Bitcoincore.org removes Satoshi's whitepaper from website after threats from CSW | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoincore.org removes Satoshi's whitepaper from website after threats from CSW

bitcoin.org

282 pointswildrice276 comments

He seems like somebody who is very concerned with taking credit for things. And not just in a "hey, I made that!" kind of way, but in a "I will sue people who say I didn't make it. " [0] kind of way.

This alone is enough for me dismiss his claims. Satoshi clearly intentionally wanted to remain unknown. It might be a real name, but it likely isn't. There was plenty of opportunity to reveal himself. Now that BTC is suddenly valuable and Blockchain has taken off, it is inevitable that there will be opportunists who want to personally gain from it. CSW is just one of many.

Not to mention that CSW has made other false claims, such as claiming to hold a PhD when he actually doesn't [1]. There is a lawsuit where his name is titled as "Dr.". Again, alarm bells should be going off for anybody that sees that.

And of course, there is a very simple way to prove he is Satoshi, which is to prove he holds the private key for a known Satoshi public key. But he can't do that, and almost certainly forged multiple keys he claims are Satoshi's [2].

[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-bitcoin-craig-wright-...

[1] https://twitter.com/mashable/status/675193059408265216?s=20

[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/jpgq3y/satoshis-pgp-keys-are...

Also here are a bunch of signed messages calling him a fraud using the keys to addresses HE CLAIMED TO OWN IN COURT -_-

https://craigwrightisnotsatoshi.com/

Edit: Explanation/thoughts from Wladimir regarding the removal & future of Bitcoin Core - https://laanwj.github.io/2021/01/21/decentralize.html

A real Satoshi could have lost his key, like many people lost their Bitcoin wallets. A fake Satoshi could possess the keys, by stealing or by receiving them in gift etc.

In a world of billions there are bound to be a few truly delusional people.

Given the evidence, I'm convinced he's one of them.

Isn't this guy literally billions in the hole to the estate of someone he claims was his partner in creating BTC, and who is co-owner of the Satoshi hoard of coins which haven't moved (ever)? Did that court case ever finish or is he still using every trick in the book to draw it out?

(Kleiman v. Wright, that's what I'm thinking of) (Looks like it got kicked back to June this year due to covid)

Yes, that fraud

Yes, he failed to produce any keys, the courier with the keys never materialized, the judge has not thrown Craig Wright in jail for contempt of court nor has be been charged with perjury. The judge seems to be mildly entertained by this and views Craig Wright as mentally ill, but won't have him committed. It is all sad and strange. There are a lot of guardrails against using the system this way, but they aren't being used.

As near as I can tell they're letting Craig Wright cosplay being Satoshi because it's another useful way of inhibiting Bitcoin's adoption and annoying the real Satoshi, wherever he is out there.

There’s nothing to suggest this one judge is part of any plan. This is just a judge playing “choose your own adventure” with live characters arguing over something he doesn't care about while providing some form of escapism.

Why do you believe this judge is part of an over-arching conspiracy of powerful but mute people who are attempting to inhibit the adoption of bitcoin through cosplay?

Why wouldn't those super-intelligent, powerful people do something about the actual Chicago based exchange that already trades Bitcoins?

It would be an entirely different judge in a different case that would have to have him committed, not a judge in a lawsuit in which he's a party, no?

In the US it's not easy to commit people- you generally need to prove that they are a danger to themselves or others. Judges just can't randomly commit people against their will, especially if it has nothing to do with the case in front of them. They can hold people in contempt, but that's a whole different thing.

It's not easy to get someone committed long term, in my experience, but startlingly easy to get someone forcefully admitted against their will for a 'short-term' stay, that may (does) turn into longer term care.

You need three things: 1. a person who is naturally combative, 2. a wellness check performed by the police, and 3. an underfunded mental health facility.

The police show up and the person gets combative, naturally. The police then swear the person is a danger to themselves and/or others. The person is committed, short-term, for evaluation. During this evaluation process, the person refuses to follow prescribed treatments; in an underfunded facility this treatment is generally accompanied by powerful psychoactive drugs, that most people, especially naturally difficult people, will refuse. Then comes long-term care.

Now, I know it's not the context of a judge ordering it, but it really isn't that difficult to do.

Source: you wouldn't believe the things I have seen in my career in higher education. Some people and especially controlling families are truly, absolutely, evil.

Also, needs to be a person who does not have family with the monetary and system-navigating resources to try to keep them from getting committed. Poor and/or alone, not able to appear and speak like a "respectable professional", you're fucked.

Or in your example if you have family that wants you to be committed and has money and the ability to appear and speak professionally and navigate beurocracies, oh yeah you're never coming back.

I don't know why it looks like you're being downvoted. Your comment adds to the conversation, and is correct.

The students who have the hardest time with this sort of controlling family are the ones who have family that are wealthy and well-connected. That's not saying there aren't low-income folks with these problems; they just don't know how to navigate the systems.

He should either be thrown in prison for contempt of court until the keys are revealed.

Charged with perjury when he tells the truth to get out of court-jail.

Or committed to an institution because he is mentally unfit and that it would be unconscionable for him to face penal consequences for his delusions.

None of this is happening and the judge is clearly entertained.

Is pathological lying (narcism, borderline personality, whatever) a mental illness that requires being committed? He should be prevented from hurting other people for sure. And who knows... with his personality he may thrive in jail.

If you are lying "to yourself", as in, really believing your lies, it may be because you are showing you are delusional. Of course that delusion has to be really dangerous for you or others.

When a mentally-unstable person uses the courts improperly, the court can label them "vexatious litigant" [0]. Then they must receive permission from a judge to file any new lawsuits. Courts don't do such things quickly.

It's not the job of courts to force people into the care of the a mental institution. The government must petition the court for permission to do that and show that the person is a danger to themselves or others [1]. Sometimes a court will recommend mental hospital rather than prison for a convicted criminal. This Craig Wright person doesn't seem to be using violence on himself or others and hasn't been accused of a crime. Therefore the system will not force him into a mental institution.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterman–Petris–Short_Act

Nitpicking here, but does Australia use the same legal standard for involuntary commitment?

>> the Satoshi hoard of coins which haven't moved (ever)

What type of math problem has to be cracked to claim that stash?

Basically you have to crack hard crypto. With key lengths long enough and no mathematical weaknesses discovered in the algorithm it could easily take until the heat death of the universe.

Can't quantum computers theoretically break elliptic curve cryptography? I suspect we'll get there a bit before the heat death of the universe.

Bitcoin is actually somewhat hardened to quantum computers. Quantum computers can break ECC but are much less effective against hash functions. You can't attack the public key offline because it's not usually part of the blockchain, only the fingerprint is.

The famous ECDLP or Elliptic Curve Discrete Log Problem, upon which a large part of Bitcoin's security rests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic-curve_cryptography#Ra...

As for why the Bitcoin Core developers were so quick to do this, the whitepaper has been a thorn in their side for years as it runs counter to the argument of Bitcoin being "digital gold" and should just be a settlement layer.

So they saw this as an excuse to remove it.

The whitepaper is why I view bitcoin’s value proposition as a gold-like store of value. Can you say more about why you think the whitepaper discourages that view?

The whitepaper didn’t expect/predict most hashing power being controlled by very few actors.

Edit: I’d say the whitepaper did expect this and basically said it could be a problem:

From the abstract:

> As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attacker.

That's a fundamental security assumption made by Nakamoto consensus. It's like assuming the discrete log problem is hard. If/when the assumption doesn't hold the security is gone.

That’s a better way of putting it. It’s a good argument for ASIC resistance and CPU dependence because it’s a lot harder to control General-Purpose CPU supply than ASIC supply.

Meanwhile my regular joe laptop can earn double its electricity cost in Monero (before it thermally locks up).

I am not a hardcore bitcoiner, but the price would fall quickly if these few controlling nodes would do something malicious. Which is against their own interest.

Probably. But a core aspect of decentralization is that you shouldn’t need to trust a few others at all.

I think it's more like limits: Trust minimization, not trust elimination.

Who cares about technicalities, the point was to let people hold the system in their own hands.

In Trust we trust!

Satoshi did predict just that, even before he launched the network (in 2008).

    “At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware.”   – 2008. 
    “At equilibrium size, many nodes will be server farms with one or two network nodes that feed the rest of the farm over a LAN.” – 2010.
    “The design supports letting users just be users.  The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be.  Those few nodes will be big server farms.  The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don’t generate.” – 2010.

You only need to read the first couple of sentences of the whitepaper to understand that it was primarily designed as a digital currency with a focus on spending/transacting.

Are those two concepts mutually exclusive? A liquid currency that holds value in unstable economies would seem to serve both the purpose of being spendable as well as a stable investment like gold. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what it means to be "gold like" though.

No they aren't mutually exclusive. In fact sound money should be both a good store of value and a medium of exchange (in other words work well for payments).

The problem is that Bitcoin's high fees has made it unsuitable for regular payments, so proponents only have the store of value explanation left.

Exactly this. To me it was proof that 99% of the Bitcoin community (such as the Bitcoin subreddit which had an absurd amount of influence, thus why taking it over and censoring discussion was so effective) didn't care about Bitcoin as a currency and had never once used it as a currency. They just bought it on Coinbase and never even transferred to their own wallet.

Meanwhile people like me who actually cared about using the damn thing, would be paying a $60 transaction fee on a $20 purchase simply because the powers that be decided that increasing the blocksize, (aka increasing the arbitrary global transaction throughput cap) was somehow antithetical to bitcoin's decentralized design.

> Meanwhile people like me who actually cared about using the damn thing, would be paying a $60 transaction fee on a $20 purchase simply because the powers that be decided that increasing the blocksize, (aka increasing the arbitrary global transaction throughput cap) was somehow antithetical to bitcoin's decentralized design.

Big blocks would have never solved this issue, and you're still free to use Bcash, but you won't as no one does... because that wasn't the issue.

Second layer solutions are the crux of that story, and people who didn't or wouldn't understand that were vocal non-tech people (like Roger Ver) who don't understand basic network protocol topology and why things need to run on secondary, tertiary etc... layers on Bitcoin (the Network) that uses bitcoin (the token) to validate your $20 tx on the blockchain, which by the way if you paid $60 for goes to show you never understood Bitcoin the network.

