[HN Gopher] The Alternative Genesis Block of Bitcoin
___________________________________________________________________
The Alternative Genesis Block of Bitcoin
Author : crecker
Score : 121 points
Date : 2022-10-08 08:04 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (serhack.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (serhack.me)
| thisisnotapipe wrote:
| > Who Is Behind Satoshi?
|
| Curiously, the most credible candidate [1] is practically never
| mentioned, while that complete and utter Faketoshi clown always
| is...
|
| [1] https://chainbulletin.com/the-unmasking-satoshi-aftermath
| endorphine wrote:
| To add to the speculation, some claim that Len Sassaman is also
| a strong candidate.
| chromatin wrote:
| Len seems much more likely than Nick, based on what I have
| read, but curiously he is mentioned much less frequently.
| px43 wrote:
| I'd not heard that theory, but I remember when Dan Kaminsky
| put the BitLen tribute into the blockchain, and it was
| definitely more about Dan screwing with weird tech, and
| realizing that anything he put there would be there forever
| right around the time that a good friend of his passed away.
| Dan was super skeptical about cryptocurrencies, and most of
| what he did around the space was finding weird ways to fuck
| with it.
| crecker wrote:
| Thanks, I did not know about this!
| lawn wrote:
| It's a completely ridiculous claim that Adam Back is Satoshi.
| He's just not smart enough.
| yucky wrote:
| The most likely candidate is the NSA.
| z3c0 wrote:
| If that were true, it would have already been 51%'d by the
| backdoor they left themselves.
| yucky wrote:
| Why would they want to destroy their creation, that makes
| no sense.
| z3c0 wrote:
| The NSA has a poor track record with cryptography, often
| being audacious enough to believe that their backdoors in
| common encryption standards wouldn't be found by anyone.
| So much so that the idea of them being behind Bitcoin at
| the same time that they were gutting modern encryption
| is... Well, laughable, really.
|
| https://blog.cr.yp.to/20220805-nsa.html
| olalonde wrote:
| Nick Szabo[0] is the more likely candidate in my opinion, but I
| doubt that it's either of them. Adam Back was quite late to the
| game and initially dismissed Bitcoin.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo
| sph wrote:
| Every time people mention Szabo, and every time someone needs
| to debunk this rumour. I'm on the phone, so it won't be me
| this time.
|
| One of the many argument against this theory is that Szabo is
| not much of a computer programmer, and Satoshi was very
| fluent with C++ among other skills.
|
| There's Hal Finney, the creator of PGP, which was a good
| programmer, a cypherpunk, and died a few years ago. The fact
| that Satoshi has shown inhuman restraint in showing up or
| saying a single world since 201x would be neatly explained if
| they were dead.
|
| I already talked at length about this, but no human would be
| able to keep their mouth shut and assets frozen if they were
| alive today and held a few billion dollars and spiritual
| reigns of the most controversial economic invention of the
| century. Not a single one.
|
| Let alone with the best opsec ever seen not to be nabbed,
| identified or killed by any of the major intelligence
| agencies in the world.
|
| Occam's razor.
| olalonde wrote:
| I specifically said I didn't think it was Szabo... I agree
| that Satoshi is probably dead, but I don't think it's Hal
| Finney either. It's most probably someone who isn't on
| anyone's radar.
| withinboredom wrote:
| or they were from the future... :tinfoil-hat:
| lupire wrote:
| There are many billionaires, far more noisy and opsecless
| than Satoshi, who have never been "nabbed" by anyone.
| Stagnant wrote:
| I think it is very unlikely to be Hal Finney either. Andy
| Greenberg's interview with Finney a few months prior to his
| death, with Finney's wife and son also being present
| convinced me of that at least. https://www.forbes.com/sites
| /andygreenberg/2014/03/25/satosh...
| zadler wrote:
| Adam back wasn't late to the game, he was there in 1998.
| olalonde wrote:
| To the Bitcoin game. He only started showing interest in
| Bitcoin when it was well into the multi billion$ market
| cap.
| px43 wrote:
| No, not Adam. I remember reading Adam's Hashcash paper back in
| 2003 or so, excited for how it might lead to cryptocurrency,
| but he was completely uninterested in the topic. Apparently
| Satoshi tried to get him involved early on, and Adam ignored
| him. My understanding is that he was pretty rude to anyone who
| tried talking to him about Bitcoin.
