I 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.
Are 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.
Yes, 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Given 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.
It 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.
Why not? AFAIK, the wallets that are supposed to belong to him have not been touched in a long time. Based on the industry he created, he likely would be a candidate for the Nobel prize in economics.
I think it can safely be assumed that he is dead. Or that he is a person with very little interest in money and fame, which is possible but unlikely. Persons like Grigory Perelman are rare.
He laid the foundation for crypto and blockchain. Hey, anybody still remembering Napster? Nobody uses it anymore. But not because it was bad, it got replaced by better things. Bitcoin not anonymous enough? Try Monero.
I went looking to see what the criteria are for a Nobel prize, as I too think the idea of bitcoin getting one is ridiculous.
I don’t find much - except that the prize in economic sciences isn’t a Nobel prize.
“The prize in economic sciences is not a Nobel Prize. In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden’s central bank) instituted “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”, and it has since been awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences according to the same principles as for the Nobel Prizes.”
Well, it is a multibillion dollar industry. And it is my understanding that he did not only invent crypto currencies but also the blockchain. While extremely inefficient from a database viewpoint, many many companies are throwing cash on it because they see potential in industry, finance, legal etc.
It enabled a lot of new markets and revitalized some old ones: ransomware, drug trading, kidnapping, CSAM trade, and even international sanctions busting.
It'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.
I disagree somewhat. I don't think it was that messy. It wasn't the most modern C++ code but it was written by an experienced programmer and IMO not likely an academic. Most academics would be likely to code for a Mac or UNIX environment while commercial coders would be more likely to work in Windows.
Or, a person that was born in the US and educated in the UK, big into cryptography and the cipherpunk mailing list and often mixed up spellings on social media.. like I dunno, Len Sassaman.
There were plenty of other oddities.. like the skeleton for a poker game in the code? Maybe a test for the digital currency? Maybe underlying motivation? Maybe... who knows.
We definitely use a mix of US/UK spellings in Canada. This gets further reinforced when you work a lot with a particular spelling (eg. we use spell 'colour' with the 'u' but every graphics library / css / etc use 'color' so its a toss up on which one I actually type)
No it wasn't-- it was highly portable. (unless you are just referring to the hungarian notation variable names, which is by no means unique to windows).
It looked nothing like academic C++. It was also very small. Some people accuse it for being "messy" because it was highly coupled and non-modular. But that would have been premature and would have increased the size and complexity dramatically. Its lack of modularity was mostly reasonable for its level of complexity, and had Satoshi tried to make it modular he probably would have created boundaries that would have needed to be thrown out later.
When I first got into Bitcoin I just read all the code. I know plenty of other people did too, that wouldn't have been half as reasonable had had been broken into a lot of parts with interfaces between them.
The metadata of how Satoshi operated suggests living in Europe at the time.
However, a government agency with extreme competency and desire to keep their involvement secret could spoof this, as well as spoof looking like an individual.
But Occam's Razor pushes me to believe it was just a single dude who happened to get enough things right to produce an escape velocity money protocol.
Are people assuming? Or are they just not speculating about cardinality and sticking to the identifier they have? Would you expect people in the DC universe who don't know about Bruce Wayne refer to sightings as batmen? They can't know!
One thing that suggests a single author (but certainly no proof) is the continued secrecy: bigger group means higher probability of a leak (accidental as much as deliberate). In a way, the probability of an author group is sinking over time, because "unexposed for n years" and "unexposed for n+1 years" aren't the same observation.
There is zero chance that a whole team and management above them would have been able to keep this secret for this long with this much attention on it. And there is no reason to believe a single person could not do the things Satoshi did.
Even a single person would have continued communication as Satoshi if they were able to, as their life's work became an incredible success. No, Satoshi was a single person who is no longer able to communicate because they are dead. And there are several good candidates who meet that description.
Personally I'm a fan of the "butler did it" theory, i.e. Hal Finney, who indeed died at the right time.
