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Bitcoin => Development & Technical Discussion => Topic started by: Sergio_Demian_Lerner on September 03, 2013, 06:55:42 AM



Title: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Sergio_Demian_Lerner on September 03, 2013, 06:55:42 AM
Please forgive me for posting a blog link, but the post has many images and it requires to do extra work to paste all here.

http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/new-mystery-about-satoshi/

The idea is that the LSB of of the 32-bit nonce value of all blocks supposedly mined by Satoshi have a very strange probability distribution.

Something is wrong.

Can anybody replicate my results?

Best regards,
 Sergio.



Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: 18RATTT on September 03, 2013, 07:06:21 AM
nice findings...


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: jackjack on September 03, 2013, 07:33:08 AM
Very nice work
B or D I guess
Or he coded his own mining software which had a bug/feature resulting in that distribution

Could you plot the satoshi LSB graph against block number?


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Muis on September 03, 2013, 07:37:22 AM
I really like the research you do, and everytime you manage to stumble upon another mystery ;) Besides the question why Satoshis nonces have a weird distribution, it would also be interesting to see if this 'fingerprint' can be used to look for other blocks or transactions done using that same PC, it could give us a clue to his identity.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: elasticband on September 03, 2013, 07:40:01 AM
very interesting indeed, keep up the good work!


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: DyslexicZombei on September 03, 2013, 08:07:38 AM
That's some incredible detective work there.

I'm guessing that the secret message will be fully decoded by the world's best supercomputers in the future. Unfortunately, I can already tell you that the answer is:

42


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: teukon on September 03, 2013, 08:17:52 AM
At first I was thinking there may be some link between this and the fact that Bitcoin addresses are given in Base58.  However, this doesn't explain the gap, the distribution, or the fact that a byte value of 58 itself appears frequently.

Curious indeed.

The idea of embedding a message seems plausible, particularly given the newspaper headline easter egg.  I doubt there will be any plain-text messages as the distribution among the frequent bytes is too uniform.  However, it might be worth seeing bytes 0 through 9 appear in adjacent block more than one would expect (clumps suggesting multi-digit numbers).

Edit:

On second thought, the lumps of 10, gap of 9, unusual bytes of 19 and 58, all suggest something unintentional to me.  Given Satoshi's attention to detail when it comes to privacy it seems unlikely that he'd embed messages across essentially all of his blocks.  A link to something about gray codes that would explain the gap would be appreciated.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: gmaxwell on September 03, 2013, 08:30:50 AM
The idea of looking at the nonce to determined endianness wouldn't have occurred to me when you consider how thoroughly little endian the reference Bitcoin software is, it doesn't even come close to running on a BE machine and never has...

As far as the distribution of the lowest byte goes: The counter starts at some value and gets reset when there is a new block or when you exhaust it. If you mine at some constant speed which isn't some large multiple of 2^32/600 hashes per second you would expect your found nonces to be highly non-uniform— not just (most obviously) in the MSB but in all of the bytes.

Not sure if it explains the data there, but thats what I'd look for.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: teukon on September 03, 2013, 08:52:54 AM
As far as the distribution of the lowest byte goes: The counter starts at some value and gets reset when there is a new block or when you exhaust it. If you mine at some constant speed which isn't some large multiple of 2^32/600 hashes per second you would expect your found nonces to be highly non-uniform— not just (most obviously) in the MSB but in all of the bytes.

I don't follow.

Why would the hashrate affect the distribution?

If the nonce is simply incremented until a block is found then why wouldn't the least significant bytes be uniformly distributed?


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: kjj on September 03, 2013, 11:17:30 AM
Possible option "E":  His next_nonce function was something other than ++.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Hawkix on September 03, 2013, 12:03:09 PM
I guess Satoshi used LSB as message encoder (preselected) into some alphabet of roughly 50 differrent chars and then he cycled over all higher 3 bytes.