|
| It wasn't until Bitcoin went over 1000 dollars that Adam
| finally realized he could cash in on the reference to his
| paper. That was when he finally got involved, founding
| Blockstream, hinting towards people that he was more involved
| with the early project. He hired up a bunch of Bitcoin devs,
| and basically ruined the network for everyone, trying to pivot
| everyone heavily towards Lightning so they could extract fees
| to pay back investors.
|
| Kleiman seems like an obvious top contender in my opinion.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/the-strange-life-and-death-of-dave-kleim...
| rufusroflpunch wrote:
| > ruined the network
|
| Pretty sure it's doing just fine.
|
| Maybe I am reaching here, but by "ruining the network" I
| assume you mean that you are blaming him Adam for the small
| blockers winning, in which case the network is better off for
| it.
| kuba___ wrote:
| despite he's mentioned in this article he is barely mentioned -
| paul le roux. he had skills, money and the timing of his
| capture and satoshi's disappearance are right.
| kang wrote:
| The original thread is more interesting:
| https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=382374.msg4108815#ms...
|
| ...& bitcointalk has many more ideas OP might wanna fill his blog
| with
| crecker wrote:
| Thanks, I might expand this in a new article :) This seemed to
| be too long for some readers.
| kang wrote:
| crecker wrote:
| Verbose? Explaining data structures to newbie is verbose,
| isn't it? Off-topic?
|
| And then a different hash from the hardcoded value in the
| code? Not quite sure. You need to verify your sources. You
| can easily verify the hash of the pre-genesis block
| yourself: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7o0ejr/has_
| anyone_trie...
|
| If you mean a different hash from the actual genesis block
| of Bitcoin, released on 3rd January 2009, of course it's
| different. We're talking about two different networks.
| how_rude wrote:
| How rude.
| keeran wrote:
| Yet there it is at the top of HN.
| pcdoodle wrote:
| Who peed in your cheerios this morning?
| wslh wrote:
| I put a comprehensive research blog at:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33131459
| crecker wrote:
| Thanks, I noticed that only now!
| finaltrap wrote:
| TekMol wrote:
| The article links to the first version of the source code:
|
| https://s3.amazonaws.com/nakamotoinstitute/code/bitcoin-nov0...
|
| Reading it now.
|
| It seems beautiful except for the strange fact that there is a
| random number of empty lines between the code blocks.
|
| Why would someone who obiviously likes the beauty of code and
| writing in general not fix those?
| crecker wrote:
| > Why would someone who obiviously likes the beauty of code and
| writing in general not fix those?
|
| Because that code is heavily edited, prepared for a review. For
| sure there are some missing comments (e.g. see "debug print" on
| line 112 compared to line 1042).
| TekMol wrote:
| Who edited it?
|
| And why did they leave everything else intact except for
| those empty lines between the function blocks?
| crecker wrote:
| Who knows? The person or people behind Satoshi identity. I
| believe that the person who posted that source code on
| BitcoinTalk forum has already stated that he merely
| copied&pasted the code (so he did not introduce any weird
| formatting).
| [deleted]
| hurlern wrote:
| What if the identity of Satoshi Nakimoto is just some guy who
| almost no-one has ever heard of, not a famous cryptographer?
|
| Perhaps he's a software developer working a modest job in some
| company somewhere, chuckling to himself as he reads all these
| outlandish conspiracy theories about his identity.
|
| Maybe he retired to make cheese as a hobby. Maybe he's now an old
| man with a pipe and a walking stick who regularly enjoys the
| company of his grandkids. Maybe he died and took the secret with
| him to the grave. Not as fun to think about, but if so, it'll
| happen some day, and the mystery will remain forever.
| antupis wrote:
| I would say Nakamoto was probably Hal Finley and guy is dead so
| we probably never know the truth.
| chatterhead wrote:
| vmsp wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but the site seems to be generated by
| "Olivetti 0.104.3". Has anyone heard of this static site
| generator? Google's not helping.
| crecker wrote:
| Hahah it's gohugo but I wanted to customize a little bit. It's
| a funny easter egg to mention the incredible genius behind
| Olivetti
| [deleted]
| finaltrap wrote:
| im3w1l wrote:
| > the source code does not contain all the files needed to
| generate a binary.
|
| This strikes me as the action of a self-conscious individual,
| that also needs the validation of an external group because he is
| working alone.
| crecker wrote:
| Yes, correct. But why including such specific parts? This was
| my question after that phrase :)
| [deleted]
| dnhk21 wrote:
| It recently surfaced that Elon Musk's x.com email was active on
| the original Cypherpunk mailing list. https://mailing-list-
| archive.cryptoanarchy.wiki/authors/x_x_...