Personally, 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.
Nope, 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.)
I 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.
I 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.
There's very little circumstantial evidence pointing to Szabo (there is some). I understand why you believe it to be Szabo. He has the skill set and history in that problem domain... but there's far more circumstantial evidence pointing to someone like Len.
None that I am aware of... I have spent more hours than I'd like to admit looking into different candidates and putting my own OSINT skills to the test. Perhaps I should create a wiki!
> Here is Szabo last post about Bitgold before he renamed it to Bitcoin;
Come to think about it, this Bit gold -> Bitcoin renaming theory would also explain why miners are called miners in Bitcoin. "Minters" (with a t) would be a much more logical name if you started with the coin analogy from the beginning.
I've thought about it, but he could have felt that way about the illegal side of it and things going on... plus there's nothing anonymous about Bitcoin so the idea of it being inherent in Bitcoin IS stupid.
Plus, what would you expect him to do? Praise it and point everyone towards it? :p
> 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.
The 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.
Why not? If I have enough access to machine in order to get an (asymmetric) encryption key off of a server, encrypt all your files with it, and delete the originals, why can't I also warm the CPU for the few days it takes for my victim to buy Bitcoin? It doesn't matter if the returns are awful because the hardware I'm mining on was stolen (thus free).
>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.
Malmi, the "Bitcoin pizza guy", Satoshi, and everyone else in the legit side of Bitcoin are not the targets of my original post and I don't believe they had any illegal motivations. They just had the wrong priors, and accidentally built something that's enormously useful for criminals looking to build a parallel state.
> The use of Bitcoin by people is entirely non-coercive.
The use of the word "entirely" is dangerous to you. Because the mere existence of a ransomware program demanding Bitcoin - and there are a lot of them - lets me be cheeky and refute your argument.
If you want to argue that there are substantial non-coercive uses of Bitcoin, sure. I don't believe they're big enough to sustain Bitcoin's current or prior valuations.
> If ransomware were its only use, and were not merely a parasitic opportunistic drain on Bitcoin momentum, then its overall value would be zero;
Having to buy Bitcoin to pay ransom puts upward pressure on Bitcoin prices. It's not a drain on adoption, it's a booster of it, because a LOT of organizations get hacked and have to use Bitcoin to pay ransoms.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadBut in this case, after 15 years of analysis, we can say with confidence that the double hashing bitcoin does is redundant.
If the former, Satoshi at least thought many governments would try to make it illegal.
Could be a whole dev team at a company (Twitter Inc. for example) or a government agency just as well.
I think it can safely be assumed that he is dead. Or that he is a person with very little interest in money and fame, which is possible but unlikely. Persons like Grigory Perelman are rare.
I don’t find much - except that the prize in economic sciences isn’t a Nobel prize.
“The prize in economic sciences is not a Nobel Prize. In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden’s central bank) instituted “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”, and it has since been awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences according to the same principles as for the Nobel Prizes.”
https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/economic-sciences/
https://cointelegraph.com/news/volkswagen-pilots-blockchain-...
https://www.cbinsights.com/research/blockchain-disrupting-ba...
Hey, countless universities have blockchain research departments
Yes, it is possible that Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain will once be viewed on as the Segway of the IT industry. But lets see.
All the nonsense about inventory tracking on blockchain went exactly nowhere.
Prediction: they will run out of investors' money within the next couple of years, and then they'll quietly die, like all other "blockchain" startups.
regrettably not anything useful, however.
All the good stuff, in other words.
Who would claim this with a straight face about a creation with the externalities of Bitcoin?
The other oddity in the code is that there is a mixture of US/UK spellings being used, which also suggests more than one person.
Oh, and the pizza thing is another myth, the real monetization was the liberty exchange setting up as market for $/bitcoin exchanges.
Not an oddity are all, it suggests a non-native speaker. US/UK spelling inconsistency is rather common unless you went to school in one of the two.
Maybe he is just canadian. We use a mix.