LSB of first 64 blocks (all of them found by Satoshi, I guess):

29,1,8,5,43,29,24,57,28,40,30,23,63,55,41,56,4,7,50,22,54,43,40,37,39,35,52,54,46,50,8,

                                              ^--- the only exception?

21,8,34,34,20,46,1,0,40,6,7,43,56,48,33,1,32,27,44,46,9,57,44,46,27,5,28,30,22,2,55,5,34

Edit:

So nonces use about 1/4 of possible LSB values, which corresponds to the observed extranonce incrementing by roughly 4 after each found block.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: phelix on September 03, 2013, 12:45:14 PM
Somebody (you?) speculated about Satoshi throwing away blocks that were found soon after the previous one. Would that fit into the picture?


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Hawkix on September 03, 2013, 01:05:56 PM
Somebody (you?) speculated about Satoshi throwing away blocks that were found soon after the previous one. Would that fit into the picture?

Yes! He could run normal ++nonce loop and discard blocks whose LSB, for some reason, he did not like. For both output chocking and some message hiding.



Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: razorfishsl on September 03, 2013, 01:14:05 PM
As far as the distribution of the lowest byte goes: The counter starts at some value and gets reset when there is a new block or when you exhaust it. If you mine at some constant speed which isn't some large multiple of 2^32/600 hashes per second you would expect your found nonces to be highly non-uniform— not just (most obviously) in the MSB but in all of the bytes.

I don't follow.

Why would the hashrate affect the distribution?

If the nonce is simply incremented until a block is found then why wouldn't the least significant bytes be uniformly distributed?


It is not, because of the difficulty you need to meet.
Also you don't need to continually increment the nonce, and in some 'implementations' valid nonces get destroyed, what this does is skews any in-depth research.

Also FPGA's don't have an endian since they are implementations of pure logic, only the algorithm is endian specific.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Sergio_Demian_Lerner on September 03, 2013, 01:21:21 PM
I like the explanation given by eyal0 here
http://de.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lmtny/maybe_satoshi_foresaw_the_advantage_of_fpgaasic/

I will copy-paste it here:


Quote
Here's a solution that actually makes sense:

"Satoshi" has 59 machines mining. To make sure that none of them accidentally repeated work, each one was given a different machine_id to put in the LSB: 0,1,2,3...58. Machines 10 through 18 broke down and he didn't bother to recycle the LSBs.

current_nonce = machine_id
while True:
  result = hash(block, current_none)
  if result < target:
    break
  current_nonce += 256

Ta-da! Solution. It makes sense that you'd put the machine_id in the LSB and not the MSB because it's easier to detect that you've wrapped around: Just check for current_nonce == machine_id. Otherwise you'd have to test for current_nonce >> 56 != machine_id, which is marginally slower.

This explanation could be disproved by checking the frequency of ExtraNonces going back in time. If too many computers are mining together (started at the same time) then one would expect one to be slightly faster than the other, so ExtraNonces are not synchronized. Then a machine with a lower ExtraNonce can solve a block just after a machine with a higher extranonce, and time seams to go back.

(I don't known the copyright status of reddit content, sorry about re-posting).

Note: Please, I encourage someone to check the research I did and post "yes it's true". I still have the felling that this is too awkward to be true, and I may have made a mistake somewhere.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Hawkix on September 03, 2013, 01:28:21 PM
We should know whether Satoshi was generating blocks at difficulty 1 too slow (and needed multiple machines) or too fast (and needed to discard already found blocks). Does anyone know what kH/sec one could expect from 2009 CPU and C-style SHA256 implementation?


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Hawkix on September 03, 2013, 01:36:47 PM
Note: Please, I encourage someone to check the research I did and post "yes it's true". I still have the felling that this is too awkward to be true, and I may have made a mistake somewhere.

I hacked short script pulling out nonces from blockchain.info and the statistics (even on first 2k blocks) are similar to yours. Please, could you upload somewhere the block number, nonce and extranonce list for first 20k blocks?

