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Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

I've always felt it was more of a consortium of people as well.

It makes a lot of sense if you start to think about it. With a small group of people working on it, it spreads the knowledge out, decentralizes any authorship or specific authority for credit and makes it easy for the team to simply vanish without a trace since most people are looking for one person, instead of many. Sounds a lot like BTC itself, doesn't it? I wouldn't doubt this was part of the design from the very beginning.

It then leaves the by-product behind for others to pick up and push forward - which is essentially what's happened.

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I very much doubt Satoshi is a group of people, because the nature of bitcoin is too much of a creative leap to have been discovered by committee.

That said, "Satoshi" could have had a group of suboordinates or collaborators working with him on the grunt work. Though again, from what I've read about the original C++ code, it looked like the work of a lone genius-albiet-non-programmer.

A distributed Digital currency backed by processing power was a fairly old idea at the time. The first time I heard about the idea was late 90's but I think it's earlier than that.

EX: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon

What about the idea of a blockchain? Because that's the creative leap.

How else do you propose to create a distributed concurrency?

The traditional approach would be a public ledger mantained by the 'miners' aka a block-chain. The the issue is that's not anonymous, but while a lot research went into creating an anonymous currency bitcoin was a MVP which took off. Now, I am not saying nothing about bitcoin was new, just the innovation was in the specific implementation not the overall idea.

Bit torrent was released in July 2001, bitcoin 2009 so the idea of distributed networks was fairly well established at the time.

PS: And yes, there was a lot of early criticism about the public nature of bitcoin.

There really was no "traditional approach" to creating a distributed digital currency at the time. The blockchain is a product of Satoshi's thought and is the central innovation in bitcoin. The principal issue was not anonymity but making a network that didn't require third parties to prevent double-spending. Genuine technical problems that a lot of smart people hadn't been able to solve were solved by bitcoin.

Bittorrent was way easier because it was about copying, whereas a currency has to in a sense make copying impossible via some sort of time-stamping to prevent double-spend.

> How else do you propose to create a distributed concurrency?

That's the point: No one knew how to do that before Satoshi.

> The traditional approach would be a public ledger mantained by the 'miners' aka a block-chain.

Are you joking? If you knew about the blockchain and miners before 2008, you could have simply created Bitcoin yourself and become multimillionaire.

> The the issue is that's not anonymous, but while a lot research went into creating an anonymous currency bitcoin was a MVP which took off.

The issue was no one knew how to create a trustless consensus mechanism. And Bitcoin is not anonymous, it's pseudonymous. True anonymity only became possible after Bytecoin's innovation in the use of ring signatures. Nowadays the most popular coin with true anonymity is Monero (created in 2014, as a fork of Bytecoin with a fair distribution).

> the innovation was in the specific implementation not the overall idea

Clearly you don't know what you are talking about.

> Bit torrent

What does that have to do with anything? Bittorrent doesn't use a blockchain.

The blockchain is just a hash tree, which was patented by Ralph Merkle in 1979. Using blocks of financial transactions as nodes is a new application, but not so different to the idea of propagating rights down the certificate chain you find in PKI.

The blockchain is not just a hash tree. There's other features that mesh together in the blockchain. For example a proof-of-work system that allows bitcoin to be distributed and trust-less by preventing Sybil attacks. While using rewards for this work as the sole means of money creation was anticipated by others, the automatic means of adjusting the cost function is a Satoshi original and very important to the success of bitcoin.

This is not exactly correct. Nobody had proposed a system that was as distributed as bitcoin until bitcoin came on the scene. Szabo wanted to use lots of timestamp servers and Finney wanted to rely on "transparent servers" that borrowed ideas from Trusted Computing so they could be audited.

To have a currency backed by processing power is not really an old idea either. It was at most 10 years old and nobody really had a good idea how proof-of-work (POW) could make a currency at that time (around 1999). I'm referring to the "Bread Pudding" variant of MicroMint (http://www.hashcash.org/papers/bread-pudding.pdf), not Cryptonomicon which doesn't really mention distributed computing or POW.

One person could have come up with the idea, brought it to a few close friends who took it and ran. There are many examples of close groups of talented friends building successful good quality products.

But not a bunch of friends that can keep such a huge secret and resist touching those (very valuable) early mined coins.

With multiple people in a consortium, I cannot believe that one of them can resist appearing on the front page of Time magazine. Loners are much better at staying hidden. E.g. the Unibomber or any number of serial killers who worked alone.

>>> I cannot believe that one of them can resist appearing on the front page of Time magazine.

I agree on this point. But if you have three people with the integrity and high moral cause, there's no reason a group of people can keep a secret.

Look at all the secret societies we currently have just in this country.

>>> Loners are much better at staying hidden. E.g. the Unibomber or any number of serial killers who worked alone.

This, however is not true in terms of serial killers. Most get caught because they want to get caught and like the media attention and the trying to out smart the police.

The only reason the unabomber got caught was that he was upset about the 9/11 bombing overshadowed one of his recent bombings and was stealing his media attention. Shortly thereafter, he insisted his manifesto be published, which then led his brother to turn him in after he read it.

It was the very pursuit of attention that you say leads groups to not be able to keep secrets that did in many high profile serial killers who often worked alone.

The one exception being either the Zodiac killer or the Golden State killer who you could just as easily call outliers.

I'll point out that the Bitcoin cliet was not originally a good quality product, and in fact was rather full of bugs and security issues, not to mention being rather heavily tied to Windows.

"Creative leap"? Most influential technologies are either incremental improvements that overcame some final hump, or straight retries of things which were before their time.

The blockchain is a creative leap, not an "improvement".

If "Satoshi" was smart enough to write Bitcoin, could "Satoshi" have been smart enough to obfuscate their code writing style?

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