It looked nothing like academic C++. It was also very small. Some people accuse it for being "messy" because it was highly coupled and non-modular. But that would have been premature and would have increased the size and complexity dramatically. Its lack of modularity was mostly reasonable for its level of complexity, and had Satoshi tried to make it modular he probably would have created boundaries that would have needed to be thrown out later.
When I first got into Bitcoin I just read all the code. I know plenty of other people did too, that wouldn't have been half as reasonable had had been broken into a lot of parts with interfaces between them.
First time I read this word and there seem to be no positive results for it on Google.
However, a government agency with extreme competency and desire to keep their involvement secret could spoof this, as well as spoof looking like an individual.
But Occam's Razor pushes me to believe it was just a single dude who happened to get enough things right to produce an escape velocity money protocol.
One thing that suggests a single author (but certainly no proof) is the continued secrecy: bigger group means higher probability of a leak (accidental as much as deliberate). In a way, the probability of an author group is sinking over time, because "unexposed for n years" and "unexposed for n+1 years" aren't the same observation.
Even a single person would have continued communication as Satoshi if they were able to, as their life's work became an incredible success. No, Satoshi was a single person who is no longer able to communicate because they are dead. And there are several good candidates who meet that description.
Personally I'm a fan of the "butler did it" theory, i.e. Hal Finney, who indeed died at the right time.
It describes the architecture of Bitcoin exactly. It is conclusive evidence that Szabo invented Bitcoin.
Come to think about it, this Bit gold -> Bitcoin renaming theory would also explain why miners are called miners in Bitcoin. "Minters" (with a t) would be a much more logical name if you started with the coin analogy from the beginning.
> I haven't analyzed BitCoin, but the impression of multiple digital cash experts I've talked to is that it's bunk. [1]
> I'd be more optimistic about BitCoin if I had the impression that they were acting on lessons learned from prior attempts. [2]
> Wow; there exists a Tor+bitcoin illegal drug marketplace, appropriately called Silk Road. [3]
> Ugh, another stupid article claiming "anonymity is inherent in Bitcoin." [4]
> This big Bitcoin heist shows Bitcoin suffers from the worst of both worlds: no strong anonymity, yet no fraud reversal protection. [5]
[1] https://nitter.net/lensassaman/status/12213554224562176
[2] https://nitter.net/lensassaman/status/56487900136734720
[3] https://nitter.net/lensassaman/status/69301492342980608
[4] https://nitter.net/lensassaman/status/81431725510635521
[5] https://nitter.net/lensassaman/status/81084436518674433
Plus, what would you expect him to do? Praise it and point everyone towards it? :p
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.
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.
Why not? If I have enough access to machine in order to get an (asymmetric) encryption key off of a server, encrypt all your files with it, and delete the originals, why can't I also warm the CPU for the few days it takes for my victim to buy Bitcoin? It doesn't matter if the returns are awful because the hardware I'm mining on was stolen (thus free).
>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.
Malmi, the "Bitcoin pizza guy", Satoshi, and everyone else in the legit side of Bitcoin are not the targets of my original post and I don't believe they had any illegal motivations. They just had the wrong priors, and accidentally built something that's enormously useful for criminals looking to build a parallel state.
> The use of Bitcoin by people is entirely non-coercive.
The use of the word "entirely" is dangerous to you. Because the mere existence of a ransomware program demanding Bitcoin - and there are a lot of them - lets me be cheeky and refute your argument.
If you want to argue that there are substantial non-coercive uses of Bitcoin, sure. I don't believe they're big enough to sustain Bitcoin's current or prior valuations.
> If ransomware were its only use, and were not merely a parasitic opportunistic drain on Bitcoin momentum, then its overall value would be zero;
Having to buy Bitcoin to pay ransom puts upward pressure on Bitcoin prices. It's not a drain on adoption, it's a booster of it, because a LOT of organizations get hacked and have to use Bitcoin to pay ransoms.