No one would sacrifice that much to miners instead of just opting for fiat at that point unless there was an absolute imperative need to do so, which at $20 is clearly not the case. I should know I did it.

I've been in this for a long time and the only time tx fees were above $20 was when the Bcash fork happened and Ver/Jihan spammed the network. I paid $25 tx fee on behalf of a new customer (merchant I just on-boarded) that was panicking because they didn't understand mining fee priority (I did explain it to them) and thought they lost they money, when in reality the 5 sat/byte tx cleared in a weeks time and I just recovered my funds then.

I discussed it and felt absolved of responsibility but rather than lose a potential client I just begrudgingly paid the mining fee, to Antminer/Jihan no less, which added insult to injury.

This is far from ideal, and I have a stuck tx as we speak (2sat/byte were clearing without a problem until then) for a over a week now, but it just goes to show that these new billionaire class investors (Saylor) don't understand this tech at all and that they need to use their new found fortune to help flesh out LN to get it to function to its full potential without all this mempool bloat they've help create.

Mainchain (layer 1) is doing EXACTLY what we would think would happen under these conditions even after Segwit, its purposely this way as this is the trade off for security, which makes it less than ideal as a settlement network for small, low cost, individual transactions.

That's what LN is for and I wish these instituinal investment firms would understand that, to date only Jack Dorsey (an actual technologist/developer) has funded Lightening labs, while the Winklevoss, Saylors of the World just keep trying to compete for more headline grabbing media attention and ignoring this vital issue as they do not understand or care to take the time to learn this very obvious fact.

As for me, I want them to keep doing this as it gives me a better buy-in position so I'm all for it.

PS: Keep downvoting, but a 2.58 tx fee cleared in less than an hour with 5+ confirmations, thus proving my point. I think we're far from the bloat we saw back then proving Segwit worked as expected and block sizes weren't a viable option nor tenable a solution to our problem, which I sincerely remains one of LN progress .

I think there are tradeoffs available there since it's mostly tx count and not currency value beings moved that dictates network fees. Potentially gift cards backed by BTC solve the issue of both slow TXs and expensive TXs.

I'm sure there are better solutions, but that's one that comes to mind.

A good argument can be made that money should not be a long-term store of value, and should only store value long enough to be useful as a medium of exchange. The idea is that it is better to lend your money than to store it, and that the best way for people to "store value" is to be invested in economically productive activities.

You're right!

The key point, no matter which theory you subscribe to, is that medium of exchange is the most important property.

I'm not sure I'd use as strong language as "mutually exclusive", but to the point: when was the last time you used gold to buy your lunch? Get groceries? Pay for an Uber? Tip someone?

I'm sure someone out there insists gold is a perfectly legitimate currency for day to day life, and it's not 100% incorrect. But gold is very inconvenient to attempt to use for quick transactions. You would typically exchange gold for some other currency to do day to day spending. The same is basically true of bitcoin now as well, which was (arguably) not the original intent at all.

They're not mutually exclusive, and that's always been the point made by those like me who supported a blocksize increase and were on the BCH side of things.

Those on the Bitcoin Core side of things believe that they are mutually exclusive, and that you can either be a gold-like store of value (that is to say, absolutely fucking useless) or a peer-to-peer electronic cash, but not both.

To me it's so obvious that the value of something as a currency is what makes it equally a good store of value.

Not to mention, "safe storage" of that currency for spending. It was literally an escape from traditional banking that was born out of the 2008 financial crisis where wallstreet caused billions in losses.

"In this sense, it's more typical of a precious metal. Instead of the supply changing to keep the value the same, the supply is predetermined and the value changes. As the number of users grows, the value per coin increases. It has the potential for a positive feedback loop; as users increase, the value goes up, which could attract more users to take advantage of the increasing value."

- Satoshi

https://p2pfoundation.ning.com/xn/detail/2003008:Comment:956...

Misleading. He's talking about Bitcoin being an (ultimately) deflationary currency. Not any "it's a store of value but not peer to peer electronic cash" fallacious arguments.

Satoshi couldn't have thought of a solution of the scaling issues, just like Mark Zuckerberg didn't design Facebook for billions of people originally. From the paper it's clear that he would have liked if all people could have access to P2P layer, but it's just technically impossible.

That's not entirely accurate. His solution was to increase the block limit [1], and use faster computers [2]. Note that Bitcoin Cash is currently implementing this, and succeeding at scaling to 1,100 tx/sec on testnet. (Bitcoin Core supports 3 to 7 tx/sec.)

[1] "It can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000) maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete. When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade."

~ Satoshi Nakamoto, on bitcointalk.org, October 04, 2010, 07:48:40 PM

[2] "Hi Mike,

I'm glad to answer any questions you have. If I get time, I ought to write a FAQ to supplement the paper. There is only one global chain.

The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling. If you're interested, I can go over the ways it would cope with extreme size. By Moore's Law, we can expect hardware speed to be 10 times faster in 5 years and 100 times faster in 10. Even if Bitcoin grows at crazy adoption rates, I think computer speeds will stay ahead of the number of transactions.

I don't anticipate that fees will be needed anytime soon, but if it becomes too burdensome to run a node, it is possible to run a node that only processes transactions that include a transaction fee. The owner of the node would decide the minimum fee they'll accept. Right now, such a node would get nothing, because nobody includes a fee, but if enough nodes did that, then users would get faster acceptance if they include a fee, or slower if they don't. The fee the market would settle on should be minimal. If a node requires a higher fee, that node would be passing up all transactions with lower fees. It could do more volume and probably make more money by processing as many paying transactions as it can. The transition is not controlled by some human in charge of the system though, just individuals reacting on their own to market forces.

Eventually, most nodes may be run by specialists with multiple GPU cards. For now, it's nice that anyone with a PC can play without worrying about what video card they have, and hopefully it'll stay that way for a while. More computers are shipping with fairly decent GPUs these days, so maybe later we'll transition to that."

~ Satoshi Nakamoto in correspondence with Mike Hearn

It's interesting, so he didn't see the limits of the system. Scaling tx/s is easy, scaling it without increasing block verification time and cost is what's impossible.

So Bitcoin is not exactly what Satoshi planned, but for me it changed my life completely.

Satoshi did actually see those limits and discussed them in the early days on Metzdowd and Bitcointalk.org. But he covered his bases and allowed for both big data centers and/or layer 2 architectures to solve that problem. I’m don’t recall if he expressed a strong preference for one over the other, though.

Could you please point to me where Satoshi discussed using "layer 2 architectures" to handle the scaling problem? To my knowledge he always talked about scaling from the perspective of every transaction being published to the blockchain, because that's how the whole system works.

> It's interesting, so he didn't see the limits of the system. Scaling tx/s is easy, scaling it without increasing block verification time and cost is what's impossible.

Nonsense, he absolutely thought about scaling and in his head it was quite simple...because it was. You just need blocks big enough to allow the transaction throughput the world requires, but they need to be a finite size. That's all.

Not sure what you mean about "block verification time" having a scaling problem. It really doesn't.

>That's not entirely accurate. His solution was to increase the block limit [1], and use faster computers [2].

This doesn't address the storage requirement problem. 15M transactions per day * 250 bytes per transaction = 1.369 TB per year. After a year most home users wouldn't be able to run a full node without shelling out for extra hardware. After 10 years you'll need to spend hundreds on hard drives just to get started. Sure, it's still decentralized in the sense that you can still run a node, but it'd be closer to usenet (users connecting to independent server farms) than what we have now.

Yes, and we’re already seeing exactly what happens with bigger blocks from Ethereum. The entire thing is being run on Consensys’s centralized Infura servers on AWS. It’s not even decentralized.

This is an unavoidable physical constraint given Bitcoin’s architecture. You can either prioritize decentralization (and with it, censorship resistance), or you can prioritize TPS or in Ethereum’s case heavy-weigh smart contracts (at the cost of decentralization).

Everyone having a copy of the whole blockchain is not needed. What you need is sufficiently distributed hashpower that no actor can perform a 51% attack. That's all.

Small-time users can use thin wallets; mega-power users can download the whole blockchain and spend whatever (in perspective, not super significant) amount of money they need for sufficient storage. Users in between can carry a reduced form of the blockchain that doesn't care so much about a full transaction log but accurately describes the state of every wallet's balance (thereby functioning the same from a "verify that they're not bullshitting me" perspective).

You just described a way to decrease the security of Bitcoin. Users already decided collectively that no amount of security should be exchanged for other features inside Bitcoin. Even taproot, which is a relatively small change takes years to get to a point that it's accepted.

It's like Kosher food: if a small percentage of people want food to be kosher, it's often easer to make all food Kosher.

As Michael Saylor says, Bitcoin is good enough to store hundreds of trillions of dollars. Just don't f*ck it up.

While I agree with you on everything, and I'm all in on BTC as a store of value, I love some of the contracts that are built on top of Ethereum. Uniswap is an example system that should be implemented in Bitcoin as well over time, as it brings transparency to trading and asset ownership. It doesn't need turing completeness (so gas is not required), though as it needs state management, I think it's important to be able to account for the cost of UTXO created.

Yes Ethereum is useful and interesting as an experimental platform to see what's possible with this new tech, and what better-designed L1 protocols, programming languages, and APIs may be able to support.

But I'm not comfortable with their marketing it as a "world computer" among other things, implying it's more production-ready and robust than it really is.

> After 10 years you'll need to spend hundreds on hard drives just to get started.

Do you think that 10 years from now, a 15 TB hard drive will cost at least $200?

Maybe? Hard drive growth speeds have slowed down in the past decade or so. While there's no doubt that storage capacity growth will outpace transaction volume growth, and that eventually it would be feasible for a typical home user to run their full node (at visa's TPS). It remains to be seen whether that's 10 years away or 50+ years away.

I feel that /r/btc lunacy has made it's way to HN

No, that sub is completely delusional

Excellent, yet another stream of text that must occupy my information grapevine to define a virtual value system utilized by people who are not creative enough to park their economic gains as deployed assets.

One BTC is currently a post-tax yearly salary, a third of a tractor, at least one Bridgeport CNC lathe, 12 metric tons of cold rolled 304 stainless coil, or two springtime paid internships for folks out of high school (including their brand new Lincoln welders).

When the price goes up, it means even more people do not know what to do with resources available to them.

Kilowatt hour upon kilowatt hour that must be sequestered only because someone desired to "invest".

