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I Am Not Satoshi

blog.dustintrammell.com

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Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#121

Post by nullc »

wmf wrote: post #106
nullc wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Founder's syndrome ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder%27s_syndrome ) is a common problem that Satoshi nicely sidestepped for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a zero-trust system, it should be judged on its merits, not extrapolations of its creators motivations. The 1.5M claim is bullshit, however. People come up with these gigantic numbers by claiming that all coins unspent mined in the first year (or all coins mined in the f…

Here's a detailed analysis (just under 1M BTC; I'm not sure why I remembered 1.5M): http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fo... http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/satoshi-s-fortune-a-...

Yes, but the 1M number there is simply counting up all the unspent blocks in the first year. Though the author presented an argument for further distinguishing blocks into "maybe satoshi" "not satoshi" sets, that wasn't actually done for the count.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#122

Post by wrongc0ntinent »

This is the amazing "Sunday" research paper. It's OK if you stop at the giant red typo, but you may eventually get the point: "The short path we found (which is depicted in Figure 6) suggests (but does not prove) the existence of a surprising link between the two mysterious figures of the Bitcoin community, Satoshi Nakamoto and DPR. It is reasonable to assume that all the accounts described along the top of Figure 6 belong to the same person, but to be on the safe side we refer to him as a “Founder” rather than as Satoshi Nakamoto. We are sure that analyzing this figure will start a very vigorous debate in the Bitcoin community."

In other words, "we're covering our asses so we don't have to retract, but we're expert and relevant to this bitcoin thing."

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#123

Post by Aqueous »

eof wrote: post #49
buremba wrote: post #28

I don't really understand why Satoshi wants to be hidden. Is it because of the legal issues or does he want be a hidden super character?

If you've been paying attention for the last three years, almost everyone thought the US government would crack down on bitcoin with a vengence, satoshi very well may have been genuinely fearful of the ramifications of his software. It is also possible that satoshi is a group of people and not a person. Lastly, the idiosyncratic nature of someone who spends their time on crypto mailing lists and making crypto currenc…

If he is not motivated by anything like ego or credit then - as Charleton Heston would have said in a lame 50s Bible movie - 'He really is the son of God.'

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#124

Post by Aqueous »

feral wrote: post #61
wmf wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a fairly typical case of an advisor giving a student free reign. Most professors do not invest the time to understand their students' work as much as you might think.

As your comment is 3rd from the top of page: You could investigate that with a few minutes of googling - the 'student' has been writing CS papers since the mid '80s [0] This reminds me of when someone on HN described both the authors as 'some Israeli CS students' [1] Whatever you think about this particular paper, the authors are experienced researchers. [0] http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~dron/ [1] https://news.yc…

And as Adi Shamir could have found out with a little more Googling, the address belonged to Trammell, not Satoshi.

It takes a bad Googler to know a bad Googler.

I guess we're all just bad Googlers.

We should really brush up on our Googling.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#126

Post by a_bonobo »

judk wrote: post #115
ars_technician wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the research Shamir does at this point is basically crap like this, which is why it's on a website instead of in a conference or journal.

Exposing a weakness in the post-journal open access publishing model. Non peer reviewed work getting more attention thannpeer reviewed work. At least on boards like HN, which I guess never respected the academic community as much as bloggers anyway.

Post journal open access publishing _includes_ peer-review; see PLOS ONE, PeerJ etc.

Similar problems as OP's have been noticed with non "post-journal open access publishing model". That's generally called "science by press conference" now - the most famous case was the arsenic life paper, which was published in Science, a "traditional" journal, and then later retracted after their press conference before the publication generated a huge buzz (and two later papers contradicted their findings).

This isn't a problem that's caused by open access or new publishing models.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#127

Post by javert »

nullc wrote: post #101
betterunix wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 requir…

It was a simple white paper, offered up anonymously for only what it was. It made no claims which have been demonstrated to be false, which is more than you can say about the paper being discussed here. The Bitcoin whitepaper does what it says on the tin, you're the one inventing criteria for it that it doesn't meet. The white paper is also remarkably readable, which is something you can't say for most academic works…

Betterunix has been in this discussion many, many times.

I don't think there is any way to get him to stop saying that bitcoin isn't an achievement and that it is a priori invalid because it doens't have a "formal security model."

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#128

Post by Smegger »

yeukhon wrote: post #80

If I really want to find out who satoshi is I would have lie to all and wait until the actual Satoshi to come out and call me a liar. Anyway, life goes on - I do want to find out who Satoshi is really...

it would be a fairly easy thing to disprove you claim while staying anonymous all he would have to do is call you out and ask you to cryptographically verify yourself since you do not have his privet key he could just cryptographically sign his challenge to you and all could see that you are full of it.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#129

Post by Aqueous »

I think we should look closer at the cryptography mailing list for evidence of Satoshi's identity. It seems likely that at some point Satoshi posted under his real name about something unrelated to BitCoin, before he decided to switch identities to release BitCoin under a pseudonym. I really doubt that Satoshi would have lurked silently there for many years before suddenly dropping the BitCoin whitepaper on the list without once contributing under his own name, perhaps before he was even thinking about BitCoin.

I think someone should do a quantified textual analysis of posts to to derive some sort of written language fingerprint for each author on the Cryptography Mailing List. Has anyone been able to derive a unique fingerprint of written language that accurately predicts the identity of the author? Has an analysis like this been done and come up empty?

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#130

Post by jamesrom »

Aqueous wrote: post #129

I think we should look closer at the cryptography mailing list for evidence of Satoshi's identity. It seems likely that at some point Satoshi posted under his real name about something unrelated to BitCoin, before he decided to switch identities to release BitCoin under a pseudonym. I really doubt that Satoshi would have lurked silently there for many years before suddenly dropping the BitCoin whitepaper on the list…

> a unique fingerprint of written language that accurately predicts the identity of the author

These kinds of analysis are usually more "fuzzy" than "unique" and "accurate". And can be easily fooled if you are trying to remain anonymous. Especially in the case that Satoshi isn't a single person.

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