[Cryptography] Ten years ago today

Ray Dillinger bear at sonic.net
Thu Nov 1 00:16:23 EDT 2018



On 10/31/2018 04:40 PM, iang wrote:
> On 01/11/2018 00:07, John Levine wrote:
> 
>> Ten years ago today Satoshi Namamoto sent a note to this list about
>> his new P2P
>> ecash proposal.  Whatever happened to it?
>>
>> http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October/014810.html
> 
> People like Hal and Bear thought it was great.  Guys like James and I
> thought it was daft.  Can't recall what happened next ;-)
> 
> iang

I can't speak for Hal, of course, but TBH, I expected it to have sharply
limited scope.  Like, for a small community or a campus or so, and
probably for a limited length of time like a semester or two.  Large
enough and long enough for a research paper or case study.  Bigger than
that, I thought, and the bandwidth requirements would cut it off at the
knees.  I was surprised when, a week or so before it happened, I learned
that Satoshi intended an actual launch to the general public.

I did some work on it, because I have a particular personal interest in
digital-cash protocols and because it was interesting.  Not because I
thought there'd ever be a chance of a nonzero valuation more than, say,
a year or so after launch.  Digital cash protocols always fail.  Or at
least, they always had.  We ALL knew that. But it was at least as
interesting as David Chaum's protocol, or several other incremental
improvements on it, and drastically reduced the bandwidth and time
complexity of the Byzantine Generals problem (given the assumption of
distribution of compute power, which has not proven to be reliable).

If I'd thought there'd be a nonzero valuation, I'd have actually mined
it.  I didn't.  Sigh.  Twenty-twenty hindsight.

I'm barely even a blip on the list of suspects, but the occasional
rumors about *me* having some ungodly number of coins stashed somewhere
are, for the record, categorically false. Whenever people even speculate
about that, whenever anybody even thinks it's possible, it gives me the
willies.  "Satoshi" rumors frankly scare the crap out of me because of
what somebody might do to some innocent person (or to me personally) in
an attempt to get at Satoshi's coins.

Bitcoin was different from previous digital-cash schemes because,
lacking Trusted roles, it seemed to be a non-scam.  Or at least, there
wasn't any scam built directly into the protocol.  It was the first
non-scam digital cash system I'd seen in YEARS.

Satoshi didn't make himself into a Trusted gatekeeper who had special
access to coins, the ability to steal from users, or any special ability
to track or exclude anybody.  He wasn't doing the "give me your actual
valuable dollars (or gold or whatever) and I'll give you these
probably-eventually-worthless coupons I printed."  If he had been, I
would have concluded he was scamming and wouldn't have given him the
time of day.

That, you'll recall, was the standard modus operandi of a huge number of
the digital-cash schemes that had been attempted before  (where the
people in Trusted roles usually wound up going to jail). Not doing it,
as far as I was concerned, was the most important NON-technical
distinguishing feature of Bitcoin, and of Satoshi.

Most of the block chain copycats of course did create Trusted roles.
With at least special access to coins (which they call a "premine"), and
frequently some of those other scammy properties too.  And lately
they've taken to "ICOs", which is apparently the new name for the "give
me your actual valuable dollars (or gold or whatever) and I'll give you
these probably-worthless coupons" scams.



				Bear



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