A modern metric to measure mediocrity, stagnation, and indecision (a hockey stick graph).

Downvoted without a counter. Point proven.

To be fair, I have only listed available assets - not a plan. This is the source of the 7 furrowed brows.

World of Warcraft "gold" is worth more than the Venezuelan Bolivar.

I don't think the 2 are mutually exclusive.

They removed the whitepaper about as fast as they removed Gavin Andresen's commit access once they found justification.

There are a lot of bad things you can call the BTC core devs but they sure as hell seize every opportunity to grab power.

From my experience in the community years ago, Bitcoin Core was a very insidious group of people that seized control of Bitcoin from within, obtained control of the Bitcoin subreddit and started banning anyone with even the most reasonable objections. They started promulgating this absurd notion that Bitcoin was a "store of value" exclusively: that is to say, was not intended to be "peer to peer electronic cash" (as Satoshi obviously intended) and that its value was purely related to "how much the other guy was willing to pay for your Bitcoin". So they turned it into this purely speculative thing.

The whole fallacy of the "store of value" thing is two-fold:

(1) Bitcoin's success and utility as a currency gives it a stable point to base its value around. For example, the value would be related to the net amount of transactions occurring (on the darknet usually) and the velocity of money, which would create a sort of natural equilibrium price where people are buying bitcoin as they need it, rather than hodling it to speculate.

(2) Bitcoin, like any asset, is a store of value, but its ability to store value is the same whether it's worth $.0001 per coin or $40,000 per coin.

So they basically turned it into a purely speculative instrument.

---

The takeover of Bitcoin from within was a big red-pill moment for me. It was an attack vector I should have seen coming but didn't. I strongly belief that any cryptocurrency community where 99% of users are speculators who view the thing as a stock ticker and nothing more, basically dooms a cryptocurrency to failure.

Anyway, Bitcoin Core as a whole and Blockstream as a company are very malicious actors who destroyed the beauty and elegance of Bitcoin so that they could build a company around exploiting the delta between what the tx fees should be and what they were. And beyond the unjustifiable censorship / suppression, they advanced tons of bogus arguments such as the notion that increasing the block size would ruin the decentralization of the bitcoin network.

---

Oh, and lastly there will be a great need for public blockchain cryptos like Bitcoin: for example, if I donate to a non-profit I'd want all their transactions to be publicly viewable. But for normal usage-as-a-currency, I am a huge believer in XMR (monero), which masks who you're sending money to, how much money you sent, and how much money you have. It also has a lot of neat tech like adaptive block size limits, etc that avoided the transaction fee debacle of BTC.

Lots of "they" in there and very little substantive evidence of who "they" actually are and what actions were connected to other "theys" involved. I'm not saying there isn't a group that is in tighter control of the codebase, but given the code they produce is independent of the actual data (the blockchain) I'm ok with that as long as others audit their work and then talk about it publicly (which they do): https://twitter.com/BitMEXResearch/status/135185541410371584.... Keep in mind that some developers who disagreed with other developers ends up creating a fork.

Bitcoin's "fiat" value is pretty much a speculative/opinionated/consensus of belief thing, by nature. This is really no different than the fed saying these 100,000 things are worth this much in dollars. It's an opinion based in observation, but still an opinion, albeit a collective one.

The value of the Bitcoin network itself to provide a wide range of authentication and payment integrations is quite high and a technology potential for changing markets. That is only valuable if it is found long term to be a secure store of integer values.

>Lots of "they" in there and very little substantive evidence of who "they" actually are and what actions were connected to other "theys" involved.

This [1] is a good recap of what happened

[1]https://hackernoon.com/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-debate-a-ti...

I wonder if this is because BTC's use as currency has definitively failed, and is now being used as an elaborate ponzi scheme to extract money from investors.

The failure to raise the block size limit is the very reason bitcoin has failed as a currency. The main people against against raising the block size limit were blockstream and bitcoin core devs. A competing client to Bitcoin core which supported a block size increase was Bitcoin XT. At one stage it had 50% of the market share, until nodes running XT started getting DDoS'd. Then the censorship began, any posts about bitcoin XT and block size limit increase were banned from bitcointalk and r/bitcoin. [1]

[1] https://hackernoon.com/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-debate-a-ti...

Block size argument has absolutely no relation to Bitcoin failing as a currency. Block size is some weird inside baseball argument that has little real world validity. Truth is, Bitcoin was never in a position to even fail, because it never succeeded in being a currency. Bitcoin only really got any attention because of Silkroad. Without the darkweb market place Bitcoin would be a fun little internet toy.

You can see this reasoning today in chains like Bitcoin Cash, these are cheaper, these do have larger blocks, but they have nowhere near the amount of currency transactions to legitimately call it a currency. These chains don't even pull in any extra load when Bitcoin fees start to creep up.

XT is not really worth talking about. It ended up being a failed power grab. BIP101 failed because both sides failed to work together, instead one side got upset and created a hard fork at the next opportunity. Then attempted to call themselves Bitcoin, knowing full well they didn't have the hash rate and subsequent proof of work.

> Bitcoin only really got any attention because of Silkroad

You just refuted your own argument. Bitcoin got attention because of its utility as a currency, in this case for illicit drug purchases. Now as soon as I have to pay an $80 fee, it ceases to be useful as a currency (except ironically for illegal drugs, if you had no other option - which is not the case btw because you can just use monero or bitcoin cash - some users would still pay a 50% fee to get their illegal drugs)

> but they have nowhere near the amount of currency transactions to legitimately call it a currency

What the hell is your definition of currency? A currency is whatever people use as a currency, and by that definition BCH or what have you is absolutely a currency. And fortunately you can send a transaction on-chain for 1 satoshi per byte, instead of having to use a stupid side chain / lightning network pseudo-solution

> instead one side got upset and created a hard fork at the next opportunity. Then attempted to call themselves Bitcoin, knowing full well they didn't have the hash rate and subsequent proof of work.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how it works. Within a protocol, the "real" chain is the longest chain. But when a hard fork occurs it splits into two different universes, where BCH people don't recognize BTC as valid and vice versa.

Frankly the software ignorance of so many shows when they discuss this topic of forking. It's worth nothing that the "soft fork" vs "hard fork" distinction, while somewhat real, is part of the whole Bitcoin Core propaganda belief system; they believe that there must be some arbitrary "legitimacy" to a hard fork (where legitimacy is defined as who can shout the loudest after having conveniently censored all the sane people out of the room).

I’m not ideological about this, but I don’t understand how it’s not obvious to anyone technical that Bitcoin can’t simply keep increasing block size to meet global/mainstream demand for payments without eventually sacrificing decentralization, which is the only characteristic of Bitcoin that makes it valuable.

Sure, doubling the block size a few times would likely be fine, so Bitcoin may be overly conservative right now, but I firmly believe any long term solution will require some form of “layer 2” for payments.

It's true that long term adoption will likely require "layer 2" solutions, but it's the worst form of "premature optimisation" to deliberately limit "layer 1" and force users into a single "official" proposed solution.

A better approach would have been to let the block size scale in line with average connection speeds and storage capacities (per dollar), and let multiple competing groups implement different "layer 2" approaches that users can opt in to.

Without a backlog of high fee paying transactions, Bitcoin mining becomes unstable in the long term when block subsidy dwindles to insignificance, as discussed at [1].

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5306354.0

This issue resolves itself. Miners will refuse to uptake transactions into blocks that pay insufficient fees. There's no need to arbitrarily force $80+ transaction fees.

As a review for anyone reading, miners are compensated via the block reward - a direct grant of Bitcoin to the miner - as well as transaction fees for any transactions they decide to include in their block. (The person who mines the block gets to unilaterally decide which transactions go in the block; functionally this means they just sort in descending order of $/kb and include as many as they can)

The paper that relies on turns out to have some inaccurate assumptions. The paper assumes that miners can flip their hardware on/off at essentially instantaneous intervals. The assume this to argue that miners will strategically turn their hardware off when the expected value of mining a block drops below the cost of power.

It turns out that many of the big miners have long term contracts with power companies to consumer power; they wouldn't save money by turning their hardware off for short periods of time. Power companies like this arrangement because it lets them predict demand better, and miners like it because they get "bulk rates" on electricity for being predictable in their consumption. The arrangement falls apart when miners turn their hardware on and off.

Please specify what you mean by "decentralization". If you want I can explain the classic (fallacious) bitcoin core argument here, which is in essence: some poor person in the 3rd world needs to be able to fit the whole blockchain on their raspberry pi.

EDIT: Meeting ended early, so I'll just take this on now. First things first:

> Sure, doubling the block size a few times would likely be fine, so Bitcoin may be overly conservative right now, but I firmly believe any long term solution will require some form of “layer 2” for payments.

So, just to point out the absurdity here explicitly, you are worried that Bitcoin's "decentralization" will be harmed by block size increases eventually, to which your solution is to force a layer 2 payment solution which essentially will force transactions to route through centralized middlemen, rather than the transaction publishing to the blockchain, which is literally the thing that gives bitcoin its value. You don't see something weird about that reasoning?

Additionally, the "you can do a few doublings but eventually you run out of space" is a misunderstanding of how exponential growth works. The capacity to store data has increased exponentially over time, there's no reason to think it won't continue down that path. (I'd really like to avoid going down the "moore's law will end" rabbithole if we can)

Oh, and for good measure this goes into the Bitcoin Core dogma that what keeps the Bitcoin network secure/decentralized is the number of "full nodes" (nodes that have a full copy of the blockchain but do NOT mine), whereas the real security of the network comes from the miners, and it is the capitalist market mechanism of competition for hashpower that gives Bitcoin its resilience to double-spends.

Finally, the whole justification for the hurt "decentralization" is as I said above: the argument that everyone needs to be able to have their own copy of the blockchain. Firstly this ignores that most users use thin wallets and have no need of the whole blockchain; this does insert some trust at a point in the chain but it is a tradeoff most users are more than happy to make for their use-cases. That being said, like I said above, there's no reason to think that one can't keep a whole copy of the blockchain. Indeed the Bitcoin Core argument is just that it's prohibitively expensive, not even that it's impossible, although they define prohibitively expensive from the arbitrary threshold of a random 3rd world person living in poverty.

It's doubly ironic because the literal result of refusing to increase the blocksize - which, not that it matters but Satoshi was never against a blocksize increase; indeed he assumed it would happen - is skyrocketing transaction fees, so that same third world person Bitcoin Core pretends to be so concerned about now has to pay $80 to buy their $1 worth of rice. Oops.

