[Cryptography] Satoshi's PGP key.

[Ray Dillinger]

On 11/15/2015 11:52 PM, grarpamp wrote:
> Is not the mark of Satoshi the crypto [private] key of the
> genesis block, to which all other supposed GPG keys
> are functionally subservient?


That depends on how you mean 'functionally subservient',
but as far as I know he (or she or they) never used the
Genesis Key for correspondence.

At least, not correspondence to me or anyone I've ever
heard from.

I don't think that widespread knowledge of the Genesis Key
would actually cause harm at this point.

Although one could generate another checkable Genesis
Block using it, that fact could not be used for theft now.

Aside from the Genesis block being checkable
cryptographically, it is widely known and distributed.  It
would not be displaced even if another checkable Genesis
Block generated by the same key showed up.

And the hashing proof-of-work has the interesting property
of being bidirectional;  We have hashers working away to
produce a partial collision with the hash of the previous
block.  You could produce an arbitrarily-long fake block
chain of _perfect_ hash collisions working backward, but
a chain of _partial_ collisions is just as hard to produce
backward as forward.  So a new Genesis block couldn't be
the root of a longer (in hashing power) block chain.

So the Genesis Private Key has value only as a historical
artifact at this point.

				Bear







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