|
| In 1998.
| permo-w wrote:
| what does that imply?
| lupire wrote:
| Elon or one of his associates was interested in
| cypherpunking.
| mouzogu wrote:
| Adam Back seems like the kind of clumsy genius who would lose his
| seed phrase and also somehow manage to hide in plain sight.
|
| I read somewhere that satoshi nakamoto means central intelligence
| in japanese, not sure if thats true.
| sph wrote:
| > satoshi nakamoto means central intelligence in japanese
|
| It does not.
| mouzogu wrote:
| I need to stop commenting on this board.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Seed phrases did not exist until at least 4 years later
| adastra22 wrote:
| Adam Back is neither a genius nor satoshi.
| Kiro wrote:
| How do you know?
| adastra22 wrote:
| Well, I know Adam Back personally, but this is an anon
| account so I won't say more.
|
| He has also made numerous flubs when describing bitcoin
| that betray a lack of understanding of the incentives
| underlying bitcoin which satoshi would have known.
|
| The type of ecash he wrote about prior to bitcoin was
| fundamentally very different. Bitcoin is not an evolution
| of hashcash like systems. It is fundamentally different by
| embracing an eventually consistent model which was
| antithetical to the approaches taken by Back, Szabo, etc.
| FabHK wrote:
| It's a bad article. As one example:
|
| > The transaction in the first block is a coinbase transaction --
| consisting of an input and an output. We recognize that it is a
| coinbase transaction (i.e. coin creation) from one key element:
| The number of inputs is equal to 1 (this condition is explicit in
| Satoshi's code).
|
| That's not what's characteristic for a coinbase transaction, many
| transactions might have only one input. What's characteristic is
| that the input comes out of no-where, so to speak, and has no
| predecessor. In other words, it's the second part of the
| condition below, not the first one, that characterises CoinBase:
| bool IsCoinBase() const { return (vin.size()
| == 1 && vin[0].prevout.IsNull()); }
| crecker wrote:
| > That's not what's characteristic for a coinbase transaction,
| many transactions might have only one input.
|
| Yes, you're correct. Thank you for the clarification, however I
| wanted to mark the check found on the source code. By the way,
| "bad article": I think you're a little bit over exaggerating.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > By the way, "bad article": I think you're a little bit over
| exaggerating.
|
| With all due respect, you might be a little bit biased.
| crecker wrote:
| With all due respect, you're not adding anything to
| discussion. HN really surprises me every day. :/
| top_secret_fact wrote:
| crecker wrote:
| Let me ring you in a bit. Can I also order a pizza?
| sherlocknakamot wrote:
| Smaug123 wrote:
| I'm not sure if the author is a programmer as such, but there are
| a few inferences which seem unjustified to me.
|
| For example,
|
| > However, it is possible to reveal a very important detail about
| Satoshi Nakamoto's personality. The fact that Satoshi chose the
| genesis block with a certain timestamp (which included the
| sentence in the UK Times article) makes one realize how much
| preparation and meticulousness was behind Satoshi's identity.
|
| This is immediately following a code snippet in which it is clear
| that _some_ value must be hard-coded; it would be the work of
| seconds to think up a value that was funny or meaningful. I don
| 't see why this indicates any preparation or meticulousness.
|
| Another example:
|
| > The other comment that arouses curiosity is this one: //// is
| this all we want to do if there's a file error like this?
|
| > Who was Satoshi referring to when speaking in the plural?
|
| Isn't this completely normal in programming? I only ever use the
| plural first person in code unless I'm specifically referring to
| myself as a human (in the same way that academic writing uses the
| plural).
| ouid wrote:
| The academic we isn't even mandated style I don't think. You
| always think of yourself as explaining to a student who is
| working with you to do the things
| frozencell wrote:
| Competent programmer seem to use a neutral style '// this thing
| does stuff' , not '// here i do that so etc.'.
|
| Satoshi is mostly an anonymous group of cypherpunks forums
| users.
| hnbad wrote:
| Competent programmers don't write comments.
|
| Yeah, that's a ridiculous generalisation but so is yours.
| Neither of your examples strikes me as something I'd expect a
| "competent programmer" (read: seasoned developer) to write.
| In fact, I find the former more suspicious because it assumes
| the code is correct (which, if I have to read the comments,
| it probably isn't) rather than clarifying the intent of the
| code.