Now the argument comes in: "no they don't need to pay $80, because they'll use the lightning network and thus never need to push to the blockchain!" Which I already addressed above but just to recap, now you've introduced a system of centralized middlemen, AND the very design of the lightning network means that (a) you have to make at least one transaction to seed your "store credit" (and even a single $80 transaction is unaffordable for our hypothetical third world person), and (b) they are required to pay in advance which again puts unrealistic financial stress on them. (For those who aren't familiar with the lightning network, the idea is basically that rather than making bitcoin transactions like normal, I send $20 to a middleman who now gives me $20 of credit and now I can "send" money via an elaborate form of IOUs that never end up on the blockchain, until some point in the future where you resolve onto the chain. It's an optimization strategy that destroys all of the utility of Bitcoin in a misguided attempt to "preserve its decentralization".) If I'm failing to be articulate here it's because the whole concept is so mindblowingly absurd that I don't even know how to properly explain how ridiculous the whole thing is, and is a large part of why I assume that anyone who advocates for it has just literally never used Bitcoin except to speculate

That’s not core’s argument. Core’s argument is that the more centralized mining and validation becomes, the easier it can be shut down by govt decree, or to regulate away privacy protections.

Keeping it spread out across millions of individual home computers, laptops, and mobile devices is the strongest, and perhaps only defense of that.

If you want to argue, at least argue the real issue, not some strawman.

Who's running a full node on their phone?

And more importantly, what utility does that have for the network?

The whole idea in their heads is that nodes will "validate" transactions. Which doesn't make any sense because it's the person engaging in a transaction (on either end) that cares about the state of the blockchain, not some random neutral third party. Your full node can detect an invalid transaction all day but without a way to tell the guy who's about to treat that invalid transaction as valid, the utility isn't there.

No, the real threat to the Bitcoin network is and has always been that a hostile actor would get 51% hashpower (or almost 50% but not quite and roll the dice until they won a few blocks in a row) and issue double-spend attacks.

No one in Bitcoin, that part is an aspiration not a reality.

But fwiw the technology does exist now to do that, just in another protocol:

https://minaprotocol.com/

Not quite. Their argument is based around running "full nodes", which is made-up term for a non-mining node that stores a full copy of the blockchain. (There's nothing wrong with having the whole chain, but the fallacy here is that "full nodes" don't protect the network, it is miners that secure the network and it is miners who decide what transactions to uptake)

It's all moot though, because introducing sidechains and the lightning network destroys the value of Bitcoin in a perverted attempt to save it from a non-existent problem.

> Keeping it spread out across millions of individual home computers, laptops, and mobile devices is the strongest, and perhaps only defense of that.

No, because Bitcoin was built to be resilient to Sybil attacks, that's why it's proof-of-work and not proof-of-stake. So it doesn't matter if a million people in Africa have the whole blockchain on their raspberry pis or laptop or whatever, because all I need is one ASIC mega-farm in Antarctica and I can double spend attack the network into oblivion.

It's hashpower that protects and secures the network, nothing else. This is one point that the fraud CSW actually got right.

I think you may have missed the whole S2X vs UASF battle. There are multiple important reasons for non-mining full nodes to be validating the whole chain and not just their own transactions.

Having many independent observers seeing the entire chain and detecting problems or attacks against it, facilitates coming to consensus out-of-band about what's happening and what to do about it. It's the ultimate check-and-balance.

A Raspberry Pi is extreme, but again, I’m not talking about a few block size doublings. “Visa scale” is on the order of 1000x Bitcoin’s current capacity.

The other argument I’m familiar with is longer block propagation times lead to more orphan blocks, which is a centralization pressure.

EDIT: responding to your edits:

> layer 2 payment solution which essentially will force transactions to route through centralized middlemen

1. Layer 2 solutions aren’t necessarily centralized

2. Even if they are all centralized I don’t believe it’s worth sacrificing decentralization in the base layer to support small payments

By "small payments" do you mean less than $1000?

A payment system's fees need to be 1-2% at most to match credit cards. I remember fees going as high as $80 for a transaction back in the day, so that means you could only reasonably use bitcoin for a minimum of $1000-$10,0000 when fees were the worst. But in reality, Bitcoin can be .000001% (I put a random number of zeroes don't take it literally).

Additionally you're trying to "protect the blockchain" by having people never able to use it. Surely you see the absurdity.

If Bitcoin ever hit Visa scale, there'd be no problem with only well-capitalized miners maintaining a full chain. It's really not an issue, but frankly you should cross that bridge when we get to it anyway. In actuality Bitcoin was hard limited at 3-7 transactions/sec for no reason whatsoever.

>But for normal usage-as-a-currency, I am a huge believer in XMR (monero), which masks who you're sending money to

There was a talk[1] a few years ago that basically argued that this property only really holds if you look at individual transactions in isolation. It basically boils down to: if you make one transaction to a darknet market, it's impossible to know whether you were actually sending to a darknet market, or whether that was just a decoy transaction. However, if you make repeated transactions to a darknet market, the chances that all of your transactions had a darknet market decoy approaches zero, and you'll be considered suspicious. At that point the police can get a warrant to search your house, or put surveillance on you so they can catch you slipping up irl.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s3EbSKDA3o core argument starts at around 10 minutes.

That is a weakness of decoy based systems. This chart [1] shows how various blockchain designs offer different tradeoffs in privacy leaks versus scalability.

[1] https://forum.grin.mw/t/scalability-vs-privacy-chart

BitCoin’s short history seems to have quite a lot of drama. Every once in a while I pop in to get an idea of what’s happening in the world of BitCoin but it’s not something I really pay much attention to so I’ve definitely missed out on quite a lot of “big” news stories.

If anyone knows of good books or podcasts about the history of BitCoin and the various characters/motivations involved I would be most interested in recommendations. Especially from the governance or legal perspective.

You'll get a history from the Bitcoin Cash perspective here: https://old.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/js6jft/frequently_aske...

Not a podcast or a book but the Cryptopia documentary gives a pretty good overview of what has been happening in the cryptocurrency space in the past few years.

> There are a lot of bad things you can call the BTC core devs but they sure as hell seize every opportunity to grab power.

This is a non-idiomatic usage of this expression, unless you're saying that power grabbing is good?

Gavin admitted he should have been removed because he stopped contributing. Why has HN comment quality fallen so low...

Hi Grubles!

Question: How do you think people will use BTC in the future? Do you think people will ever be able to buy coffee with it?

No, because people don’t use highly volatile speculative assets for everyday transactions.

But I know you’re referring to the transaction fees, and it would only be fair to point out that the cost of a lightning transaction is a few cents.

And it is only fair to point out that to use lightning you first need an on-chain transaction to enter it, and then you need to have another one in reserve so you don't lose your money. And then you need another one if you want to top it up with more money. And if the node you connect to goes down or you can't find a route you need to open a new channel...

Or you use a functional cryptocurrency that don't have these ridiculous limitations.

“A few cents” was the amortized cost of those transactions, if the lightning channel is indeed used for everyday activities.

Peter Todd said it was because he thought he was hacked [1]. Then two days later he posts a blog about wanting to submit a pull request for bigger blocks[2]. Interesting timing.

[1]https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/727078284345917441

[2]http://gavinandresen.ninja/time-to-roll-out-bigger-blocks

> Gavin admitted he should have been removed because he stopped contributing

Citation desperately needed. Here's a contribution from literally the day before he had his commit access stolen.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/006cdf64dc932

Even if he did say that, it's irrelevant to this discussion. Him "no longer contributing" was not the reason his commit access was revoked. It was revoked as a power grab because he wanted to and had the power to increase the block size. Nothing more.

His access was revoked because having unused keys to the Bitcoin code is an attack vector.

Citation here BTW: https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1247592193319198720

> His access was revoked because having unused keys to the Bitcoin code is an attack vector.

Yes I agree this was the public justification for it. That being said, I'm certain they wouldn't have acted in the same way if it had been Luke jr or Greg Maxwell. They pulled his access because he wanted bigger blocks and he was ruining the official narrative.

I believe your citation but the point still stands.

And for future reference, a citation isn't generally accepted when it's just a screenshot you posted in a tweet you once made where the screenshot reveals a comment to a random reddit post with no visible url in it.

I'm the reason why Core removed Gavin's commit access, as I pointed out that he doesn't use it, he was bamboozled by Craig, and in fact Gavin himself agreed that it should've been done long before just as a security measure.

The FUD on here is always surprising voluminous.

Why are you posting this as 'fact'? You do not know this, do you?

Source?

If Craig Wright was Satoshi, he would be able to sign a statement proving that with the keys from the genesis block. Otherwise, he's just an obvious fraud.

Unless satoshi lost his keys lol like virtually everyone else of that cohort.

You think a guy smart enough to give birth to Bitcoin, and maintain complete anonymity while doing so and while communicating in public forums etc, would forget his private key?

You just need to remember one seed and suddenly you have billions of dollars of value stored in your brain. I don't think that's a realistic possibility.

Sure why not! It was utterly worthless at the time (and today in my opinion) and we know plenty of people who lost multi tens of thousands of bitcoins.

All it takes is spilling some coffee on your laptop.

Everything you say is true*, but there's plenty of other evidence that Craig Wright is a fraud, independent of whether he's in possession of Satoshi's private keys: https://craigwright.online/

* - Except where you point out that it's your opinion

> Sure why not!

For multiple reasons

> It was utterly worthless at the time

If you read what Satoshi wrote, he didn't think it would be worthless in the future at all.

> (and today in my opinion)

Your opinion is contradicted by reality

> we know plenty of people who lost multi tens of thousands of bitcoins.

They weren't the creators

Of course.

I know a lot of security phds who fall for phishing emails. The hugely likely outcome of btc was that it would end up worthless. "Oh crap, those keys were stored on that disk" after dropping it on the floor or having a laptop stolen is an entirely reasonable situation.

Or perhaps being incarcerated for 25 years shortly after releasing bitcoin

> You think a guy smart enough to give birth to Bitcoin, and maintain complete anonymity while doing so and while communicating in public forums etc, would forget his private key?

> You just need to remember one seed and suddenly you have billions of dollars of value stored in your brain. I don't think that's a realistic possibility.