The theory of 59 machines can be proven/discarded on independent statistical analysis on the expected hashrate of each such machine, they should be kinda consistent in time and independent on each other.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: jackjack on September 03, 2013, 01:37:53 PM
Quote
Here's a solution that actually makes sense:

"Satoshi" has 59 machines mining. To make sure that none of them accidentally repeated work, each one was given a different machine_id to put in the LSB: 0,1,2,3...58. Machines 10 through 18 broke down and he didn't bother to recycle the LSBs.

current_nonce = machine_id
while True:
  result = hash(block, current_none)
  if result < target:
    break
  current_nonce += 256

Ta-da! Solution. It makes sense that you'd put the machine_id in the LSB and not the MSB because it's easier to detect that you've wrapped around: Just check for current_nonce == machine_id. Otherwise you'd have to test for current_nonce >> 56 != machine_id, which is marginally slower.

The probability of 10/59 machines being broken and having consecutive numbers is 1.6*10^-10


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Sergio_Demian_Lerner on September 03, 2013, 01:47:46 PM


The probability of 10/59 machines being broken and having consecutive numbers is 1.6*10^-10

They were not broken. They belonged to the next computer Lab in the faculty. But Satoshi couldn't get access to that lab when he wanted to start mining.

It was the Lab of the "Law and Regulation" class. :)


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: jackjack on September 03, 2013, 01:48:31 PM


The probability of 10/59 machines being broken and having consecutive numbers is 1.6*10^-10

They were not broken. They belonged to the next computer Lab in the faculty. But Satoshi couldn't get access to that lab when he wanted to start mining.

It was the Lab of the "Law and Regulation" class. :)
I'm ok with this!
Looks like there are 9-10 computers per lab


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: johnyj on September 03, 2013, 02:12:50 PM
I like the lab scenario, it's highly likely he ran lots of machines to simulate a small sized P2P network


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Carlton Banks on September 03, 2013, 02:48:56 PM
I like the lab scenario, it's highly likely he ran lots of machines to simulate a small sized P2P network

I believe this also, he would've had to have been almost too insightful with his various "goldilocks" values and also with the innovative distributed database in order to be happy that 0.1 worked well enough, and for none of these values (50 BTC blocks, 2016 block difficulty adjustments, 10 minute average block solutions) to run into trouble in real world use. This mystery of the clue to the construction of the genesis block only highlights this further IMO: Satoshi clearly had a range of self developed software tools that he used to test and develop the system in a networked setting, but only released the source for 0.1 client and the White Paper to the public.

This would have been very much a long term project for Satoshi, whether he was tackling it full time or in spare time. He devoted quite some resources to it. He was also highly motivated to seeding the network and concept amongst the public (or at least amongst interested computer programmers). The (still supposed) effort to produce the Genesis Block he wished for via trial and error also indicates strong motivation.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Mike Hearn on September 03, 2013, 05:06:35 PM
There were long gaps in 2009 when no blocks were mined at all despite min difficulty. I doubt Satoshi would have been running Bitcoin on public computers, given his preference for privacy.

Most likely there was just a bug that got fixed at some point.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: jackjack on September 03, 2013, 05:12:21 PM
There were long gaps in 2009 when no blocks were mined at all despite min difficulty. I doubt Satoshi would have been running Bitcoin on public computers, given his preference for privacy.
Indeed

Maybe he owned 6 computers, each of them running ~10 instances of an own designed mining software.
Look how each block of 10 LSB bytes has roughly the same value.
To be clearer:
  • LSB=0-9: ~450
  • LSB=10-19: ~0
  • LSB=20-29: ~550
  • LSB=30-39: ~450
  • LSB=40-49: ~330
  • LSB=50-59: ~300


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Sergio_Demian_Lerner on September 03, 2013, 06:43:17 PM
There were long gaps in 2009 when no blocks were mined at all despite min difficulty. I doubt Satoshi would have been running Bitcoin on public computers, given his preference for privacy.
Indeed

Maybe he owned 6 computers, each of them running ~10 instances of an own designed mining software.
Look how each block of 10 LSB bytes has roughly the same value.
To be clearer:
  • LSB=0-9: ~450
  • LSB=10-19: ~0
  • LSB=20-29: ~550
  • LSB=30-39: ~450
  • LSB=40-49: ~330
  • LSB=50-59: ~300


I don't see the difference (at least in the first 20K blocks). But if a divergence appears, I would say that there were 6 machines, each on them running a limited range. The owner of the machine running 10-19 decided not to be part of the Bitcoin experiment and left the group, and Satoshi were 5/6 people.
Nevertheless, as I said, I don't see any statistical meaningful difference.



Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: gmaxwell on September 03, 2013, 06:45:25 PM
The nonce uniquing to avoid collisions seems unlikely to me. The blocks are already made unique by paying to different public keys. If nonce-index were the method used to unique a cluster of machines we would have expected to see pubkey reuse, but we do not. It could have both used the LSB and the pubkey, but I don't know why it would.  It may have also been rolling the nonce early in order to test the extranonce rolling.

I'd suggest looking at the actual code and see what it does… If the initial release has the same behavior "mystery solved".


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Mitchell on September 03, 2013, 06:48:18 PM
I don't understand anything of what is said here. Anyone care to explain?


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: jackjack on September 03, 2013, 07:36:10 PM
There were long gaps in 2009 when no blocks were mined at all despite min difficulty. I doubt Satoshi would have been running Bitcoin on public computers, given his preference for privacy.
Indeed

Maybe he owned 6 computers, each of them running ~10 instances of an own designed mining software.
Look how each block of 10 LSB bytes has roughly the same value.
To be clearer:
  • LSB=0-9: ~450
  • LSB=10-19: ~0
  • LSB=20-29: ~550
  • LSB=30-39: ~450
  • LSB=40-49: ~330
  • LSB=50-59: ~300


I don't see the difference (at least in the first 20K blocks). But if a divergence appears, I would say that there were 6 machines, each on them running a limited range. The owner of the machine running 10-19 decided not to be part of the Bitcoin experiment and left the group, and Satoshi were 5/6 people.
Nevertheless, as I said, I don't see any statistical meaningful difference.
What do you mean "difference"? I'm talking about this:
http://bitslog.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/byte0-unspent.png
There are the 6 values I've described
Looks like 59 was not used but if the theory is correct it means that the last machine was also the least powerful (even with only 9 miners on it) so he/they may have decided not to run as many miners as on the others machines


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Mitchell on September 03, 2013, 07:45:05 PM
I don't understand anything of what is said here. Anyone care to explain?

He is looking for patterns in the way early blocks mined to try to determine if they were mined by Satoshi.  This is to get an estimate of how many blocks Satoshi mined and how many Bitcoins he (they) has (have) stashed away.
I see! That is really interesting then!


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: jdbtracker on September 03, 2013, 07:56:48 PM
what if he was using bi-endian machines? A single segment of servers? I can see Itanium processors doing this.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Sergio_Demian_Lerner on September 03, 2013, 08:31:05 PM

What do you mean "difference"? I'm talking about this:
http://bitslog.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/byte0-unspent.png
There are the 6 values I've described
Looks like 59 was not used but if the theory is correct it means that the last machine was also the least powerful (even with only 9 miners on it) so he/they may have decided not to run as many miners as on the others machines
Oh yes, that graph in the post included up to block 36K. I was analyzing the graph up to block 20K and I didn't notice the difference.

Now there are two choices:

1. there were originally 6 "machines", whatever those machines were. One of the machines broke or was unavailable.

2. there were 58 machines, divided in 6 labs. Each lab had a certain kind of computer, and models were slightly different with +-50% performance.

I like more the second since 59 is not divisible by 6.

Good catch jackjack !


