> Did it every occur to you that their might be something inherently wrong with Bitcoin given there is no transparency around who exactly created it
That's not really relevant, is it? It's open-source code that does not depend on any central entity. Either it's useful or it isn't - there isn't anything hidden.
> Fun fact: the original Satoshi bitcoin code included a partially completed distributed market system. Check out the file market.cpp in version 0.1.0.
> The reality is that Satoshi envisioned bitcoin very differently from how things are currently implemented. They envisioned public keys being rotated, single use addresses, etc.
That’s literally how all wallets work in 2022, no?
Public keys are constantly rotated, addresses are single use.
> There's no crypto code in Bitcoin that was invited by Satoshi and could have been badly broken in a subtle manner.
Read up on the history of the client. Satoshi was innovative but could certainly not code securely to save themselves. Most of the script OP codes are still disabled because they introduced huge vulnerabilities. You could spend anybodies coins in Satoshi's client, or create integer overflows that created billions of coins in a transaction.
The client is a lot better now, but to say it's perfect because it was there from inception is a huge mistake.
I don't think so. Satoshi included the headline of bank bailouts in the first block. It's been a decade since I scanned over the whitepaper, but I think it was to create a currency that people couldn't manipulate.
Bitcoin may be censorship resistant, but it is not censorship proof.
> It's clear that Satoshi was able to achieve some sort of fine tuned [hash-rate] control. I'm not sure how such control could be maintained, but I'm willing to guess that the standard client on a home PC wouldn't be able to do it.
This is something the operating system can provide (or another application). No need for a 'special' client.
>The only reason to bring it up at all just seems to be part of the myth-building.
I don't understand how this can be what you think I'm getting at, when my post was myth-busting. You agree with me that most average, non-tech-oriented people seemed to misunderstand that Bitcoin was largely anonymous. Now, those assumptions had to come from somewhere, right? I'm not saying they know who Satoshi is, or what a Bitcoin whitepaper is at all, nor am I saying Satoshi should be lionized or mythologized. But what I am doing is pointing to rhetoric used early on in Bitcoin's life that could've easily made it's way into the lexicon of the less technically-minded and explain how we ended up there.
An analysis of how the myth was built, as it were, rather than further building of the myth.
> 1. Discussions in the early BTC community and forums, which is why I stepped beyond the debate as that’s not something easy to document now
All of Satoshi's public posts are archived online (e.g. https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/ and usually available in the original location), I had no difficulty providing several examples where statements supporting your position would have been expected if they had any basis.
e.g. In the aforelinked Bitcointalk post (583.msg11405) Satoshi pointed out outright that a good which was purely limited supply and transferable over a communications channel without any other utility would expect to be valued for its utility for exchange.
> in changing a software in a way I think is dumb or leaves fewer features
But that isn't what you alleged, you alleged "the same people" change it to eliminate its source of intrinsic value and violate "Satoshi’s vision", resulting in "slowed adoption following that change". If that were true anyone who'd purchased Bitcoin on the basis of that intrinsic value offered by Satoshi would rightfully say they were harmed by it.
(Which is also why what you claim likely couldn't occur: Once Bitcoin was widely used why would people adopt a new version that reduced its capability?)
The comment about tortious acts isn't conjectural, two of the several lawsuits brought by the con artist Craig Wright alleges hundreds of billions of dollars in damages on the basis of objectively false claims about "removed opcodes" -- a false argument you appear to be advancing here.
> There’s no way I’ll be able to document to you something a decade ago, largely from in person discussions.
Can you clarify for me: You're now claiming that you personally were involved in Bitcoin a decade ago? And that you were having "in person" discussions with Satoshi?
In any case, I was there. I can't recall anything even close to what you're suggesting. If my memory was erroneous I see no reason why you couldn't easily point to them on Bitcointalk, the Bitcoin Wiki, Satoshi post archives, etc. I've been happy to cite my points to contemporary discussions, but I'm limited by the fact that your position demands that I prove a poorly specified negative.
> The removal of the math op codes was a poor choice of how to handle security — but drastically reduced the ability of the network.
Take it up with Satoshi. I don't agree that it actually had the drastic effect you imagine but if your post had said that Satoshi drastically reduced the functionality I probably wouldn't have replied at all, since while debatable it would have lacked the objectively false and accusatory components.
