Will the real Satoshi please stand up?
I Am Not Satoshi
81–90 of 179 posts
Re: I Am Not Satoshi
#82I doubt the real identity of Satoshi will ever be revealed. Seriously, if the claims of Satoshi mining the first 20,000 Bitcoins is true (with a value of almost one billion), would he seriously want to be publicly known? I would imagine the FBI amongst other Government organisations and figures would love nothing more than to pick Satoshi's brain (by force if need be) if his or her identity were to ever be truly reve…
Where did you get that 20,000 Bitcoins are worth (even hypothetically) one billion? Even at $1,000 per BTC that's just $20M.
Some people estimate his net worth to have been not 20,000, but 1.6 million bitcoins. That adds to over a billion dollars.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto-the...
Re: I Am Not Satoshi
#83If his statement is true the "research" by Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir seems more than just accidentally flawed, not to say even highly misleading.
Well, he said that the research was funded by Citi bank's 'philanthropic' foundation. Is he mentioning that to insinuate that a bank is trying to produce de-anonymizing scare research about Bitcoin, which need not be true so long as it shakes consumer confidence?
I suspect it's just very easy to get funding for Bitcoin related research right now because it's a hot topic, but that would be a much more fun explanation...
Re: I Am Not Satoshi
#84I wonder, is research like journalism where an academic is morally obliged to issue a retraction or correction for conclusions shown, conclusively, to be false?
If it were published in an academic journal, the journal would publish these remarks by Dustin Trammell in the next issue. But this "paper" was published online without peer review, so it's up to Ron and Shamir to do the right thing.
Re: I Am Not Satoshi
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was about to argue with you about it not being very confusing, but then I read the "About" section on the front page: "This site allows you to navigate the bitcoin blockchain (a database which holds information about all transactions)." That really does make it sound like they are storing the centralized database for bitcoin. Edit: changed "storing a" to "storing the" to clarify my point per gojomo's reply.
I can see where you are coming from, but how could you word that to be technically correct, succinct (not a full blown lecture on what bitcoin is), and not leave yourself open to giving people that impression? Bitcoin isn't the simplest concept around. Unless you are in the business of packaging up bitcoin for non-technical consumers, I think it is reasonable to expect your users to bring some knowledge about bitcoin…
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Re: I Am Not Satoshi
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was about to argue with you about it not being very confusing, but then I read the "About" section on the front page: "This site allows you to navigate the bitcoin blockchain (a database which holds information about all transactions)." That really does make it sound like they are storing the centralized database for bitcoin. Edit: changed "storing a" to "storing the" to clarify my point per gojomo's reply.
I can see where you are coming from, but how could you word that to be technically correct, succinct (not a full blown lecture on what bitcoin is), and not leave yourself open to giving people that impression? Bitcoin isn't the simplest concept around. Unless you are in the business of packaging up bitcoin for non-technical consumers, I think it is reasonable to expect your users to bring some knowledge about bitcoin…
"This site allows you to navigate through a copy of the bitcoin blockchain"
Re: I Am Not Satoshi
#87This is not even the first paper by Dorit Ron and Shamir on Bitcoin; they did an analysis of the transaction graph earlier: http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf And that one too was quite poorly done; from the text, it actually seemed like they thought that "the blockchain" is a file stored on blockchain.info. Disappointing from the inventor of Shamir's Secret Sharing and differential cryptanalysis.
We acquired the complete state of the Bitcoin transaction system [...]
This required downloading 180,001 separate but linked HTML fi les [...]
following the links backwards to the zeroth block [...]
Each fi le was parsed in order to extract all the multisender/multireceiver transactions in it, and then the collection of transactions was encoded as a standard database on our local machine.
Re: I Am Not Satoshi
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can see where you are coming from, but how could you word that to be technically correct, succinct (not a full blown lecture on what bitcoin is), and not leave yourself open to giving people that impression? Bitcoin isn't the simplest concept around. Unless you are in the business of packaging up bitcoin for non-technical consumers, I think it is reasonable to expect your users to bring some knowledge about bitcoin…
"This site allows you to navigate through a copy of the bitcoin blockchain"
Yeah, that's definitely better. You might still have people falling into the weird "the blockchain is a bunch of html documents" hole though.
Re: I Am Not Satoshi
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find the criticism of research papers on the part of Bitcoin supporters a bit ironic. Have people forgotten how poorly researched the original Bitcoin paper was?
Not sure what you mean by 'poorly researched'. Whatever it's flaws, it produced a hell of an innovative idea (or rather, a conglomeration of ideas into something innovative), and it has grown into something undeniably huge. Something people are building businesses upon. Something that is trading at over $900 USD/unit right now, despite countless rounds of naysayers decrying its intrinsic worthlessness and foretelling…
"Not sure what you mean by 'poorly researched'."
I mean that it was poorly researched. There was no definition of security, no mention of the vast body of related work in digital cash or secure multiparty computation, a weak security analysis, no mention of the fact that polynomial time attacks are usually considered to indicate that a system is not secure (one would think that a different security model would require at least some justification), and so forth. That is not the mark of a solid research paper; the fact that Bitcoin has become so famous or that people are making money with it has no bearing on the quality of Satoshi's own research.
Re: I Am Not Satoshi
#90Satoshi is a perl programmer