Len Sassaman memorialized in the Bitcoin block-chain | Hacker News Reader

Len Sassaman memorialized in the Bitcoin block-chain

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68 pointstrotsky28 comments

It's a nice tribute to Len. Len's indirectly the reason I live in San Francisco today, and why I moved here without a job after graduating college. Through Len I met people who are my close friends in the hacker community today. The last time I heard from Len was four days before his death, and sadly, there was no indication that there was anything amiss.

I'm not sure of the exact circumstances of Len's passing, and I'll probably never really know. Instead, I'll just say that for all of you reading this today -- if you suffer from depression or feel a deep darkness over you, please seek help. Depression is a disease, and it can be treated. So while it may seem hopeless, or that nobody knows of the deep burden you carry, give it a chance. There was a time you felt good, even if it's hard to remember right now, and there's a way to get back to that place.

RIP Len. ;-(

This is veering off the original topic, but isn't the ability to embed arbitrary text into the blockchain a bit problematic? Suppose a nefarious actor embedded text under current copyright (that s/he did not own) into the chain?

(or other data, though presumably text is the only medium where a possibly significant violation seems likely given the size limitations).

It's a lovely tribute to Len. It's perhaps worth pointing out that he was not a fan of Bitcoin. Here are some of his Bitcoin-related Tweets over the last few weeks of his life:

@glynmoody I wasn't happy with EFF's original acceptance of bitcoin, but I agree with you that their reasons for reversing course are "eh."

https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/83095852104695809

@znmeb Ah, then you'd be missing the people advising their mothers to put their life savings into Bitcoin while they still can get in on it.

https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/82850601876205568

@mentalguy The question is, though, just how much of Bitcoin's success is due to irrational exuberance? I think most of it.

https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/82754572958961664

mentalguy

RT @mentalguy Also, if I had a significant BTC balance, I'd have kept it in PDF417 in a safe deposit box, not on someone's servers. Retweeted by lensassaman

https://twitter.com/mentalguy/status/82552784876089344

In reply to Mary Gardiner wishing the damn "kids would get off her lawn":

@hypatiadotca As a cypherpunk entering middle age, I have one word in response to that: Bitcoin.

https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/82638700185530368

@jonmatonis has your opinion of bitcoin's anonymity (or rather, lack off) finally changed?

https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/84184691892166656

Ugh, another stupid article claiming "anonymity is inherent in Bitcoin." Dear reporters: please stop sucking. | http://j.mp/iU2paU

https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/81431725510635521

@dredeyedick That only works if you want to leave the inflated value of Bitcoin on the table; otherwise you must cash out before the crash.

https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/81121594373709825

Those tweets read like someone who had a levelheaded view of Bitcoin, as compared to a minority of irrational Bitcoin fanboys. A Bitcoin bubble is a real issue. Volatility is a real issue. Anonymity is a real issue. Despite those issues, Bitcoin is still really cool.

I wonder if he will talk about it in this lecture [1].

[1]: http://events.ccc.de/camp/2011/Fahrplan/events/4555.en.html

Yes, he will. He will also be talking about it at Blackhat.

Wait 'till somebody encodes child porn in the block-chain... BitCoin will be illegal a week.

Pirated material works too, but that would probably be legislated against a bit more slowly.

This ASCII is child porn. I can tell by some of the characters, and having seen many unicodes in my day.

yEnc or Base64-encoded JPEG image?

Could someone explain what this means?

Who Len was or what the blockchain is?

Len Sassaman was a very prominent member of the cypherpunk community who recently passed away.

The blockchain is the record of all transactions that the bitcoin network has processed. The blockchain is how bitcoin clients know who sent how many bitcoins and to whom.

Can you explain what Dan Kaminsky is trying to do with the Genesis block?

Edit: corrected for improper terminology. I understand now.

I do not know what the genesis blockchain is.

You are mixing two different terms here: The blockchain is a list of transactions that are linked to each other using cryptographic functions. Each block in the chain links to it's parent block. The genesis block is the first block created, it has no parent block. As proof that Bitcoin wasn't started before a specific date, the block references a The Times headline ("Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks").

Dan Kaminsky figured out a way to embed ascii text into the block chain. I did not try to find out how he did it, but he probably created some transactions that include those strings. If you want to find out more about how he did it, he will give a talk at the Chaois Communications Camp related to Bitcoin.

I knew who Len Sassaman was. I did not know how the blockchain worked, or how Dan Kaminsky and Travis Goodspeed added this tribute to it.

(Presumably) Dan Kaminsky and Travis Goodspeed modified a bitcoin miner so that when it found a block, it would embed this tribute inside one of its unused field. (or rather, it embeds it in the transaction that is created as a part of generating a new block, the "coinbase".)

I verified it by typing in the command. The ASCII Bernanke is truly hilarious.

" coauthor and cofounder and Shmoo and so much more.

A typo immortalized?

Could be because of the width constraint (could be self imposed)

The method that Dan Kaminsky used is subject to a width constraint in Bitcoin.

That's quite the memorial. And that ASCII Bernanke is STARING INTO MY SOUL O_O.

Um, this is not part of the bitcoin block-chain? The bitcoin blockchain started way back in 2009. Nice try?

Perhaps this guy is Satoshi Nakamoto?

I am confused.

The block chain is always growing. This was recently added to it.

Edit: Never mind, I understand.

Sure it is. You can verify it yourself.

  [tsl@pepper ~]$ strings -n 20 ~/.bitcoin/blk0001.dat | tail -3
  :TXXXWw,_ "), ,wWT: 
  ::TTXXWWW lXl WWT:  
  ----END TRIBUTE---- 
  [tsl@pepper ~]$

The bitcoin blockchain contains a record of every verified transaction that's happened to date - it needs this information to verify new transactions. Sometime in the last 500 blocks or so, Kaminsky and Goodspeed used a trick to embed this memorial inside a transaction, which is then dutifully stored by all bitcoin clients.

One wonders how the creators intend to scale a system where every user needs the entire past state of every coin..

How else are you going to guarantee the irreversibility and proof in such a system? The block chain was very much a careful design consideration.

Every user doesn't even need the full set of transactions. I buy and sell bitcoins and have only run the desktop client for a few minutes to see what it looked like.

See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability.

It is true that the network would have to evolve to a two-tiered structure with supernodes and client nodes. In Satoshi's paper it is explained how low-power client nodes can do "Simplified Payment Verification" (Section 8 of http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf). This is the mode implemented by bitcoinj (http://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/) and it is already used to run bitcoin clients on android.

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