BIP39 mnemonics ("seeds") were not around in the early days. Bitcoin core software generated random private keys that were completely unrelated to one another. So it was necessary to backup the wallet file each time that new keys were created. Most users would generate hundreds (or thousands) of keys at a time, to reduce the frequency of backups.

So how could you use these private keys now? Considering they're not seeds.

EDIT: downvoted for asking a question

I can still import a wallet from at least 2012 and move the coins using the official client just like it was created yesterday.

edit: and obviously you can't remember that but if you encrypt your wallet you can save it to long term storages like Dropbox / differrent servers / medias / etc, what Satoshi would most likely be doing

They're still supported by most if not all wallets.

Any one of those individual private keys could be imported into another wallet software application (e.g Electrum). Then the funds can be swept to a newer wallet that has a seed backup.

Private keys are just numbers. That has not changed since the beginning.

I see. Very interesting! I wasn't involved that early so wasn't aware :)

Anyway, my general point stands, just s/remember a seed/store an encrypted file

Personally I think Satoshi is either dead or never going to move his bitcoin.

Satoshi was a mathematical and programming genius who did not take backups. LOL.

Of course this is easily possible.

Maybe his house burned down and he had failed to keep offsite backups. Maybe he never made backups in the first place and his hard drive failed. People make all kinds of mistakes, sometimes very costly mistakes.

And plus, who knew it would grow so big when things were just getting started? For all we know it was used as a test of the program rather than a real account.

Satoshi, Hal Finney, etc were very aware that it at least theoretically could become the world's primary transaction system. Indeed it was that insight that motivated Satoshi to make Bitcoin in the first place.

> People make all kinds of mistakes, sometimes very costly mistakes.

For example, pizza-Bitcoin guy. The stories always talk about how he traded 10,000 Bitcoins for two pizzas. That's only a small part of the story, what actually happened is drastically worse. He sold several times that many Bitcoins in other low-value transactions at the same time (some straight up for cash) and did the pizza trade more than once.

Pizza guy likely traded a minimum of 50,000 Bitcoins for less than a few hundred dollars of value. That's $1.6 billion presently at 50k.

If CSW was genuinely Satoshi, he would be humble and genuine enough to admit he simply lost the keys. He would also acknowledge that there is no way for him to prove he is Satoshi, but that that is his own fault for losing the keys. Instead, he is engaged in childish lawsuits and actual fraud (his PhD, the backdated keys). Not the moves of somebody like Satoshi.

A while ago he (this Craig Wright fraud) actually sat with one of the first people behind bitcoin development Gavin Andresen. Gavin was the main developer in the beginning chatting with satoshi in the forum. There was a video of Gavin saying that Craig proved to him that he was satoshi. But later seemed to have been part of some kind of social engineering - wasn't totally clear how he proved he could sign the keys.

Regardless the guys's behavior doesn't at all match Satoshi's behavior from the initial days in the forum (before he disappeared that is).

edit: video of Gavin saying Wright is satoshi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNZyRMG2CjA

Craig produced a proof on a computer he himself provided. Wouldn't have been hard to alter it to say whatever he wanted to.

Indeed. I think Craig is a fraud. I'm just dumbfounded why Gavin --a person I admire from intial days and who is probably person n.2 after satoshi in terms of bitcoin actual initial lines of code written -- was so easily fooled.

Yeah it's hard to understand. Gavin's good nature of assuming good intentions from anyone is sure to play a big role.

Also worth to remember that anyone can get bamboozled, even if you're highly intelligent and knowledgeable in a certain area. Just look at how many cult followers there are in the world.

It is easy to understand. Gavin wanted to say what he said. It does not mean that he thinks this is true. He just wanted those words to be out of his mouth. Now how to interpret this fact is another question. May be he wanted to distract public focus from another person. May be he was paid to say so. May be he was bored and did it for lolz.

Just because people demonstrate remarkable skill or intelligence does not make them immune to the same cognitive biases shared by every human being on the planet. We are all susceptible to being fooled, and a lot more easily than we probably like to imagine.

It is usually easier to con smart people. Or in the alternative, being a bit thick can provide protection against fast talk.

Also book smart vs street smart. Gavin is book smart, but not street smart. Street smart people don’t get taken by conmen with flawed cons.

Maybe because he didn't expect anybody to do a lot of work to convince him of a basically worthless fact.

How long have you spent verifying your own computing platform? However it is, it is never impossible that somebody can corrupt it and fool you about something.

> he didn't expect anybody to do a lot of work to convince him of a basically worthless fact.

Being Satoshi seems like the exact opposite of a basically worthless fact.

Gavin was just being gullible. Being a good early developer on an important project isn't mutually exclusive with being gullible to social engineering.

What does he lose if he guesses wrong?

Reputation obviously... He'll forever be "the guy who believed Craig"

> What does he lose if he guesses wrong?

Total credibility loss in the BTC community.

I could some how look past his indiscretions: calling himself 'chief Scientist' of an open source project, gate-keeping antics for pull requests, attempted forks with Hearn et al, his involvement with the foundation... He was still critical to the project for many years and not beyond redemption as open source project typically fork into other things for experimentation purposes that grow the project in the long term--Linux distros being a prime example.

But when he went public that he bought faketoshi's narrative it was clear he was beyond help, and that his meeting at the NSA was more than what any of us ever assumed and he was so compromised that nothing could help that anymore.

I hope he is mentally well, and I'm sure he has enough money to do what ever he wants in Life if he just kept a fraction of his coins, but other than I never want to see or hear from Gavin ever again.

He probably wasn't fooled, or actually, he got screwed by both sides. He knew CSW wasn't satoshi, also he knew adam back was satoshi but couldn't tell anyone because of the NDA he signed (adam had long been compromised at that point). I think he felt the only way to save the project was to point to someone else being satoshi that did believe in the original bitcoin = p2p cash narrative, but that obviously backfired. Craig also did a complete 180 on his 'beliefs' and made everything he touched proprietary, patented and anti-freedom and privacy. Hard to believe that happened without any external influences as well.

The history of bitcoin is a very interesting one. The video series of unmasking satoshi nakamoto from barely sociable is a great first step into the rabbit hole. But i'm warning you, the deeper you go the weirder it becomes.

>also he knew adam back was satoshi but couldn't tell anyone because of the NDA he signed (adam had long been compromised at that point).

uhh what?

After you watch the socialy bareable video it would probably make more sense. Makes it pretty clear that adam is satoshi (i would say with a 99% certainty). Adam says completely different things about bitcoin today than satoshi did all those years ago. It's not definite that he was compromised but him taking back control over the project with blockstream and the direction he steered it in makes it pretty clear to me.

On Gavin, that's also explained pretty well in the video, also this reddit quote from gavin says more than enough for me (this was under a post named "How Craig Wright probably tricked Gavin Andresen"): "I won't violate people's privacy or repeat things told to me under non-disclosure agreements, so I'm stuck-- I'm not going to say anything more, except I suspect someday the full story will come out (and it'll be made into a movie).

Of course, everything I was told could be a lie, and even professional magicians can be fooled sometimes (ever seen Penn & Teller's Fool Us show ?)."

Adam Back? The guy who said we should use "tabs" instead of Bitcoin while we waited for Lightning Network to be finished?

I'm not kidding, here's the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHc81OL_hk4&feature=youtu.be...

> Adam Back? The guy who said we should use "tabs" instead of Bitcoin while we waited for Lightning Network to be finished?

While I don't claim to know that Back was involved in the creation of Bitcoin, it's also really hard for me to understand why many people think Satoshi was just one person after all this time.

If anything Hal makes more sense and has way more circumstantial evidence if it was just a single person, but even then I don't think it matters much who was/were the thing we refer to as Satoshi Nakamoto and is actually a cool part of the mythology we've created over the years.

It's like something you'd expect from a Neal Stephenson or Daniel Suarez Book.

Because in the end, they don't matter anymore; it's gone so far from the original codebase that its entirely academic and quite honestly incredibly uninteresting in comparison to everything else that has been accomplished in this community. Though I argue much more could dhave been done if we didn't have to be derailed by this kind FakeToshi BS drama we so all too often in Bitcoin.

And yet you can explain Adam Back/Bitcoin Core/Blockstream's actions much more simply as them being insidious actors that wanted to take over the Bitcoin project in order to promulgate propaganda supporting ridiculously high transaction fees so that they could establish a for-profit company to extract the delta between how high the fees are and how low they need to be for bitcoin to actually be usable.

Sending a message from Satoshi's e-mail is very obviously not proof of identity. Satoshi needs to move coins or sign a message. That's the only acceptable proof.

You claim Adam Back is compromised because the things he writes and does are so contrary to Satoshi and what he believed in that it's the only explanation that would make a universe where Back is Satoshi make sense. I much prefer to believe (with better evidence, btw) that Back is just not Satoshi. Boom, no logical contradictions to resolve.

The connection with the very niche bmoney, the conspicuous absence of adam the years before and after bitcoin's release, his move to a tax haven, his creation of hashcash which is very similar to bitcoin, his deep knowledge of bitcoin's source code without having ever contributed to it with his bitcointalk posts, his writing style, and not many other people that would be able to pull it off...

Also even if he didn't create it, why did he never contribute to or interacted with the project? Why did he create a company that would make something he always wanted to create unusable? He even put this on his wikipedia page in 2007: "He has an interest in privacy technology, electronic cash (of the payer and payee anonymous type)..." and yet he is completely absent from bitcoin from 2009-2013 and sets up a company the completely defies everything that he wanted to create for years? It's completely illogical.

I know most of these arguments are from the video but come on. He is the perfect candidate. And i think you will not get much better evidence when someone doesn't want to be publicly known to be satoshi. But sure there is no 100% conclusive proof so believe whatever you want.

What are some good subsequent steps after the barely sociable vid?

The e-mails between Peter Todd John Dillon and the connection with Greg Maxwell and the FBI. There is a pastebin out there from 2013 which is mind blowing. (see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=335658.0)

But looking into what happened in 2015 with the introduction of blockstream, the core devs and the small block campaign. The massive censorship on all major bitcoin discussion platforms. introduction of RBF. the rise of Bitcoin XT and later classic and unlimited. The major signalling for Bitcoin Unlimited by businesses and miners and its subsequent DDOS attack. The segwit proposal with the subsequent Segwit2X proposal. The NY and Hongkong agreements. The BCH fork (and subsequent SV fork if you're interested in that side). The activation of Segwit and the UASF and anti S2X campaign. The complete narrative change shifting to digital gold, SoV and scrubbing anything related to the title of the whitepaper (p2p electronic cash). and so much more interesting stuff, much of the info can be found on reddit's /r/btc that has been scrubbed from other parts of the internet. warning: many info you will find on the subject will be biased one way or another so try to get info on these topics from different sources and make up your own mind.

