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I Am Not Satoshi

blog.dustintrammell.com

141–150 of 179 posts

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#141
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a positive thing, because it only grows trust between members of community.

Unless you are the one being hunted and have to stop your life to explain yourself and hope they get it before someone on FBI believes on it.

I think if you have much influence, people should know at least who you are. The same applies to any kind of influence, but with fiat currencies it is much easier to hide it in certain positions.

This could also have a maybe unintended consequence of increasing equality, because some people, knowing who has the most bitcoins, might act to decrease the influence they feel is too large by, for example, choosing alternative product or service to use or buy. We see this effect already with people feeling that corporations like Google have grown too big and some go out of their way to not use their services.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#142

One of the consequences of a public transaction chain is the great potential for witch hunts. Here's one of the first examples, but it surely won't be the last.

The scary thing of these kinds of witch hunts is that law enforcement is listening / reading / conducting hunts of their own. And they will be prone to the same mistakes as these readers.

That brings the frontrunners of Bitcoin in a predicament.

On the one hand they are often libertarians and very happy with the succes of Bitcoin. On the other hand, getting in early gives them some windfall gains, and law enforcement will go after them, since many of the real criminals using Bitcoin will remain elusive to them.

A little tidbit that will hit any of them sooner or later: did they properly file their taxes on the Bitcoins they mined? Trammell just admitted holding 800K$ worth of Bitcoins. Where did they come from? (Mining, I know, but those lawsuits will get hairy, because lack of knowledge.)

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#143
post #127
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Well he stopped saying there was no formal security analysis once someone linked him to one, I think. :)

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#144
post #91
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I stand corrected and I apologize to Dr. Ron. I am still not sure how much Shamir is responsible for the flaws in this research given that he's not the first author.

I'm not sure about this particular paper, but in most theoretical fields the authors are listed alphabetically by last name (the assumption being that each of them made a contribution without which the paper wouldn't exist - so ranking them is not important).

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#147
post #142

One of the consequences of a public transaction chain is the great potential for witch hunts. Here's one of the first examples, but it surely won't be the last.

The scary thing of these kinds of witch hunts is that law enforcement is listening / reading / conducting hunts of their own. And they will be prone to the same mistakes as these readers. That brings the frontrunners of Bitcoin in a predicament. On the one hand they are often libertarians and very happy with the succes of Bitcoin. On the other hand, getting in early gives them some windfall gains, and law enforcement…

> Trammell just admitted holding 800K$ worth of Bitcoins.

Well, no. He admitted to holding an amount of Bitcoins that would now be worth 800k. At the time he transferred them they were worth a 20th of that amount.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Satoshi is the NSA. This is 99% because it would be the most entertaining result, and 1% actual reasoning ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6206086 ).

It would be entertaining if the NSA could use blockchain data as an aid to cracking systems which employ SHA-256. It would be doubly fun if bitcoin was originally some off-the-cuff gamification scheme to help generate lookup tables for the NSA.

Are there any papers about practical (slash nefarious) uses one could make from the work put into the blockchain? I had the same thoughts as you recently, but don't have the background to imagine what's possible.

Re: I Am Not Satoshi

#150
post #42

General consensus seems to be that Ron&Shamir's publications on this topic are extraordinarily weak given how stellar a record Shamir, in particular, has. The conclusion seems obvious: It's a misdirection. Adi Shamir is Satoshi Nakamoto. (Note: No, I do not in fact believe this.)

I think it's important to note that this paper was a research paid by the Citi foundation, which belongs to Citi Group, a financial services corporation formed following the merger of banking giant Citicorp and financial conglomerate Travelers Group.

Why exactly is that important? Because it suggests that Citi is involved in hiding the identity of Satoshi and that implies their involvement in setting up Bitcoin?

Or am I missing an angle here?

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