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: gmaxwell on September 03, 2013, 08:56:04 PM
The original nonce update code:

Code:
            if ((++tmp.block.nNonce & 0x3ffff) == 0)
            {
                CheckForShutdown(3);
                if (tmp.block.nNonce == 0)
                    break;
                if (pindexPrev != pindexBest)
                    break;
                if (nTransactionsUpdated != nTransactionsUpdatedLast && GetTime() - nStart > 60)
                    break;
                if (!fGenerateBitcoins)
                    break;
                tmp.block.nTime = pblock->nTime = max(pindexPrev->GetMedianTimePast()+1, GetAdjustedTime());
            }

An interesting characteristic here is that it only checked for new pindexPrev every 2^18 hashes performed locally. This may have resulted in work with higher least-significant-byte nonces ending up orphaned more often.

MakeNewKey() was called at the start of the mining process outer loop, and then the key only saved if a block was found.  On this basis, I'd say that anyone using their nonce for deduplication was confused or using very different bitcoin block creation (not just mining) software. Though it would have been very easy to change the starting value and increment.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Ente on September 04, 2013, 10:34:13 AM
Normally I don't bother with speculation about Satoshi.
But this analysis and writeup is beautiful!
Thank you for the inspiration!

Ente


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: deepceleron on September 04, 2013, 11:14:34 AM
As the extranonces on the Satoshi miner incremented much faster than released code, it is logical to say that not all of the nonce bitspace was searched before resetting the loop and incrementing the extranonce. This is just a small mining code tweak, just significant in that the miner can be identified as not using the "official" release client due to this. Occam's Razor. You can get the same effect by just changing the maximum nonce value at which the loop exits and starts again with a +1 extranonce, as demonstrated in the gmaxwell code above.

You don't need a huge mining farm to make the ~2-4 MHash/s of the baseline miner throughout 2009's difficulty 1. This could even be a prototype multithreading miner, give each CPU thread it's own unique two or three bits of the nonce. The only strange thing is the "gap" of missing nonces, but this may also be from mistaken assumptions leading the methodology of analyzing the bit use.


http://bitslog.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/all-t1000-5.gif
Figure 1.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Rampion on September 04, 2013, 01:13:09 PM
Fascinating research as usual, Sergio.

Going back to your first research (the one that proved that Satoshi is holding to aprox. 1M Bitcoins that never moved) I think somebody should write a script that immediately sends a warning if some of those coins are transferred… That would be probably the best time to dump everything and run for cover! :D


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Ente on September 04, 2013, 01:43:01 PM
Fascinating research as usual, Sergio.

Going back to your first research (the one that proved that Satoshi is holding to aprox. 1M Bitcoins that never moved) I think somebody should write a script that immediately sends a warning if some of those coins are transferred… That would be probably the best time to dump everything and run for cover! :D


Poor Satoshi..
Reminds me of Midas - the greek guy which would turn everything to gold what he touches.. eventually starving!

Also, put that "1bitcoineaterdonotsend" address on that list ;-)

Ente


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Sergio_Demian_Lerner on September 04, 2013, 10:08:26 PM
I think deepceleron was right, as this image proves it:

http://bitslog.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/satoshimul-226-start-0-stop-50000-x-20000-y-15-tscale.png

This is the same image as above, but Satoshi time is corrected by the 59/256 factor.
Now Satoshi computer looks like standard computer, but is it?

More analysis is on my last post:  http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/09/04/satoshi-machine-one-mystery-is-solved-and-another-opens/

Best regards, Sergio.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: vandeam on October 24, 2013, 06:49:38 PM
any way to translate this to english ?  :P

---Edited---

Quote from: HELP.org on September 03, 2013, 06:57:47 PM
Quote from: bitcoininformation on September 03, 2013, 06:48:18 PM
I don't understand anything of what is said here. Anyone care to explain?

He is looking for patterns in the way early blocks mined to try to determine if they were mined by Satoshi.  This is to get an estimate of how many blocks Satoshi mined and how many Bitcoins he (they) has (have) stashed away.
I see! That is really interesting then!


Thanks.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Atheros on October 25, 2013, 12:32:20 AM
So this solves the mystery of Satoshi's miner being 4 times faster, and we can tell he had only one computer mining. Which, as far as I understand it, makes the current question: Why was Satoshi's miner skipping byte values 10 through 18 and then resetting after 58?