AFAIK this is probably the same trick he attempted to use where he took a signature from the blockchain and used it. The signature would be of a hash of a transaction, but it would appear as a "valid" signature from that wallet public key.

That wouldn’t really mean anything. If he is Satoshi, he may have lost the keys. If he has the keys, that doesn’t mean he is Satoshi, it only proves that he has the keys.

Anyone who has the keys is Satoshi, for all intents and purposes. The problem is no-one has the keys (at least publicly).

Satoshi has never revealed themselves. That's because they're either smart enough not to, or they're dead.

If the paper was signed with that key, then the signature must be FIPS compliant to be legally significant, but the paper is not signed.

Craig Wright has done enough to hurt Bitcoin over the years that I effectively think of him as a canary: the fact that he is still walking around is evidence that there are no darkweb assassination markets that are not just scams or honeypots.

It just goes to show that effective assassination markets need to be centralized and corporate, not distributed and anonymous.

Unfortunately the operating space is monopolized in every jurisdiction with strong barriers against new entrants. Regulatory capture is so thorough at this point it will probably take an unforeseen externality to generate any disruption.

Uber Offs!

Note that the canonical Bitcoin whitepaper url (which appears on tshirts and stickers and the like) is still just fine:

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

That URL's been up since the beginning, and AFAIK isn't going anywhere.

I didn't even know bitcoincore.org was a thing until today.

https://github.com/bitcoin-core/bitcoincore.org/pull/744

Reason number #420 why you should institute 24 hour rules on your repos (and not abuse lock functions.)

"Yesterday both Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org received allegations of copyright infringement of the Bitcoin whitepaper by lawyers representing Craig Steven Wright. In this letter, they claim Craig owns the copyright to the paper, the Bitcoin name, and ownership of bitcoin.org. They also claim he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, and the original owner of bitcoin.org. Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org were both asked to take down the whitepaper."

> In this letter, they claim Craig owns the copyright to the paper, the Bitcoin name, and ownership of bitcoin.org.

Isn't that basically asking for a lawsuit in the format of "Prove that you are Satoshi or be charged with perjury" ? Why is CSW still able to play these tricks?

Because the cost of the lawsuit would still be carried by these open source volunteers.

Yes it is. He is wanting to get into a situation where he can provide proof in a legal setting so that any outcome can be used in other legal battles.

>Furthermore, Satoshi Nakamoto has a known PGP public key, therefore it is cryptographically possible for someone to verify themselves to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

I find cryptographic signatures fascinating in that they didn't exist 50 years ago. They are a completely new discovery. The long term implications are not yet clear.

They are fundamentally different from the paper and ink signatures they are named after in that they can give an entirely anonymous person a consistent voice over a long period of time. This is a great example of that.

> They are fundamentally different from the paper and ink signatures they are named after in that they can give an entirely anonymous person a consistent voice over a long period of time.

The fundamental difference is the medium not the properties. People can sign papers with false signatures and be erroneously identified as the actual party. That is why there are notaries, to authenticate the identity of the signer, subject to trust in third party documentation.

For example, people steal houses by signing false quit-claim deeds. Signatures on paper do not have any positives properties over cryptographic signatures.

> I find cryptographic signatures fascinating in that they didn't exist 50 years ago.

Very new, I think you could even say almost all of computer science pre-dates them.

In 1655 an astronomer discovered Saturn's moon Titan. He wasn't sure of his observation but wanted to preserve his priority. So he scrambled text of his discovery in an order only he knew (a private key) and published the resulting gibberish. In this way he made it possible to verify himself later as an author of the discovery. Maybe not a very strong encryption by today's standards, but good enough for the time.

Huh? You can't claim authorship of anonymous publication. Neither the author, nor anybody else, it's the whole point, anonymous once anonymous forever.

There are multiple ways one could prove themselves to be Satoshi. He has known public keys, bitcoin wallets, email accounts etc.

As they point out, the paper is not anonymous. It is pseudonymous. "Satoshi" is a person or persons whose communications are validated through a public key (Qanon folks take note). Anyone claiming to be Satoshi can simply sign something with the associated private key and prove they were involved with the identity.

What is the reason to believe that the key belongs to Satoshi? Did he post a proof?

That is not only false in this case, but also in general. As another refutation, consider A Warning, by Anonymous, subsequently revealed to be Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor.

You can personally believe such revelations, but they aren't binding.

This is so bizarre.

For those that aren't aware, Craig Steven Wright has publicly claimed to be Satoshi but failed to provide cryptographic proof as such, and uses his supposed identity as Satoshi to justify having a bunch of sketchily-acquired Bitcoin (I forget the full details here, it's been years).

Even someone without much prior knowledge should be able to trivially deduce that this guy is a fraud:

- The real Satoshi (assuming they're one individual as CSW is essentially implying) took care to maintain their anonymity, and is almost certainly aware that they would be the target of intelligence agencies around the world, in addition to your more run-of-the-mill "let's kidnap this guy and force him to transfer his enormous wealth to us" criminals. So releasing his identity publicly would be just painting a massive target on his back.

- If Satoshi ever did want to reveal themselves, they would do it in a cryptographically undeniable way (moving coins from their wallet or signing a message with a known keypair of theirs). Also, given they dedicated at least a huge chunk of their life to giving birth to Bitcoin, which unified a bunch of cryptographic primitives and Austrian-economics type theories into a system that found the right balance of technology and economic incentives to be viable, they wouldn't be issuing frivolous lawsuits and trying to get their (anonymously distributed, freely released) whitepaper pulled from websites.

- The fact that Bitcoin Core would even consider taking the whitepaper down is lunacy.

Note: There's a (mostly) unrelated whole dramatic history of the great Bitcoin fork, where Bitcoin split into BTC and BCH. Supporters of BTC believe it's the one true bitcoin, and likewise for BCH. Personally, since I actually have used bitcoin as a currency, I'm team BCH because BCH is the fork that increased the blocksize limit, which was arbitrarily limiting the global transaction rate to a level so small that it led to fees in the $20-80 range at its worst (and the way BTC works is the fees are related to the bytes in the blockchain, not the amount of bitcoin itself transferred, so you'd pay an $80 fee on a $5 tx just as much as a $500 one). That transaction fee insanity was also necessary for Blockstream (a private company supporting the BTC side of the fork) to be able to profit off the delta between an idealized $0 tx fee and the actual $80+ fees, by creating systems like the lightning network which basically reinvents the whole credit card system in Bitcoin and moves transactions off chain, which as far as I'm concerned misses the point and destroys the value completely. I'm only mentioning all this because at least at one point, CSW threw his support behind BCH, which was unfortunate because now you have an actual fraud backing the coin which was actually the better coin, but made it appear like a total joke.

Lastly, it's worth mentioning that even though this guy is a charlatan and fraud, he has some ideas that aren't bunk. He had a fairly compelling paper that argued that Bitcoin's proof-of-work model was not some inefficient, climate-change-inducing wasteful system, but rather was a system that incentivized private firms to invest in the security of the network (resistance to double-spend, etc). I believe that paper was this one for the curious: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2993312

The real satoshi is probably Paul Le Roux, and currently in federal prison.

> He had a fairly compelling paper that argued that Bitcoin's proof-of-work model was not some inefficient, climate-change-inducing wasteful system, but rather was a system that incentivized private firms to invest in the security of the network (resistance to double-spend, etc).

Well that’s obviously and trivially wrong so... I mean you can’t pretend away one Chile of electricity use to play multiplayer excel.

Not a chance, all the evidence for theory that is very weak and circumstantial.

> Well that’s obviously and trivially wrong so... I mean you can’t pretend away one Chile of electricity use to play multiplayer excel.

It's horribly wasteful now. As the block reward decays it may transition to being less wasteful; it depends on how high transaction fees rise. Last time I tried to work it out the total electrical+transaction fee cost of bitcoin compared to spend volume (not including obvious change to self) was at about 1%. Almost comparable to current credit/debit network overhead, probably a lot more expensive than interbank transfer.

Currently about $80 of electricity and goes into each transaction, which is socialized across all holders as inflation. It’s this incentive which keeps miners mining. Once the reward drops to zero, transaction fees will be born directly by parties to the transaction and will have to be high enough to stave off a 51% attack directly.

> Once the reward drops to zero, transaction fees will be born directly by parties to the transaction and will have to be high enough to stave off a 51% attack directly.

This is something I don’t see talked about much, but the asymptotic state of Bitcoin when mining fees are zero is interesting to think about. It’s not obvious to me that the economic incentives against running a 51% attack will exist in the “terminal” stage of Bitcoin in the way that they do in the “inflationary” (positive mining reward) stage.

Would the economic incentives not remain unchanged as a function of unit price of BTC? It feels like in the terminal state there’s going to be a high stakes game of chicken between attackers and holders to see who’s willing to pay more for control of the whole network. This is likely exacerbated by a move to layer 2 networks to avoid the 7tx bottleneck isn’t it? I’m not sure personally this is just something I’ve been noodling on.

Yes, I agree that the incentives to run a 51% attack are purely a function of the market value, but I mean that without the incentive to mine in excess of what transaction costs would pay for being socialized by the whole community, it seems unlikely that transaction fees will be enough to secure the network from a bad actor.

Especially if, as you point out, layer 2 networks become a more desirable place to do transactions.

Basically, it seems like the terminal state of this is a gigantic freeloader problem where everyone wants the network to be secure but nobody is incentivized to do it.

> Basically, it seems like the terminal state of this is a gigantic freeloader problem where everyone wants the network to be secure but nobody is incentivized to do it.

It'll be in the interest of exchanges and payment processors to prevent double-spend at least, and they have an incentive for the blockchain to be trustworthy vs. running their own attacks and could adjust their own fees to maintain >51% control of miners across the lot of them.

