Hacker News Reader

Comment by zelly | Hacker News Reader

Almost every coin is implemented with straightforward, non-blinded accounting ("UTXO" model) such that everyone knows how many coins are associated with each public key. For example, this one belongs to Hal Finney (the creator of Bitcoin) and you trace the balance of and movement of coins transparently:

https://blockstream.info/address/1BgoUL3Mf8vDSDU4jjpFARKBJ6z...

View on HN

Small correction. Although many people think that Hal Finney could have been the creator of Bitcoin, the matter is far from settled. He even denied it himself before he passed.

> Hal Finney (the creator of Bitcoin)

Uhh, source??

Is there some kind of binary backing https://blocksteam.info? Information doesn't just appear on the internet.

Bitcoin is not one of the scams with no working software I was talking about.

The information comes from a leveldb database you can download from peers after installing this client: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

> "how do people know who has how many coins, for a coin which has reportedly never shipped a working binary"?

They have a MySQL type database that stores IOUs for the people who bought the ICO tokens. They promise to deliver the actual coins once they finish the software, which in many cases has never happened. Others are less egregious than this and have working binaries on a testnet--the future main network is promised to deliver the actual functionality. There are a few coins (Cardano, EOS) worth multiple billions that don't have a mainnet or a working wallet.

Cardano certainly has both a working mainnet and a working wallet, and has for a couple of years.

They are also running a testnet for their staking capability, which will promote to the main net eventually -- but claiming they're not running a live net and don't have a wallet is absolutely incorrect.

EOS mainnet launched in 2018 and it certainly has wallets. As far as I can tell it does what they said it would do.

> Bitcoin is not one of the scams with no working software I was talking about.

OK, why'd you use this example as your entire response to "how do people know who has how many coins, for a coin which has reportedly never shipped a working binary"?

Can you answer the original question instead of linking an unrelated bitcoin topic?

> Hal Finney (the creator of Bitcoin)

To be clear, this isn't definitive, as he is one of many individuals suspected to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

I think it is fair to say he is "a" creator of Bitcoin given all the early work he did to make the project a success but there is no evidence that he is the inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.

As an unrelated side note it is worth reading his post from 2009 when we talks about having ALS: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bshZiaLefDejvPKuS/dying-outs... I have a memory of discovering this essay on hn, but I can no longer find the discussion. Maybe I remembered it wrong.

Edit: I found it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=867623

Really speculating people are some anonymous person that doesn't want to be identified is at best, rude, otherwise dangerous. Don't make assertions you can't prove, despite the man being dead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com