|
| Maybe we shouldn't draw extreme conclusions based on
| arbitrary details that are neither here nor there. Nothing
| about the code in the article strikes me as evidence that the
| author must have been a solo dev or can't have been a solo
| dev. However my experience tells me it's more likely that it
| was a solo dev because I've seen solo devs write far more
| interesting and far more complicated programs than the
| original Bitcoin stuff and it's harder to keep a secret the
| more people are involved.
| throw101010 wrote:
| If this "we" was meticulously used it might also be that
| Satoshi was very conscious that this code would have to be ran
| by someone else who reviewed it before an actual consensus-
| driven network would arise.
|
| So effectively "we" in this context could be anyone who thought
| that this code would become _law_ for that network.
| BrianHenryIE wrote:
| The author, Serhack, is a prominent developer in the Monero
| community, and has written a book "Mastering Monero"
| crecker wrote:
| Thanks for the introduction! :)
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > _Isn 't this completely normal in programming?_
|
| It's common in academic writing too. And many of those
| academics end up writing code too.
|
| From Knut's course [1] on mathematical writing:
|
| > _But this use of "we" should be used in contexts where it
| means "you and me together", not a formal equivalent of "I".
| Think of a dialog between author and reader. In most technical
| writing, "I" should be avoided, unless the author's persona is
| relevant._
|
| [1] https://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-
| papers/knuth_mathematic...
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I tend to believe that if Satoshi was an academic (well, at
| very least a computer scientist) the white paper would have
| been written in LaTeX rather than _in the style_ of a LaTeX
| article but actually in OpenOffice (at least according to the
| PDF metadata.)
| ZiiS wrote:
| I tend to believe that someone with the internet notoriety
| of Satoshi who preserved thier privacy for over a decade
| faked every single bit of metadata.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Fair point really.
| geokon wrote:
| My impression is that it's simply from the fact that most
| papers have multiple authors - so it's a bit incorrect to use
| the singular even if only one person writes the text (you're
| speaking on behalf of your "collective"). This carries over
| to other forms like textbooks
|
| It also functions like the passive voice and makes it sound a
| bit like the author is less individually responsible for the
| words he says
|
| My personally impression is that using "I" sounds more
| honest/direct and less evasive than "we". I've never seen it
| used outside of blogs though :/
| [deleted]
| fire wrote:
| yeah I do it in comments because the present me is not the
| only one that'l be reading them. Future me is basically a
| totally different person as far as my commenting is concerned
| kodah wrote:
| I like Knuth's take. Personally I do it to signal, "I'm
| looking to work with people on this". Some of my hobby
| projects consequently have notes from my perspective which
| read as more journalesque.
|
| I agree with OP, this interpretation is reading a bit much
| into code comments without asking a single programmer the
| norms of programming.
| [deleted]
| rajman187 wrote:
| As a funny aside, the author of one of the early works on
| wavelets [1] employed the first person plural pronoun with a
| footnote on the first page defining it as the "Royal we"
|
| [1] https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.1994-2280
| crecker wrote:
| Hi! OP here, thanks for your comment. Please note that I'm not
| a native English speaker so probably during translation I might
| have miswritten concepts as I intended. Let me explain.
|
| The fact that he released the first genesis block on 3rd
| January 2009 with the sentence of UK Times article is not
| casual. We can see from the first version of the source code
| that his network was ready many days before that date. Was he
| waiting for "fixing issues"? No, he ended up clearly with a
| release that contained many errors (e.g. amount created in
| genesis block can not be spent).
|
| > Isn't this completely normal in programming? I only ever use
| the plural first person in code unless I'm specifically
| referring to myself as a human (in the same way that academic
| writing uses the plural).
|
| Yeah, I do agree. However if you notice there are some comments
| written in a particular style ( with double slashes //) and
| there are some others written with four slashes. It's really
| weird to have both styles on codes, unless there are more
| people (>= 1) that work on the code or that reviews the code.
|
| In addition to this, please understand that none of my content
| must be taken as the only truth in this world, so I'm open to
| any discussions about those weird things I noticed :)
| throw827474737 wrote:
| > The fact that he released the first genesis block on 3rd
| January 2009 with the sentence of UK Times article is not
| casual. We can see from the first version of the source code
| that his network was ready many days before that date. Was he
| waiting for "fixing issues"? No, he ended up clearly with a
| release that contained many errors (e.g. amount created in
| genesis block can not be spent).
|
| Sounds almost more like fair instead of a bug, but nommatter
| what, time going by between "finishing" and releasing is also
| more than normal on various levels for many reasons?!