There's also a fallback recovery mechanism; for any attacker willing to invest $X in a 51% attack the remaining users only have to invest an additional $X*.04 to regain 51% control and make a hard fork that most miners would switch to. My guess is that faced with evidence of a double-spend most miners would switch to the hard fork to avoid losing the block rewards the attacker's chain stole from them. This relies on rapid detection of the attack and availability of a hard-fork client.

A nice collection of articles regarding bitcoin’s energy usage. Spoiler: it’s quite different than the narrative that’s out there: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/tags/energy-consumption

The only spoiler is that a pro Bitcoin source is going to extreme levels of mental gymnastics to justify the unjustifiable use of an entire countries worth to electricity to write 7 entries per second into the worlds slowest and least efficient database.

Bitcoin would be an utter failure if it sacrificed security in order to gain speed and efficiency.

And make sure to compare how much energy (including the entire military, police forces, FBI, etc.) is used to secure US dollars.

> And make sure to compare how much energy (including the entire military, police forces, FBI, etc.) is used to secure US dollars.

Those aren't to secure the US dollar, those are to secure the US. Switching to Bitcoin would not change the expenditure in those areas one iota. Not. One. Iota.

If anything the US dollar is freeloading on the expenditure there.

However, setting that aside, it's pretty trivial to disprove your argument. If you linearly scaled the energy usage of Bitcoin to the number of transactions per second currently handled by just Visa alone, Bitcoin would require more energy than the entire world generates a few times over, and generate more e-waste than the entire world generates today. 7 transactions per second is enough for a decently flea market or a Costco, not a global economy.

> Bitcoin would be an utter failure if it sacrificed security in order to gain speed and efficiency.

Which is why it shouldn't exist. We can do better. We are doing better already.

There were 285,418 bitcoin transactions* in the last 24 hours, bitcoin energy consumption is estimated to be around 76.87 terawatt hours per year, which is 0.210603 twh per day.

So 0.210603 / 285,418 = 0.000000737874765 which is 737.874765 kWh per transaction. Assuming a price of $0.10 and an average 475g CO2 emitted per kWh, the real cost of a single transaction is $73 and 350kg of CO2. But I suppose that's a price worth paying...

*according to https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/

> So 0.210603 / 285,418 = 0.000000737874765 which is 737.874765 kWh per transaction. Assuming a price of $0.10 and an average 475g CO2 emitted per kWh, the real cost of a single transaction is $73 and 350kg of CO2. But I suppose that's a price worth paying...

From the same site, mean transaction value is 2.67 BTC ($86,672 USD), so about .1% transaction fee. https://www.blockchain.com/charts/cost-per-transaction-perce... computes it at closer to 1%. My guess for the difference is comparing total volume vs. approximate real value transfer (subtracting the change going back to the same address).

Comparable to the cost of the card networks but an order of magnitude more expensive than ACH transfers and maybe double the cost of wire transfers.

EDIT: I'm assuming that the profit margin is scarce on average so most miner fees go directly to hardware+electricity. Given the volatile price in USD I don't know a better assumption to make.

Yeah your point about it being a fairly low % of average transaction value is valid, the % is highly dependant on the current market price of bitcoin, though.

The $73 is not strictly related to the transfers fees but rather to how much it costs to mine a single bitcoin. If the total numbers of transactions were to decrease by 99% the energy cost per transaction would be $7300 but that wouldn't mean that transfers fees would increase that much or at all (if I understand how btc transfers work correctly it should decrease since there would be less people bidding) as long mining bitcoin remains profitable.

If currently 900 coins are generated per day, the cost to generate 1 bitcoin (234003kWh at $0.1 per kWh and using the yearly energy consumption value) is $23,400 in addition to that miners also received 150 coins from transaction fees in the last 24 hours. So if 150 dropped to ~0 the number of miners should only decrease by 14% to maintain the same profit margins.

Bitcoin mining uses hydroelectricity, that doesn't emit CO2.

Yeah, no, it simply does not. Citation needed.

It's also on the original claimant to prove that mining runs on CO2 energy.

What proportion of bitcoin mining is done in places which have either built new renewable power plants specifically for mining bitcoin or already have a surplus of energy and have no options to sell it to anyone else?

The only example I know is Iceland, but according to https://cbeci.org/mining_map it's not even in the top 10. Over 85% of all bitcoins are mined in these countries:

- 65% is mined in China with 721.2 g/kWh

- 7.2% in US: 417.305 g/kWh

- 6.9% in Russia: 517 g/kWh

- 6.17% in Kazakhstan (couldn't fine specific figure but around 80% produced power comes from Coal plants so gCO2/kWh must be very high)

The only country in the list which close to 0g/kWh is Norway at 0.48%.

China has history of building hydroelectric power plants with excess power and you need only a few instances of surplus energy as they can be bought at a discount, which makes mining more profitable. Fossil fuel can't provide surplus energy in principle and can't be attractive for mining.

Unless it's in a grid in which a 100% of all energy is renewable that's not that relevant because lowering total energy consumption would it make possible to decrease production in fossil fuel power plants.

That's a hypothesis, real mining is fixed in objective reality and is not affected by hypotheses.

It's more of an observation on how markets tend to work in general.

Unless we're only talking about Iceland or similar countries, which are not connected to any continental grid and have a surplus of cheap/free energy they have no where to put, increased demand for electricity will lead to increased production. This demand might be fulfilled by building new powerplants using renewable sources (since currently that's cheaper than fossil or nuclear. However as long as these new sources are connected to a grid which still has non-renewable power plants mining bitcoin will produce as much CO2 as using a washing machine, smelting aluminum or driving a tesla per kWh.

Now if (assuming everything else stays constant) for some reason all bitcoin mining stopped the decrease in demand would lead to decrease in production from more expensive (possibly due to regulatory overhead and/or subsidies to renewables) more fossil-fuel based energy sources

Whether it can be used for other production or not, if mining runs on renewables, that's just it. How do you deliver energy for other production? Just send it across the country?

So you are saying that there a miners running on energy from power generators specifically built for them and they are not connected to the grid?

Can you gave any examples on where this is happening?

>The real satoshi is probably Paul Le Roux, and currently in federal prison.

That conjecture makes a huge amount of sense based on circumstantial factors but most importantly, business purpose. The gentleman you identified was (when BTC was released) running an international unconventional business with money-logistics issues. As we see now, BTC's primary use case is facilitating international financial logistics for criminal transactions-- the use case for BTC always stayed close to home! Assuming the conjecture is correct BTC performs exactly the real-world role it was designed to perform.

As for the paper, let me get this straight-- the group that publishes the software that establishes what BTC is now has taken the position that whoever Satoshi is or was can claim copyright and take down core BTC IP no matter how licensed?! Yeah, that can't be very reassuring to a multi-million dollar industry based on IP collected and distributed by Bitcoin Core, i.e., the entire bitcoin ecosystem.

To be fair, we don't really know it was Paul "Solotshi" Calder Le Roux, but there is a ton of circumstantial evidence - not least the nickname on his Congolese diplomatic passport. I really liked the Wired write-up by an author who's been following Le Roux's, uh, career, for many years. [1] It's fair to say his authorship of E4M (the precursor to TrueCrypt) gave him the crypto chops.

Le Roux genuinely impresses me haha. He's a real-life Bond villain - even his Wikipedia article is riveting [2].

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-inte...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux

I'd say claiming Satoshi is Paul Le Roux is obviously and trivially wrong when there is much more evidence pointing at Nick Szabo.

BCH eventually got forked into Craig Wright's and Calvin Ayre's "Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision (BSV)", which has a block size in the gigabytes, and which according to them carries the torch for Satoshi's original vision for Bitcoin.

Craig Wright is the chief scientist for BSV.

I personally think there's sufficient evidence to conclude Craig Wright isn't competent enough to have created BTC: https://craigwright.online/

I don't think he is Satoshi but what evidence is in your comment?

Follow the link.

As transactions grow in BCH, wouldn't it need larger and larger blocks? I think larger and larger blocks would centralize the nodes.

Edit: Also, I don't think the Lightning Network behaves likes the credit card networks. What do you mean when you say that?

It would need larger blocks, but it was the general understanding within the community before the fork that with Moore's Law, hard disk capacity would increase and price would go down in the future, so it really isn't a big deal, and not enough to cause "centralization of nodes" like some people argue.

Also, my understanding is that Lightning Network is semi-custodial, so it's probably more similar to banks than credit cards. I'm unsure why modern bitcoiners are adamant about "not your keys, not your coins", but are ok with semi-custodial solutions.

What do you mean by “semi-custodial”? You’re not giving anyone the keys to your address. It’s nothing like a bank.

Yeah, not sure where they got that.

The problem with the LN is that it's like a gift card (I said credit cards before but gift cards is a better analogy). I need to send $X on-chain to establish my "store credit" so that we can transact off-chain for future transactions, before eventually resolving on-chain at some point in the future.

Imagine network address translation but stupider by orders of magnitude :P

Please specify what you mean by "the nodes". As I've discussed in other comments, the whole "full node" concept is basically made up and absurd; the security and therefore decentralization of the network is provided by miners. The network is only truly "centralized" if a faction gains a sufficiently large portion of the hashpower to perform a 51% attack.

I went through and read your comments on full nodes, and I don't believe you have addressed the issue of UASFs nor have you addressed topics like privacy, trustlessness, and self determination. Most anyone who can afford to do hobby computing can run a full node. You miss the point of crypto networks unless you realize that the people are the network.

> failed to provide cryptographic proof as such

That is not entirely correct. Wright provided a forged cryptographic proof to Gavin Andresen and tricked him into accepting.

> forged

So in other words he failed to provide proof

It's worse than just failing.

Exactly. By trying to fake a proof Wright increased the odds that he is not Satoshi.

> The real Satoshi (assuming they're one individual as CSW is essentially implying) took care to maintain their anonymity, and is almost certainly aware that they would be the target of intelligence agencies around the world, in addition to your more run-of-the-mill "let's kidnap this guy and force him to transfer his enormous wealth to us" criminals. So releasing his identity publicly would be just painting a massive target on his back.

This would be the Hollywood interpretation of his motivation to remain anonymous. Personally, I think it’s because he really wanted the work to speak for itself, and not have the entire project tied to one particular individual with thousands of newspapers trying to figure out what motivated him.

Remember The Social Network movie? When they tried to make it look like Facebook was created just so Zuckerberg could get back at his ex-girlfriend? It’s stuff like that he was trying to avoid.

