What Satoshi Didn't Know [video] | Hacker News Reader

What Satoshi Didn't Know [video]

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I converted this talk to mp3 audio to listen to it more conveniently: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cr388hk0uarg90j/DevCore%20Boston%2...

Is there a tldr (or in this case tldw)?

Satoshi Nakamoto is/was the anonymous creator of Bitcoin. He voluntarely disapeared a few years ago. Gavin Andersen is the lead developer of the open source Bitcoin project since then. In this video he talks about the past and the future of the cryptocurrency, and touches some parts of Bitcoin history and his relationship with Satoshi.

But what didn't Satoshi know?

From the video:

- That you can compress ECDSA public keys from 64 to 33 bytes

- Compression techniques that can be applied to the bitcoin protocol, such as inverted bloom lookup tables

- SNARKS

- Fully homomorphic encryption

- Various bugs in the initial bitcoin implementation, including one that created ~2 billion BTC

- Whether bitcoin was legal

- Whether it would take off

Fully homomorphic encryption is a really big one. It allows to perform operations on an encrypted data - in theory you could run a computer program that would have it's memory contents encrypted at all times.

In case of cryptocurrencies it means that it's possible to create a cryptocurrency that has all the advantages of bitcoin, but also guarantees total anonymity - i.e. you're able to prove that you have the coins and not show where the coins come from. Mixers would not be necessary, and it would not be possible to track the coins.

The practical implementation of this is called DarkCoin. When we were doing Orisi we considered launching a sidechain to Bitcoin that would do similar stuff. But abandoned the project - privacy is important, but we all know who would be the first clients would be ;)

Also, it is be possible to create computer programs that run on your computer and have their own money, but that money is impossible to be stolen from them (the private key is never decoded and never reaches the computer memory).

Imagine a frustration of a computer hacker that gets a program which will pay him 1 BTC if, and only if he solves a specific equation. The program is open-source, and yet there provably is no way to hack into it.

Or a program that sends you money when it sees phrase "XXX" on Hacker News (you cannot cheat by providing altered HN website, because the program verifies HN SSL certificate on a homomorphically encrypted virtual machine).

Is there a runnable, fully homomorphic encryption program that allows running turing complete languages?

IIRC it's a very fresh research. From what I heard It's definitely possible, but I don't think there are any working implementation of a turing complete machine on this.

Never roll your own crypto, unless you're a cryptographer.

At least he realized that.

But he did design his own protocol

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