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Unexpected Ways in which Bitcoin Dodged Some Cryptographic Bullets

bitcoinmagazine.com

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Re: Unexpected Ways in which Bitcoin Dodged Some Cryptographic Bullets

#71

Post by sktrdie »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #3

Who created Bitcoin? This comment seems to offer many clues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547590 There are two groups that are on the suspects list for having engendered bitcoin, one group centers around Trinity College, another is a bunch of loosely affiliated international collaborators. Both groups are on the record with precursors to bitcoin (papers, software), neither has admitted openly that they were…

Their activity on the official Bitcoin forum could probably lead to some analysis on where they are from: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3;sa=stat...

Re: Unexpected Ways in which Bitcoin Dodged Some Cryptographic Bullets

#72

Post by pbsd »

celticninja wrote: post #42
maaku wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. The original bitcoin client did what was called direct-to-IP transactions, which didn't use hashed pubkeys, and which was vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks (oops). Bitcoin's ECDSA curve was chosen because it was one of the faster ones, not because of any NIST connection (a "real" cryptographer of the day would have probably advised against the secp256k1 curve used in bitcoin in favor of one of the N…

unless the "real" cryptographer knew about the NIST/NSA weakening of secp256r1

What weakening, may I ask?

Re: Unexpected Ways in which Bitcoin Dodged Some Cryptographic Bullets

#73

Post by kristianp »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #3

Who created Bitcoin? This comment seems to offer many clues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547590 There are two groups that are on the suspects list for having engendered bitcoin, one group centers around Trinity College, another is a bunch of loosely affiliated international collaborators. Both groups are on the record with precursors to bitcoin (papers, software), neither has admitted openly that they were…

Why is it that an off-topic (and untechnical) thread always seems to go to the top of HN discussions? So irritating.

Re: Unexpected Ways in which Bitcoin Dodged Some Cryptographic Bullets

#74

Post by eof »

Perseids wrote: post #67
deegles wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are keeping a close eye on the addresses holding all of those bitcoins. I wonder how he'll avoid being detected when trying to withdraw them.

I guess when there are some more established exchange services they could slowly pull some of that money out in relatively good anonymity. (Assuming that a more established service would not sell their name to the press.)

they will have to have their own, popular, mixing service to pull this off

Re: Unexpected Ways in which Bitcoin Dodged Some Cryptographic Bullets

#75

Post by deelowe »

mrb wrote: post #70
deelowe wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a related question. Why hasn't the creator(s) come forward? What reason is there for hiding their identity? I'm starting to add more tin foil to my hat these days and this sort of thing worries me.

He wants to remain anonymous almost certainly because he is estimated to own ~1 million BTC ($200 million!); and a lot of thieves would track/kidnap/torture/murder someone for the chance to steal that amount.

I doubt that's it. There's plenty of more wealthier people out there: http://www.forbes.com/lists/

Re: Unexpected Ways in which Bitcoin Dodged Some Cryptographic Bullets

#76

Post by shalmanese »

vbuterin wrote: post #17
enimodas wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my thoughts exactly. For those who don't know, never ever use floats for things like money. Try in windows calculator for example sqrt(4) - 2 and see why. Strangely enough he talks about floating point rounding errors in one of the next paragraphs?

> For those who don't know, never ever use floats for things like money. This is normally a very good rule to follow. The reason is that floating point is binary, whereas cash is decimal, so even an innocent number like 0.4 has no exact representation in binary (it's actually an infinite tail: 0.011001100110011...). Here, however, I'm using floats NOT to store decimals; every single value that I store is an integer.…

Still seems risky to me. There are some numeric calculations where input and output values are small but intermediate representations might be many times larger. It's not certain that all the people working after you are going to be aware of the assumptions intrinsic in your code.
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