> From looking through the link, your solution appears to require external programs and systems besides BTC,
Obviously you need to have an implementation that actually lets you specify the program and what not, but that is fundamentally unavoidable. If there were a lot of interest support could be included with Bitcoin wallet software. No external system was used, and the software is only external because there hasn't been any cause to integrate it in an ordinary wallet -- it's a pretty specialized use!
> complete the whole exchange directly on chain in a single transaction
That isn't particularly interesting: With the approach you imagine any other participant on the network could see the solution, take it out of the transaction then stick it in their own transaction to claim the funds. With that reality there would be little to no incentive to actually solve the problem since it would just be stolen (as the theft would be automated just as people have done for transactions using insecure keys/nonces).
That approach would also be extraordinarily resource inefficient, since all nodes in the network now and forever in the future would need to directly process the entire problem (which is easily gigabytes in size for any SAT encoding of a problem interesting enough to pay someone else to solve). The approach described in the post eliminates both the theft problem and resource usage problem.
> You explicitly said it would be easy to document your objection in the post I replied to
I see how that may have been unclear.
It would be easy to falsify a positive claim. For example, you could specify your allegation: "The developers of Bitcoin Core disabled OP_BLAZ in 2016" and I would reply "There never was an OP_BLAZ [link to code as of Satoshi's last activity]" or "That was disabled, but it was disabled by Satoshi in 2010 [link to commit]", or "That's still there right now [link to code implementing it] or so on. Falsifying the less specific allegation of "stopped BTC from having smart contracts via a full featured VM, moving it away from Satoshi’s vision" requires proving a vague negative.
> Having a market where you can redeem a token for information/good you want is important to valuing money — and the whole principle of the former gold standard (and arguably what backs money now, in oil). BTC lacked such a good.
I'm not following you here: No special functionality is required to trade Bitcoin for goods or services-- you can just use it like any other money and of course people do exchange Bitcoin for goods and services constantly and at significant scale today. I agree that trade is quite important, and yet also quite irrelevant to the discussion.
The particular snazzy trick of trading bitcoin for machine verifiable facts with absolutely zero fraud risk is cypherpunk sexy but of little interest to most of the world, and as a result unlikely to constitute any substantial basis for Bitcoin's value-- yet it's also perfectly functional in Bitcoin today.
The alternative you imagine of sticking the whole statement to be satisfied in a transaction directly wouldn't be useful due to solution theft and wouldn't have been practically possible in the system as Satoshi created it because script's 10,000 bytes limit[1], and to whatever extent the opcodes were removed made script less useful those changes were made by Satoshi (as I showed), not anyone else. But it doesn't matter because there is a way to do it which doesn't run into those incentive compatibility problems and Satoshi implemented limitations ... for as much as anyone cares (turns out-- not much!).
>>> Bitcoin core (BTC) has been systematically dismantled and destroyed by the federal reserve who funds the bitcoin core development team.
Do you have any sources to support that assertion?
>>> The software you are viewing is brilliant. It is the beginning of things that will fundamentally change the way payments are performed in the next few years.
POCs showing content stored in blockchain currencies have been floating around for quite some time now.
Where has everybody in this thread been for the past decade?
> Satoshi clearly wished to maintain their pseudonymity, and I'd rather respect that.
Actually that was just a joke. I don't need their identity but sometimes I wish there was a way of discussing some design decisions that went into Bitcoin (I did a little bit of technical analysis of Bitcoin and was involved in electronic crypto-based asset projects before Bitcoin was conceived). Unfortunately that would make it harder for Satoshi or stay anonymous.
> There are some Bitcoin maximalists that think Satoshi was a god who figured everything out perfectly from inception. To me their insistance on never changing seems more religious than technical
It's not about getting it perfect. It's about getting it good enough and stable.
Bitcoin had its forks that introduced change. People voted with their legs and chose the stability. What matters is that some developers attempted a change and ultimately people decided they prefer original set of rules.
Not sure what happened with ETH but I feel like it might work a bit differently there.
Yes. This is the one part of the whole story that doesn't smell. The first version of Bitcoin was windows-only.
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