Looking at the hash rate reductions and how it seems to be explicitly controlled first (1) to drop just below 50% and then (2) fading out, it's almost as if Satoshi was thinking (1) build trust in the network by not maintaining a 51+% attack position and (2) the network is self-sustainable, my work here is done.
Yeah, I imagine there was a testing aspect to what he was doing, and you pointed out some potential tests. Maybe just making sure the version that went live responds the way he predicted it would.
> It's clear that Satoshi was able to achieve some sort of fine tuned [hash-rate] control. I'm not sure how such control could be maintained, but I'm willing to guess that the standard client on a home PC wouldn't be able to do it.
This is something the operating system can provide (or another application). No need for a 'special' client.
I find it increasingly hard to believe that Satoshi was one person. It is, however, in the best interest of everyone but journalists that they keep their identities hidden to avoid ad hominem attacks.
One argument against the consortium of people is that the more people you add, the more likely someone leaks. There have been no leaks and as far as I aware those early mined Satoshi blocks haven't been moved.
That being said, rather than a group of friends, a government agency or a highly secretive group of cyberpunks, I could imagine two or more family members keeping such a secret. However it would still be hard to resist the urge to cash in on even some of those mined coins, unless you were already stinking rich.
I know that many have theorised that Satoshi could have simply lost the coins, but as the author states in his article, it seems like Satoshi went out of his way to back up his clients on a regular basis. That isn't the action of someone who loses things so easily, especially if they both believed in, and could appreciate the impact of the project.
This is an interesting idea. Given the additive properties of bitcoin keys it would even be pretty easy to make a key that was very very unlikely to be recoverable. Three people separately generate keys, throw away the private keys, and then mine to the product of the three public keys. It would take all three of them lying about throwing away the private keys and then collaborating to recover the combined private key to get the coins back.
Another possibility is that one (or more) of the 3 installs spyware on the other collaborators before the generation (or at least before the subsequent destruction) of the private keys. Then the attacker waits a while and then combines all the captured keys to produce the combined private key and claim/spend the mother lode.
I'd put this at pretty unlikely - I suspect the early experiment was never expected to take off anywhere close to what it has and so the foresight of doing this probably overlooked.
A great deal of effort must have gone into staying anonymous, and planning & designing & developing the client, the network, the scripting language, the economic progression (difficulty levels, decreasing block rewards, etc) and even the ascii content embedded in the genesis block. There must have been a plan for the first mining operation as well, why put in so much effort and then be surprised it catches on?
The "unfairness" of pre-mining (or early mining) must have been considered.
OTOH i haven't looked at the numbers. Would a dump of Satoshi's holdings crash the market?
I like this theory too. There was a lot of thought put into creating the platform, so it's reasonable to assume that Satoshi just opted to mine enough to bootstrap the network, and decided to throw away the keys in order to not be tempted to use.
Had Satoshi used the coins before its time, it could have "contaminated" the experiment, and possibly crashed permanently the market. By mining and not using it, it increased its early value. I'm sure there's a mathematical proof somewhere that this would be the best option, especially if Satoshi is in fact a group of people.
Of course, Satoshi may still have the keys, and waiting a bit more before cashing in.
That's the beauty of bitcoin open ledger: we'll all know for sure in the next 10-15 years...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Creative leap"? Most influential technologies are either incremental improvements that overcame some final hump, or straight retries of things which were before their time.
He uses a bunch of colloquialisms which kinda hints at him living in an English speaking country. Obv one could also pick those up online, but I'm guessing that the first scenario is more likely.
No, I am not sure, but if you look at all the evidence discussed by other people who have researched his posts, there are a lot of signs that suggest he is a native speaker. If you sit down and read all of his bitcointalk posts, it's pretty easy to come to the same conclusion.
There's also always the chance his parents are Japanese but he was born in an English-speaking country, but I think considering the fact he clearly wanted to hide his identity, he probably picked a name that was unrelated to his true nationality and ethnicity.
Well, if we have access to his posts (which we do) couldn't someone run it through a program that attempts to find consistencies in an author's writing style? I know there are several such. Of course this would only prove if there was either on 'PR' person for the group or not, but it's a start for testing this hypothesis.
From this can we estimate what kind of hardware Satoshi was using? Like was it feasible to get that hash rate on 1 desktop computer back then, or would he have been using a large number of computers?
That's what the author concludes actually, that this data might help determine Satoshi's hardware.
"These insights may help investigators determine the sort of hardware Satoshi used, and how much control he would have had over the early client or his PC / cloud infrastructure."
Or it was a group of people smart enough to realize that behaving like a group was exactly the thing people would think a group of smart people who want to stay anonymous would be unlikely to do.
There most likely was a simple gpu miner that wasn't public knowledge until later, which helped in balancing out the network without needing a horde of machines early on.
I hope Gwern and other writers interested in the Satoshi phenomenon keep tabs on stuff like this... I mean, the fact that you might be able to deduce his hardware and other small clues slowly being revealed, might eventually lead to a pretty stable image of the persona behind Bitcoin.
It's existence is a continual reminder of just how little many sites think of users.
I had been using it more and more in the last year or two, but I'm starting to give up. Between sites where it doesn't work, the pagination isn't right, or how slow sites are to load all their 'features' I've simply been leaving sites more and more.
Indeed. This is one of the most unreadable pages I came across in a while. The sidebar also creates a ton of problems. It interferes with my navigation habbits. When I use the cursor keys to move around, suddenly some other page loads.
Well, perhaps I was downvoted for "hating" those templates. I really, really dislike them.
As for the JS dependency, when I want to read an item published under such a template, I view the Google cache copy. It loads up just fine without JS -- or I'm forgetting that, foolish me, I have google.com whitelisted.
Not sure about one's satisfaction with this on mobile, but it would be worth a shot.
