[Cryptography] Satoshi's PGP key.
ianG
iang at iang.org
Tue Nov 17 20:13:42 EST 2015
On 16/11/2015 21:50 pm, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>
> 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.
Why would they? Do *they* have any need to prove themselves? If I was
Satoshi, which I am every second Tuesday, I'd be scared to have to
authenticate my very words, it would mean that my words meant nothing,
only my persona. That way lies madness.
> 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.
This surprising (?) unknown (?) property is similar that used to make
root lists work - distro by other means. It is also exactly the same
property that makes Ricardian Contracts strong without any external
referent - the document is distributed from person to person until it is
so widespread that it is hard to introduce a "false" one.
> 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.
We should ask her to try that experiment ;)
Coming back to the need to prove words, it is notable that people tend
to ignore the mail because they are unsure if the source is valid. Do
we have a situation where SN could write a great idea and have it be
ignored because it isn't signed? Or, if he wrote a daft idea for say
blocksize enlargement, signing would cause the daft idea to become gospel?
iang
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