[Cryptography] Satoshi's Trump Card

iang iang at iang.org
Mon Jul 3 14:15:26 EDT 2017


On 02/07/2017 21:01, Ray Dillinger wrote:

> What puzzles me about these discussions is that people assume, with no
> evidence and apparently for no reason, that Satoshi would choose to play
> his (or her, or their) so-called "Trump Card" in some way that agrees
> with their own particular agenda.

Yes.  The Satoshi has become a God.  No matter that the brand has been 
dispersed and/or destroyed, no matter the logic or the agenda or the 
humanity, the brand has taken on an impossible standard that no mortal 
can meet.

Unfortunately the public won't be shaken from that.

And, unfortunately, the bitcoin community has moved on in its own 
agenda.  There are now serious monetary interests involved and they are 
quite happy to fight for their wallet, and no stinkin stashi wannabe 
dare get in their way.

So, to live in interesting times.

It is somewhat elusive to think back.  From the very beginning a very 
special sort of person believed in the Satoshi invention.  Not me, I 
thought it was ... unsustainable.  I was not special enough. :-)

But some people on this very list did, and dived in.  Then others followed.

And a community was born.  But that community also had its own style.  
Like a genetic algorithm, living, growing, that community has eaten its 
way to its current phase.  So moveth the herd.

That which we all see now is the evolution of what was begun in Jan 2009.

> Satoshi, as I recall, was very responsive to design feedback. When Hal
> pointed out potential problems with the scripting language, the
> scripting language got changed, immediately.  I remember saying to both
> of them I thought they didn't need to cut that much from the scripting
> language (ie, that they could afford to include more of FORTH). But then
> Hal outlined a DoS based on the cost of key checking (which I had
> underestimated, badly) and all the flow-of-control stuff stayed cut.

Not wishing to be boring, but one of the difficulties in getting close 
to the god that is Satoshi was that it was a team.  They carefully 
worked all the posts and the paper to make it good.  And to strip out 
personality.  To leave the objectivity in.  All very perfect and 
professional and they may be ruing the day, now they or he or she has to 
live up to that standard.

> ...
> The fact that the interests of miners and users are not necessarily
> aligned, I have always regarded as one of Bitcoin's flaws.  It opens the
> potential for mining that is completely useless to the users, or the
> possibility of giving miners incentives to cooperate with DoS attacks
> against the users, etc. The block chain records many blocks that come
> from miners apparently indifferent or malicious to the users' interests.
> They are empty blocks more than five minutes after the previous block,
> at times when transactions were averaging more than thirty a minute.

Yeah.  What always upset me about Bitcoin was that the users' interests 
were never taken seriously.  Still not.  Oh well.  They're right and I'm 
wrong.

iang



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