What Satoshi Did Not Know (2015) [pdf]
ifca.ai
ifca.ai
It describes the architecture of Bitcoin exactly. It is conclusive evidence that Szabo invented Bitcoin.
Come to think about it, this Bit gold -> Bitcoin renaming theory would also explain why miners are called miners in Bitcoin. "Minters" (with a t) would be a much more logical name if you started with the coin analogy from the beginning.
> I haven't analyzed BitCoin, but the impression of multiple digital cash experts I've talked to is that it's bunk. [1]
> I'd be more optimistic about BitCoin if I had the impression that they were acting on lessons learned from prior attempts. [2]
> Wow; there exists a Tor+bitcoin illegal drug marketplace, appropriately called Silk Road. [3]
> Ugh, another stupid article claiming "anonymity is inherent in Bitcoin." [4]
> This big Bitcoin heist shows Bitcoin suffers from the worst of both worlds: no strong anonymity, yet no fraud reversal protection. [5]
[1] https://nitter.net/lensassaman/status/12213554224562176
[2] https://nitter.net/lensassaman/status/56487900136734720
[3] https://nitter.net/lensassaman/status/69301492342980608
Plus, what would you expect him to do? Praise it and point everyone towards it? :p
But in this case, after 15 years of analysis, we can say with confidence that the double hashing bitcoin does is redundant.
Could be a whole dev team at a company (Twitter Inc. for example) or a government agency just as well.
I think it can safely be assumed that he is dead. Or that he is a person with very little interest in money and fame, which is possible but unlikely. Persons like Grigory Perelman are rare.
The other oddity in the code is that there is a mixture of US/UK spellings being used, which also suggests more than one person.
Oh, and the pizza thing is another myth, the real monetization was the liberty exchange setting up as market for $/bitcoin exchanges.
Not an oddity are all, it suggests a non-native speaker. US/UK spelling inconsistency is rather common unless you went to school in one of the two.
Maybe he is just canadian. We use a mix.
It looked nothing like academic C++. It was also very small. Some people accuse it for being "messy" because it was highly coupled and non-modular. But that would have been premature and would have increased the size and complexity dramatically. Its lack of modularity was mostly reasonable for its level of complexity, and had Satoshi tried to make it modular he probably would have created boundaries that would have needed to be thrown out later.
When I first got into Bitcoin I just read all the code. I know plenty of other people did too, that wouldn't have been half as reasonable had had been broken into a lot of parts with interfaces between them.
First time I read this word and there seem to be no positive results for it on Google.
However, a government agency with extreme competency and desire to keep their involvement secret could spoof this, as well as spoof looking like an individual.
But Occam's Razor pushes me to believe it was just a single dude who happened to get enough things right to produce an escape velocity money protocol.
One thing that suggests a single author (but certainly no proof) is the continued secrecy: bigger group means higher probability of a leak (accidental as much as deliberate). In a way, the probability of an author group is sinking over time, because "unexposed for n years" and "unexposed for n+1 years" aren't the same observation.
Even a single person would have continued communication as Satoshi if they were able to, as their life's work became an incredible success. No, Satoshi was a single person who is no longer able to communicate because they are dead. And there are several good candidates who meet that description.
Personally I'm a fan of the "butler did it" theory, i.e. Hal Finney, who indeed died at the right time.
If the former, Satoshi at least thought many governments would try to make it illegal.
No, it was bootstrapped by ransomware companies encrypting your data in order to demand a ransom paid only in Bitcoin. This is how literally all money starts - not as a facilitator of existing economic transactions but as a conduit for imposing coercive taxation. e.g. the US Dollar is money because the US government demands you pay taxes in that currency.
The first historical examples of money were invading tyrants and conquerors paying their soldiers in coins they could mint and demanding payment of taxes in the same money. Since the people being subjugated didn't have the coins they needed to pay, they had to sell their useful goods and services to soldiers in exchange for worthless discs of metal that indicated that they had sufficiently funded their oppressor's further military expansion.
Ok, sure, that's a nice history fact, but how does that relate to cybercrime? Ransomware vendors can't print Bitcoin!
They can, in the same way everyone else does: mining it. Except because we're already breaking into other people's computers to encrypt files, we can also just mine the Bitcoin on their computers that they will later have to buy to pay us. A huge amount of cybercrime is just mining Bitcoin, because you can then sell that Bitcoin - which is free to you - to your victims in exchange for useful goods and services[0].
What Satoshi didn't know is is not would it bootstrap, but how. Money bootstraps not by being more private, more inflation-resistant, or just by being better money, but by the use of coercive force[1]. Bitcoin is objectively worse money than US dollars - there's expensive transaction fees, high confirmation times, price volatility, etc. People use it anyway because they have to - otherwise, the person who broke into their servers is going to either delete or leak all their valuable business data.
[0] Ok, yes, US Dollars.
[1] This implies the only acceptable economy under the NAP[2] is a barter economy, because barter and payments-in-kind is what people choose to use in contexts where there is no coercion.
[2] "Non-aggression principle", a thing right-libertarians like to talk about as if it's so self-evident we don't even need to talk about it.
The first people using Bitcoin were not ransomware users; the first bootstrappers were not involved with Silk Road at all.
It is quite the insult to those people, many of whom were highly ethical, to insist that their efforts, development, and research were motivated by illegal intent.
Mining on broken-into-computers is not possible.
Satoshi predicted significantly specialized mining operations, which is exactly what happened. He didn't predict pooling, which happened to be a massive accelerator. Pool mining is also not criminal in nature, intent, nor progress.
There is no coercive force in Bitcoin. The use of Bitcoin by people is entirely non-coercive. If ransomware were its only use, and were not merely a parasitic opportunistic drain on Bitcoin momentum, then its overall value would be zero; thus, your assertion that ransomware is some kind of driving force which imparts value to Bitcoin is self-inconsistent on its face.
Why not? If I have enough access to machine in order to get an (asymmetric) encryption key off of a server, encrypt all your files with it, and delete the originals, why can't I also warm the CPU for the few days it takes for my victim to buy Bitcoin? It doesn't matter if the returns are awful because the hardware I'm mining on was stolen (thus free).
>It is quite the insult to those people, many of whom were highly ethical, to insist that their efforts, development, and research were motivated by illegal intent.
Malmi, the "Bitcoin pizza guy", Satoshi, and everyone else in the legit side of Bitcoin are not the targets of my original post and I don't believe they had any illegal motivations. They just had the wrong priors, and accidentally built something that's enormously useful for criminals looking to build a parallel state.
> The use of Bitcoin by people is entirely non-coercive.
The use of the word "entirely" is dangerous to you. Because the mere existence of a ransomware program demanding Bitcoin - and there are a lot of them - lets me be cheeky and refute your argument.
If you want to argue that there are substantial non-coercive uses of Bitcoin, sure. I don't believe they're big enough to sustain Bitcoin's current or prior valuations.
> If ransomware were its only use, and were not merely a parasitic opportunistic drain on Bitcoin momentum, then its overall value would be zero;
Having to buy Bitcoin to pay ransom puts upward pressure on Bitcoin prices. It's not a drain on adoption, it's a booster of it, because a LOT of organizations get hacked and have to use Bitcoin to pay ransoms.