|
| > It's really weird to have both styles on codes, unless
| there are more people (>= 1) that work on the code or that
| reviews the code.
|
| Hmm, no definitely no.. either just slacking, or even
| intentional to mark something?! Maybe you area very clean
| coder, I do this all the time if not polishing for work..
|
| Could have been so, but deducting like those are proofs is
| very far fetched .
| crecker wrote:
| > Sounds almost more like fair instead of a bug, but
| nommatter what, time going by between "finishing" and
| releasing is also more than normal on various levels for
| many reasons?!
|
| I'm missing something: who says is not normal? Anyway
| regarding comments and that, the source code is clearly
| heavily edited and redacted, so I do agree that we can't
| extract much from comments. I did not understand why HN
| triggered so much about two/three/four slashes.
| Maarten88 wrote:
| I think in Visual Studio, if you start a comment block with 4
| or more slashes and hut return, it will automatically start
| the sentences after that with 2 slashes so you can write more
| comment lines. Close with 4 slashes or more to end the block.
|
| ////
|
| // Comment
|
| // more comment
|
| // and more
|
| ////
| Forge36 wrote:
| Having been a longtime coder in a language that doesn't
| support Todo tasks (tooling doesn't find them) I've seen
| double commenting a line as a trick to make them easily
| findable (it's the fastest thing to type).
|
| It's a personal hack for being able to quickly find them.
| Ctrl+F //// is a reasonable "Todo" And one which on a single
| person project I can get away with. Because they are also
| valid comments persisting past release occasionally happens
| as (in my case) the second reviewer doesn't know this
| convention.
|
| Working on a project for the past several months I've left
| many todos in my code to be reviewed. In most cases by myself
| when I better understand the problem. I am after all the
| first person to review my own code.
| crecker wrote:
| Thank you for this comment. For todo comments, Satoshi or
| whoever was used "//// todo: " so it might be for that too.
| Forge36 wrote:
| Personally: I use both!
|
| I've also noticed myself forgetting "Todo:". Sometimes
| it's the ":" and the tooling doesn't pick it up. If I've
| really screwed up its "tod:".
| lloeki wrote:
| > a release that contained many errors (e.g. amount created
| in genesis block can not be spent)
|
| I was thinking that this may have been intentional.
|
| In that sense there may be a stronger message when creating
| an unspendable "big" value (reward was 50BTC) than a
| spendable value of e.g one satoshi.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| If one selects code and comments (with //) in most editors,
| then uses the "comment this block" action, the result is code
| commented with // and comments with ////. It's more likely
| this is a result of using a code editor or IDE than a
| particular style choice.
| crecker wrote:
| It seems more some manual stuff: there are ones with three
| slashes too.
| Lerc wrote:
| I think of the use of we as the team of programmer and
| computer. I can see people not doing this but I don't think you
| could infer anything either way.
| saurik wrote:
| As someone who does this but has never analyzed WHY somehow
| this description you just provided of the mental model really
| resonates with me... thanks!!!
| hnbad wrote:
| Personally I use "we" because I'm including the author
| (myself) and the reader (someone else or at least my future
| self, who may hold a very different opinion from me now).
| I.e. "we" may want something to happen in this function but
| "I" don't know why this test case is randomly failing.
| masklinn wrote:
| > I think of the use of we as the team of programmer and
| computer.
|
| I don't agree because the computer is a tool with no agency
| like a hammer or a chisel.
|
| I use "we" in program because it's a consideration for the
| project / team, even if odds are low anyone else will ever
| use or contribute to it. It's a reminder to avoid factoring
| in ego too much.
| wslh wrote:
| The most accurate and serious articles about the analysis of
| Satoshi Nakamoto early days is from our co-founder Sergio Lerner
| [1]. For example [2]. He is an authority in the field (you can
| easily check that) so in any case I recommend OP to review the
| data with him.
|
| [1] https://bitslog.com/
|
| [2] https://bitslog.com/2020/08/22/the-patoshi-mining-machine/
| crecker wrote:
| Thanks!
| MatthewCampbell wrote:
| > Unfortunately, due to a problem also present in the first
| public version of Bitcoin, Satoshi could never spend the money
| from that transaction.
|
| What evidence suggests that this was unintentional? It offers a
| sense of fairness and objectivity from the originator, without
| generalizing the concept of a transactionless block or requiring
| any special logic to enforce it.
| crecker wrote:
| Great question. I can't say this was intentional or not. To
| people interested, it was only one line of code missing: he
| ""forgot"" to include the first transaction to the
| mapTransactions.
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