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I Am Not Satoshi

blog.dustintrammell.com

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Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#101

Post by nullc »

betterunix wrote: post #89
nullymcnull wrote: post #78

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…

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.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#102

Post by nullc »

wmf wrote: post #58
cLeEOGPw wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me neither. As it appears he have not premined any significant amount of bitcoins, so it's not like he is going to cash out. So the version, besides that he wants to be "hidden super character" may be that he was not allowed by some organization to reveal who made this breakthrough. It's not even clear if it was a single person. But even if it was by some organization, why hide? Maybe they didn't want bitcoins foreve…

A movement cannot outgrow its charismatic leader until the leader dies. Satoshi would find it very difficult to retire if he wasn't anonymous. Also, Satoshi mined ~1.5M BTC, now "worth" over $1B.

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 first year at all!) were Satoshi. This is known to be untrue because there are many other people who mined in the first year and have coins unspent (or lost!) from then.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#103

Post by betterunix »

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…

"It made no claims which have been demonstrated to be false"

That is because no falsifiable claims were made.

(Edit: Strictly speaking, this is not true. Falsifiable claims were made; this, for example:

An attacker can only try to change one of his own transactions to take back money he recently spent.

This claim has already been falsified: an attacker who can control the block chain can also selectively deny transaction verifications and prevent miners from receiving the mining reward.)

"you're the one inventing criteria for it that it doesn't meet"

No, I am just stating the criteria that determine how well-researched a paper is. If a paper does not cite the relevant previous work, it is poorly researched -- that is the standard that every other paper is held to. If a cryptography paper does not have a well-formed or clearly articulated security definition, it is poorly researched -- that is the standard other cryptography papers are held to. If a security paper breaks from widely accepted notions of security but never bothers to justify that, it is poorly researched. These are not unheard-of criteria, these are standard fare.

"The white paper is also remarkably readable"

What is your point? Readability is orthogonal to how well-researched a paper is.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#104

Post by memracom »

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?

What if Satoshi is actually a group of NSA agents who created a new crypto-currency as a honey-trap to attract bad guys so that they could either stop them or use them as slave agents. What if?

Would that Satoshi want to be identified?

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#105

Post by maaku »

betterunix wrote: post #67
maaku wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He had a balance of ~1200 btc on mtgox in March of 2013, during a time when bitcoin was hovering around $50. Had he sold it all then it would have been a cool $60k. Had he kept it until now, it would be approximately $1MM (it's never been below $50 since that time). Whether that counts as "rich" is a matter of perspective, I guess.

It only counts as "rich" if he can use the money. I suspect that in practice, such large amounts of Bitcoin money have limited usefulness. It would be hard to get the actual million dollars his wallet is supposedly worth. There are still exceedingly few businesses that accept Bitcoin payments. At best, he could get augment whatever other income he has by selling small amounts of his Bitcoin money at a time.

Mtgox had millions is USD daily volume at that time.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#106

Post by wmf »

nullc wrote: post #102
wmf wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A movement cannot outgrow its charismatic leader until the leader dies. Satoshi would find it very difficult to retire if he wasn't anonymous. Also, Satoshi mined ~1.5M BTC, now "worth" over $1B.

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-...

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#107

Post by nilved »

michaelt wrote: post #75
betterunix wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only counts as "rich" if he can use the money. I suspect that in practice, such large amounts of Bitcoin money have limited usefulness. It would be hard to get the actual million dollars his wallet is supposedly worth. There are still exceedingly few businesses that accept Bitcoin payments. At best, he could get augment whatever other income he has by selling small amounts of his Bitcoin money at a time.

According to [1] and [2] I can sell 100 bitcoins for $88,631 or $96,805 at Bitstamp and Mtgox respectively - or 10,000 bitcoins for $7,155,446 and $8,797,257 As I understand it those are offers to buy that are on the market right now, so you could execute the trades instantly. [1] http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/bitstampUSD_depth.html [2] http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD_depth.html

Yes, but in doing so you increase supply and therefore decrease the price. When you have a large amount of bitcoins, selling them all means flooding the market and ultimately selling them at a very low price. The best you can do is sell a portion every day.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#109

Post by manuelflara »

unreal37 wrote: post #70
manuelflara wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you get that 20,000 Bitcoins are worth (even hypothetically) one billion? Even at $1,000 per BTC that's just $20M.

The paper linked speculates that a small group of people mined the first 20,000 blocks of Bitcoin. 20,000 blocks (@50 coins each) is 1,000,000 bitcoins, which @ $1000 is $1 billion.

Ah, got it. Confused bitcoin with blocks. Thanks.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#110

Post by ninguem2 »

vbuterin wrote: post #20

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.

And the S in RSA.
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