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: jdbtracker on October 25, 2013, 03:23:54 AM
What if it was overclocked? would that affect the outcome of a computation. I find that overclocking even when things look stable... are not quite right.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: tonto on October 31, 2013, 07:59:48 PM
Code:

<-----------\
             \
 0            \________This topic
\|/
 /\  <-- Me



Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Mitchell on October 31, 2013, 09:04:13 PM
Code:

<-----------\
             \
 0            \________This topic
\|/
 /\  <-- Me

Nice one. I know the feeling dude. ;)


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: callem on November 01, 2013, 09:18:45 AM
Benford's law, or some permutational artifact?


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: NewLiberty on November 01, 2013, 03:42:02 PM
I like the lab scenario, it's highly likely he ran lots of machines to simulate a small sized P2P network

I believe this also, he would've had to have been almost too insightful with his various "goldilocks" values and also with the innovative distributed database in order to be happy that 0.1 worked well enough, and for none of these values (50 BTC blocks, 2016 block difficulty adjustments, 10 minute average block solutions) to run into trouble in real world use. This mystery of the clue to the construction of the genesis block only highlights this further IMO: Satoshi clearly had a range of self developed software tools that he used to test and develop the system in a networked setting, but only released the source for 0.1 client and the White Paper to the public.

This would have been very much a long term project for Satoshi, whether he was tackling it full time or in spare time. He devoted quite some resources to it. He was also highly motivated to seeding the network and concept amongst the public (or at least amongst interested computer programmers). The (still supposed) effort to produce the Genesis Block he wished for via trial and error also indicates strong motivation.

Satoshi was working on it for many years before the implementation in 2009 and the whitepaper in 2008.  The full architecture of bitcoin predates 2005.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: jdbtracker on November 01, 2013, 03:45:58 PM
If it is a single computer, we can say that it is a quad core cpu that they were mining on.

so we have the intel quad core and amd phenom x4 also the server editions of these chips xeon,Itanium,Opteron.

if we link the 4mh/s rate we could figure out which of these processors was doing the work, I'm leaning towards a Intel since my old Bulldozer 8150 did 4mh/s when mining with the cpu, so only an Intel processor would be powerful enough to get those number in 2009.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Carlton Banks on November 02, 2013, 07:13:55 PM
The full architecture of bitcoin predates 2005.

Interesting, what's our evidence for this? Forum/newsgroup chat from Satoshi?


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: NewLiberty on November 02, 2013, 08:35:38 PM
The full architecture of bitcoin predates 2005.

Interesting, what's our evidence for this? Forum/newsgroup chat from Satoshi?

No.  Just something we can discuss sometime though.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: bluemeanie1 on November 03, 2013, 06:20:36 PM
Something is wrong.

Can anybody replicate my results?

Best regards,
 Sergio.

very nice work Sergio.

I tend to think youre on with this:

Quote
B. Satoshi was mining with a hardware very different from a PC.

might give you a clue as to who is behind Bitcoin... who has access to this high-grade crypto hardware?  Might shed some light on other mysterious factors as to the origins of Bitcoin.

It also would suggest something profound: that there is a backdoor to SHA256 and whoever has knowledge of this backdoor could bring down Bitcoin or generate coins at a fraction of the processing cost.



Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: maaku on November 03, 2013, 06:46:26 PM
It also would suggest something profound: that there is a backdoor to SHA256 and whoever has knowledge of this backdoor could bring down Bitcoin or generate coins at a fraction of the processing cost.

Really? Because to me that seems totally out of left field.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: bluemeanie1 on November 03, 2013, 06:54:57 PM
It also would suggest something profound: that there is a backdoor to SHA256 and whoever has knowledge of this backdoor could bring down Bitcoin or generate coins at a fraction of the processing cost.

Really? Because to me that seems totally out of left field.