It's not a hollywood interpretation at all, Satoshi created something that was an existential threat (at least long-term, in terms of the doors it opened) to fiat currencies / fractional reserve banking more broadly. It's not farfetched to see that certain government organizations would want to disrupt that, or at a minimum gain control over the founder to be able to direct things how they please.

Regardless, intelligence community subpoint aside, I think the fact that third-party criminals would want to kidnap him and force the transfer of his bitcoin mega-fortune is very plausible, even if you don't see governments as a possible threat vector.

I do agree in general that maintaining pseudonomynity helped keep the focus on the project and not the person(s). But I think it's undeniable that being publicly known as a figure with billions of dollars of value stored in their brain puts a target on one's head. And it puts a target in a way that being a normal fiat billionaire does not, because you can't just wire a billion dollars to another country without having the transfer stopped, whereas with bitcoin once they force him to transfer Bitcoin (if he caved to torture etc) it's irreversible.

> It's not a hollywood interpretation at all, Satoshi created something that was an existential threat (at least long-term, in terms of the doors it opened) to fiat currencies / fractional reserve banking more broadly.

At its most charitable, the underlying economic theory you're supposing is out of mainstream. To the extent that it's a Gold Standard version 2.0, though, it should be pointed out that the kind of mainstream economists who actually run economic policy would usually view it as a specifically discredited theory: 100% of all gold-standard currencies have failed and been replaced with non-gold-standard.

In any case, though, the notion that someone with an alternative economic theory is so threatening to your profession that you need to send Deep State Operatives™ to shut everything down is Hollywood fantasy at best and Qanon idiocy at worst.

If you can't see why Bitcoin is a threat to the status quo such that it could theoretically justify "Deep State Operatives" trying to either outright stop it by murdering the founder or compromise and neuter it by taking over the project, I don't know what to tell you.

I'm not saying anything about how likely it is or isn't, just that it's a theoretical possibility that someone in Satoshi's position would be considering.

And I find your dismissive references to absurdities like Q-Anon to be wholly inappropriate and a cheap shot.

The real Satoshi is probably dead. Who just disappears, without any warning, without saying goodbye, when their project is just beginning to take off? What sort of a person never gets involved again, even just to comment, when the project attracts the interest of heads of state? Death or severe incapacitation (stroke, coma, etc.) is the simplest explanation that fits all the things we know about this person. He probably used FDE and his family probably did not know his passphrase or what he was working on, so nobody even knew to announce what happened.

People die all the time -- car accidents, heart attacks, strokes, drug overdoses, etc. Usually you never hear about them. Satoshi was almost certainly not a well-known cryptographer or even someone with significant involvement in the cryptography research community or any related community (the whitepaper screams "enthusiast"), so his death would have likely gone unnoticed.

(Besides being a simple explanation of the evidence, this is also falsifiable -- all Satoshi has to do is spend some of his BTC or sign a message or otherwise unambiguously reappear and we will know I am wrong about this.)

Wouldn’t it be great if Satoshi’s true identity was left ambiguous...because Satoshi forgot their password and couldn’t log in again to prove it.

TF even if he is Satoshi, scientific papers belong in the public domain.

What makes it qualify as a scientific paper?

It has only 8 references, less than papers published around the same time

It was self-published, not subject to peer review

It has no proofs

It has errors: https://gist.github.com/harding/dabea3d83c695e6b937bf090eddf...

The content is scientific in nature and it spawned an entire field of research. The quality of the paper is of course debatable as are the ideas contained within.

Haha this whole exchange is such a good metaphor for classic academic gatekeeping. Satoshi gave birth to an idea that spawned an entire new type of financial system, with revolutionary implications for the world, and the GP is spending his time arguing that it didn't go through peer review and wasn't published by a real journal and therefore it's not real science :P

This kind of thing drives me crazy. Peer review is very valuable, but it was basically instituted to make sure government science grants were not being wasted. It also has a function of keeping crackpots out of the public information stream and increasing paper quality. However, Newton (and "Satoshi", though not at the same level as Newton by a long shot) didn't use such mechanisms but their ideas were eventually accepted (in some fashion) through wide ranging debate.

Someone should host the whitepaper on IPFS.

They have. It's also hosted on the Bitcoin blockchain and it's forks and there are torrents of it of course.

Here's how to decode it from the blockchain: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/35959/how-is-the...

Many people thought the same thing. Here it is: https://twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/13523156821934366...

https://bitcoinwhitepaper.eth.link/ will always work to view the Bitcoin whitepaper from any browser. https://bitcoinwhitepaper.eth/ is completely decentralized but you need an IPFS enabled web browser to view. (FYI you can add .link to any .eth website to view it through an IPFS gateway)

You can get it directly from data stored in the BSV blockchain:

https://bico.media/42d44c395904e6743f67011b4198d8bcc07de21c6...

Buterin & Poon on Wright:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TglmWKJBTec&feature=emb_logo

Yeah, only a few years late. Seems like a pretty fraudulent claim.

> This surrender will no doubt be weaponized to make new false claims, like that the Bitcoin Core developers “know” CSW to be Satoshi Nakamoto and this is why they acted in this way.

It's like "Bank of America paid 10 millions to the claimant - WITHOUT ADMITTING GUILT - ..." There is specific phrase for that, so - why not insist that the removal was "without admitting the guy is Satoshi"? And reinstall the paper?

I think Craig is a pawn who's handler's goal is to reveal Satoshi's true identity.

Craig discussing the very website 2 weeks ago https://youtu.be/_E7iuVM4CIA?t=4328

I always thought bitcoin core and bitcoin.org were run by the same people. Who controls bitcoin.org?

A pseudonymous individual called C0bra controls bitcoin.org.

Why would "real" Satoshi first add the paper and now want to take it away?

Would be interesting to run linguistic analysis on written text by CSW and Satoshi.

Is it even legal to claim copyright on a pseudonymously published work?

I'm more worried about whether a pseudonym can (with legal credibility) place their work under an MIT or other Free license.

I don't see a reason why not. If it's an original copyrightable work one would assume that the author can grant rights to others or the public.

IANAL and the legal system is sometimes strange, but there is no obligation to register yourself as a copyright holder.

Right but I was thinking more in terms of there being no legal person to say, should it go to court, “Nah, I totes licensed that for anyone to use.”

Sure, just because you used a pseudonym you don't lose the rights associated with being the author. Getting people and the legal system to believe you that you are the author is your problem though.

That clown is still around?

Surprised no-one has put a hit on him yet.

Bitcoin slow descent to zero? Or buying opportunity before the next moonshot?

no way to tell for sure, but the stock to flow model has been pretty accurate over the years and it projects around $90k+ by year end ... institutions like PayPal are buying directly from miners, others are applying with SEC to buy BTC for their funds ... price looks shaky, but the big players seem confident in the fundamentals

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Or are they just getting in to be the ones selling the axes during the gold rush?

There’s definitely multiple ways to make money as an institution and yeah this is a possibility as well.

wouldn't he need to pay taxes?

And the bitcoin circus continues with the most bizarre turn of events.

I would be worried too if Paul Le Roux was getting released from federal penitentiary.

Is he being released? I thought he received a 25 year sentence in 2012?

Paul actively cooperates with the US justice and secret services. It is likely that his sentence will eventually be reduced.

I've read somewhere that he is being released in 2025 but can't be sure.

The BOP website lists his release date as 1/14/2034 with his status as "NOT IN BOP CUSTODY".

what does that mean tho? BOP?

Is he out on bail???

BOP is the federal bureau of prisons. https://www.bop.gov/

The federal inmate locator lists him as not in BOP Custody. Did he get extradited somewhere? House arrest for covid?

There is this constant thread of seediness to the point of absurdity running through Bitcoin that makes it look like a joke that everyone is in on except the suckers buying into it. Which makes it hilarious for an observer... though I guess I don't get to laugh all the way to the bank, which is a fitting punchline.

I have to wonder if a lot of this is straight up money laundering. Were there seriously billions of dollars worth of gullible people buying ICOs and every random alt coin a few years ago?

On Reddit, there are tons of spammers selling "copy trading" services. Are there actually customers for that?

>I have to wonder if a lot of this is straight up money laundering

Because the best way to clean your dirty money is to sell tokens (which are "totally not securities") and get investigated by the SEC.

In the ICO boom, I worked on many of their products.

For the most part, everyone from the CTO to contractors like myself knew the business plan was terrible and the founders were as deluded as the investors. We were just trying to extract as much money as possible from these companies before they went under.

It worked. I was earning anywhere from $400 to $5000 an hour.

I am the only one who thinks Craig Wright is the writer of the Bitcoin whitepaper and the original developer? I understand why it is controversial and doesn't fit the bitcoin myth. And I don't find him particular symphatic.

But he convinced Gavin Andresen and in general has the background of someone who could build this and do the writing that followed on various mailing lists and discussion forums.

There’s a simple way to verify his claim, yet he has yet to do so. Why, if he could, would he not?

And why would the opinion of a single person (Gavin, or anyone) be relevant to wether or not Craig’s claim is factual?

He’s stated his reasoning many, many times. Legally speaking, keys do not prove identity. They prove access to keys which can be stolen. He’s making an intentional point to prove it in a court of law as a part of his bigger point that Bitcoin exists within existing legal frameworks and was not created to evade the law. Quite the opposite, it was created as a system to provide immutable evidentiary trails.

Craig worded this nicely 2 weeks ago here https://youtu.be/_E7iuVM4CIA?t=2133

And if you read the whitepaper it is pretty obvious that the author did not intent bitcoin to be a "digital gold" secondary settlement layer. And the low transaction fee "BSV" version is a lot closer to the original idea than the current "BTC" version.

Yes. There is strait up clear evidence of his fraud.

The tricks he used to convince Gavin were revealed later and shown to be fraud—he used slight of hand to reuse a historical block chain signature rather than produce one.

Revealed how? By Gavin Andressen or Craig Wright?

By CW. He later did a blog post showing the same "proof" that he had done in person with Gavin.

you're not alone. it's pretty obvious when you care enough to listen to him directly talking about bitcoin, economy, law, history... There's a lot of quality interdisciplinary information coming from him, that makes infinite more sense than anything anybody else says about bitcoin. you just have to understand his aspergers manierisms, but for me it's clear he's the real deal, despite all the vicious fud coming from interested parties.

It's a shame that even in HN people aren't immune to the shallow crypto propaganda...

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