from Bitcoin's existence? Only all the economic benefits from a _viable_ digital currency. All previous attempts at digital currency are weak in comparison. And currency market manipulation is by far the most profitable game, like that even needed to be said. Who would go through all that trouble? In a world where a US Agency (NSA) has successfully tapped almost the entire internet, maybe it's time to accept that this kind of advanced planning is within reach. It helps to point out some common misconceptions about Bitcoin. Bitcoin does not guarantee anonymity, despite the p2p elements of the protocol - far from it. Bitcoin is much more flexible than you think, for example the "1" prefix on all addresses currently. Bitcoin does not have to succeed or last forever, the idea has been planted and isn't going away. All markets are a mix of manipulation and organic behavior. Factor that into your plans and Bitcoin makes a lot more sense. - posted anonymously
- mrb 13y ago
  I'd say points #1 through #4 promote the theory that Satoshi is a single person. The more persons would be behind the Satoshi identity, the more chances there would be for mistakes or leaks: one of them spending/stealing the BTC, one of them boasting about the secret Bitcoin project, or revealing it while intoxicated at a party, etc.

snitko 13y ago

So how come Bitcoin is so fundamentally opposed to the concept of state and regulations then? Doesn't make any sense. Where's the catch?

vbuterin 13y ago
The same way Tor is fundamentally opposed to the concept of regulations on speech but is still funded ~60% by the US military. The US government sees the cost of itself losing some control as worth it to deny China control.

gd1 13y ago

>very difficult to believe that something this sophisticated was developed by anyone other than a well financed, possibly nation-state backed organisation. Hilarious. A "well financed, nation-state backed organisation" just gave us the Obamacare website.

throwhalloween 13y ago
The same nation-state successfully operates the largest military organization in the world without accidentally detonating any nuclear bombs. It doesn't all have to be ACA websites.
- npongratz 13y ago
  > The same nation-state successfully operates the largest military organization in the world without accidentally detonating any nuclear bombs. But this same large military organization did come "dramatically close", as "only one low-voltage switch" prevented what would have been an atomic explosion in North Carolina in 1961: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bomb-north-carolina-1961 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bom...
- drcode 13y ago
  Hey- I haven't accidentally set off any nuclear bombs yet, either! Am I awesome, or what? I should add that as a bullet on my resume: - Hasn't accidentally set off any nuclear bombs.

betterunix 13y ago

"Every single time I read something about what 'Satoshi Nakamoto' did in designing, implementing and securing Bitcoin, I grow more skeptical that one person, or even a small group of people, created Bitcoin. It is very difficult to believe that something this sophisticated was developed by anyone other than a well financed, possibly nation-state backed organisation." Really, you think Bitcoin is that sophisticated? Can you even point to any clearly stated requirements, constraints, or security definition? The original Bitcoin paper did not even describe the system well enough for someone else to implement it; half the specification of the data formats was in the code itself. Nevermind the bad design; the original Bitcoin paper somehow failed to mention or even hint at (or even use the concepts from) the massive body of related work. All the evidence points to Bitcoin being the work of an amateur, just one hobbyist who hacked together a system based on an idea he had. My guess is that it was a college student who was fascinated by cryptography and had read a few books. This is not necessarily bad -- the same is true of the Linux kernel, after all -- but to claim that Bitcoin is some kind of highly sophisticated system that must have been the work of a government team is just silly.

conformal 13y ago

i think your suggestion that bitcoin was created by one or more government agencies is a pretty good bet. it could be some other large, shady organization, but the tech is pretty highbrow and uses a lot of crypto. i have been overseeing the development of the alternative full-node bitcoin implementation, btcd, and it seems pretty clear that there was an enormous amount of novelty, insight, planning and countermeasures included in the initial release. it is unlikely that the initial 0.1.0 code was coded by a single person, but it seems pretty obvious that all the comments were removed. without having this post balloon in size, i'll leave you with an interesting scenario: let's say you were a member of some shadowy group and you were tasked with moving funds around the world but you didn't want intelligence services to be able to watch those funds move, e.g. via the SWIFT system. your only alternative is to move funds some other way, using an alternate system. moving physical goods around always carries risks at customs checkpoints and it is slow. this leaves some kind of an electronic value-transfer system. since one of your own group members may be a spy or otherwise untrustworthy, the system must assume everyone is untrustworthy. the obvious way to deal with untrustworthy parties is cryptography. a classic way to pass messages semi-anonymously is to "write on a wall" somewhere that you tell your counterparty to look, but others do not know to check. if you had such a private / closed-loop value transfer system, the only real caveat is settlements in fiat currency, which all "normal" ppl use to settle transactions. if you aggregate these fiat settlements episodically using a fixed exchange rate, it effectively decouples actual meaningful transactions from the fiat transfers, obfuscating the actual transactions.

adamb_ 13y ago

Imagine if it really is just one individual hacker that got extremely lucky (both with Bitcoin's success & maintaining their secret identity)... What must that person be thinking right now?

Smegger 13y ago
probably wondering how long until the bitcoin economy is stable enough for him to spend any of his fortune without it immediately collapsing after all he is said to have a truly massive share of the bitcoins produced setting in his wallet.

frezik 13y ago

Design by Committee doesn't give you well-thought-out designs. It gives you crap like WEP and USB, where many competing voices try to drive the design in their own way. In fact, being well-conceived and svelte is evidence that it was just a few very smart people, perhaps just one.