Backdoors to hashing algos have emerged before.  Some even suggest that these backdoors are intentionally worked into our crypto standards.  If you have any knowledge of the way this field operates politically and legally you would know that this is entirely possible.

it's even been discussed on this forum before: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=291217.0

given the Snowden revelations you can't exactly say my suggestion is 'totally out of left field'.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: jackjack on November 03, 2013, 07:58:46 PM
Backdoor to SHA256^2 you mean?


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: bluemeanie1 on November 03, 2013, 08:33:01 PM
Backdoor to SHA256^2 you mean?

doesnt matter if it's doubled up.  You don't even need to crack it[1], you just need to find a way to bias the probability of finding a solution to a block.  Once you've done that, than you have a monopoly on mining not to mention other disruptive things(look at the thread link I just posted).

perhaps there are even spooks on this forum participating anonymously and attempting to influence the discussions.

[1] meaning reverse the hash


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Sergio_Demian_Lerner on November 04, 2013, 02:46:59 PM
My current thought on the matter :

32 zerobits / 10 min , 4.2 Ghash/block
● Satoshi CPUs: 7.1 mhash/s (aprox)

State of the art 2009

● Intel i7-920 CPU: 6 mhash/s
(@ 4 cores) (Introduced Nov 2008)


My opinion is that Satoshi was doing multitasking on 5 threads, but since version 0.1 did not allow internal multitasking, and he didn't wanted to run 6 copies of the client (and store 6 copies of the blockchain) he created a special version of the Satoshi client which sent to 5 other "client" threads some hashing work to be done. But these threads were dumb, and only did the hashing part (no pubkey management, no extra-nonce incrementing). So Satoshi had to split the nonce space in order to avoid wasting work. He chose a range of 10 lsbs per thread because that represents a time (100 msec) that does not generate much IPC traffic and can wait for the remaining threads to finish without killing them if the one thread finds the solution for the block.

Best regards!


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Sergio_Demian_Lerner on November 04, 2013, 02:52:59 PM
And I don't think SHA-256 was broken.

The simpler explanation is that Satoshi did have a good state-of-the-art computer. Justified by the occam's razor principle.
 


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: JackH on November 04, 2013, 05:17:31 PM
To have that puts him being someone that has access and resources. Either working for someone, or having amassed this himself, maybe having his own tech company.

You mentioned before some other software we have not yet seen was part of building the genesis block. Do you have more info about that Sergio?


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: vesperwillow on November 04, 2013, 06:49:42 PM
Speaking of Occam's, I would suggest that when you have the figure of Satoshi:

* Leans toward privacy
* Masterminded a lot of what we know today
* Spent significant time on it
* Continues to be mysterious

It would  negate theories such as:

* Lost access to a computer lab
* Uses public computers
* A third of the machines broke and he was like 'lol' and kept trucking
* Needed supercomputers

Though those aren't bad suggestions, they just don't seem likely. Someone bright like him wouldn't plan something this important and leave the likelihood of lost access to the wind, or ignored broken machine input. It's not as if he had a clear deadline, at least that's my thought.

As to the hardware, it's highly likely he simply had some high-end equipment, which didn't take much to achieve 7mh in 2009. Also, individuals like him often do put easter eggs into things, so a message or a simple tag of some sort, is not outside normalcy. The mystery part makes me wonder if there's a reason for it, aside from just because.

Just random thoughts off the top of my head.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Ente on November 11, 2013, 02:55:16 PM
might give you a clue as to who is behind Bitcoin... who has access to this high-grade crypto hardware?  Might shed some light on other mysterious factors as to the origins of Bitcoin.

It also would suggest something profound: that there is a backdoor to SHA256 and whoever has knowledge of this backdoor could bring down Bitcoin or generate coins at a fraction of the processing cost.

If the creator of bitcoin knew of a backdoor to SHA256 (whatever this might mean), he wouldn't use a whole chain of hashalgos. Besides SHS we have RIPEMD at least.
And, for sure the creator wouldn't just "backdoor" the block generation and make the other functions (transferring bitcoins, for example) secure? For what, an advantage for early mining efficiency? While risking that everything blows up once, when the "backdoor" becomes public?
Nah.

