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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.

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.)

> 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.

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.

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.