Live data from Hacker News

I Am Not Satoshi

blog.dustintrammell.com

161–170 of 179 posts

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#163
post #87

This 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. This is definitely a very st…

No. Blockchain.info indexes the block chain by address. bitcoind indexes the block chain by transaction IDs (if you enable it). You'd still have to index the data you get from RPC calls by address if you want to track the movement of certain coins.

It's a lot easier to just get it from blockchain.info.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's correct. The market isn't nearly as illiquid as some of the commentors on this forum would like you to think.

According to my calculator, selling 1000 BTC on Bitstamp would yield $867,833 with a slippage/liquidity cost of $28,958, or around 3% of 'face value.'

I made a little Python script that calculates the slippage from selling/buying an amount of BTC on various exchanges. Here's the result for selling 1000 BTC right now (in both USD and EUR):

    rune@rune-desktop:~/Programming/scripts/bitcoin$ ./depth.py 1000
    1000.00 bitcoins can be sold for 956,782.15 USD on Mt. Gox with a slippage of 28,317.85 USD (2.87%)
    1000.00 bitcoins can be sold for 922,365.80 USD on Bitstamp with a slippage of 18,434.20 USD (1.96%)
    1000.00 bitcoins can be sold for 864,201.16 USD on Bitfinex with a slippage of 76,548.84 USD (8.14%)
    44.38 bitcoins (insufficient bid volume) can be sold for 22,951.93 USD on Kraken with a slippage of 964,703.67 USD (97.68%)
    rune@rune-desktop:~/Programming/scripts/bitcoin$ ./depth.py -c EUR 1000
    1000.00 bitcoins can be sold for 697,614.73 EUR on Mt. Gox with a slippage of 17,392.27 EUR (2.43%)
    No orderbook for BTCEUR on Bitstamp
    No orderbook for BTCEUR on Bitfinex
    81.19 bitcoins (insufficient bid volume) can be sold for 52,229.71 EUR on Kraken with a slippage of 679,770.29 EUR (92.86%)

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#165
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

But $1B in nominal marginal priced BTC is faaar less liquid (less order book depth) than most other assets.

Yeah, it's worth more like $50M if you place your sells across exchanges:

    1,600,000.00 bitcoins can be sold for 35,066,701.01 USD on Mt. Gox with a slippage of 1,544,789,298.99 USD (97.78%)
    222,043.14 bitcoins (insufficient bid volume) can be sold for 15,395,973.27 USD on Bitstamp with a slippage of 1,493,404,026.73 USD (98.98%)

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#166

I wonder, is research like journalism where an academic is morally obliged to issue a retraction or correction for conclusions shown, conclusively, to be false?

Looks like they posted a retraction: http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/27/technology/bitcoin-silk-road...

I hope they also apologized.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#167

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.

If it pointed to a particular individual then people would quickly find corroborating evidence (or not), so the fuzziness doesn't make the analysis useless.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#168
Here's another thing to consider: the NSA and other intelligence agencies have most likely already figured out who is behind Bitcoin, even if the general public have not.

What does that mean?

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#169

I wonder, is research like journalism where an academic is morally obliged to issue a retraction or correction for conclusions shown, conclusively, to be false?

Looks like they posted a retraction: http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/27/technology/bitcoin-silk-road... I hope they also apologized.

So, they put forward a theory, it turned out to be wrong, they said "ok, we agree, we were wrong". I think this is how the science is supposed to work, not? Vast number of theories and ideas are put out and most of them prove to be wrong, some prove to be true. I think it is a very normal and healthy process and I wonder why so many people feel the need to attack the researchers personally just because one of their ideas turned out to be wrong.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 requir…

Personally, I say thank god it was poorly researched. If the whole thing was inundated with 20 pages of obscure terminology and various arcane inequalities far fewer people would have understood it. Also, Bitcoin takes such a completely different tack from existing digital cash and SMPC schemes that I think including any discussion on those would have been distracting.
Post reply on HN