Speaking of Occam's, I would suggest that when you have the figure of Satoshi:

* Leans toward privacy
* Masterminded a lot of what we know today
* Spent significant time on it
* Continues to be mysterious

It would  negate theories such as:

* Lost access to a computer lab
* Uses public computers
* A third of the machines broke and he was like 'lol' and kept trucking
* Needed supercomputers

Though those aren't bad suggestions, they just don't seem likely. Someone bright like him wouldn't plan something this important and leave the likelihood of lost access to the wind, or ignored broken machine input. It's not as if he had a clear deadline, at least that's my thought.

As to the hardware, it's highly likely he simply had some high-end equipment, which didn't take much to achieve 7mh in 2009. Also, individuals like him often do put easter eggs into things, so a message or a simple tag of some sort, is not outside normalcy. The mystery part makes me wonder if there's a reason for it, aside from just because.

Just random thoughts off the top of my head.

This, however, I like a lot!

Ente


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Jouke on November 25, 2013, 10:18:37 AM
Sergio, in this paper: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/839348/silk-road-paper.pdf , they claim they have found a connection from satoshi to silkroad. I think their conclusions are wrong on several levels, but I believe they are referencing to the following address: 1Nsyx1KBDfTCczg2LmXu2HagyfewQkSPH9 . Do you think this address is related to Satoshi at all?


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: gmaxwell on November 25, 2013, 10:24:59 AM
Sergio, in this paper: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/839348/silk-road-paper.pdf , they claim they have found a connection from satoshi to silkroad. I think their conclusions are wrong on several levels, but I believe they are referencing to the following address: 1Nsyx1KBDfTCczg2LmXu2HagyfewQkSPH9 . Do you think this address is related to Satoshi at all?
They are referring to 12higDjoCCNXSA95xZMWUdPvXNmkAduhWv: total received coin matches exactly to the numbers in the paper..


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Jouke on November 25, 2013, 10:57:49 AM
Sergio, in this paper: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/839348/silk-road-paper.pdf , they claim they have found a connection from satoshi to silkroad. I think their conclusions are wrong on several levels, but I believe they are referencing to the following address: 1Nsyx1KBDfTCczg2LmXu2HagyfewQkSPH9 . Do you think this address is related to Satoshi at all?
They are referring to 12higDjoCCNXSA95xZMWUdPvXNmkAduhWv: total received coin matches exactly to the numbers in the paper..

Yes, but they are referring to coinbase-transactions and a coinbase-transaction that was made to the mentioned address was forwarded to the address you mention.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Rampion on November 25, 2013, 11:47:58 AM
Sergio, in this paper: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/839348/silk-road-paper.pdf , they claim they have found a connection from satoshi to silkroad. I think their conclusions are wrong on several levels, but I believe they are referencing to the following address: 1Nsyx1KBDfTCczg2LmXu2HagyfewQkSPH9 . Do you think this address is related to Satoshi at all?
They are referring to 12higDjoCCNXSA95xZMWUdPvXNmkAduhWv: total received coin matches exactly to the numbers in the paper..

Wasn't that address already linked to "one of the AHA guys" (I won't be more specific for privacy purposes) who admitted to have had cashed out a big amount in 2011?



Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: gmaxwell on November 25, 2013, 01:00:55 PM
Wasn't that address already linked to "one of the AHA guys" (I won't be more specific for privacy purposes) who admitted to have had cashed out a big amount in 2011?
Yes.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Rampion on November 25, 2013, 01:09:50 PM
Wasn't that address already linked to "one of the AHA guys" (I won't be more specific for privacy purposes) who admitted to have had cashed out a big amount in 2011?
Yes.

And here we have another reminder that Bitcoin is not anonymous at all unless some very specific procedures are followed.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: jgarzik on November 25, 2013, 08:28:22 PM
Let's not immediately believe every paper we read, especially ones without peer review.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1reuwq/vigorous_debate_over_shamirrons_supposedly/



Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: jdbtracker on November 25, 2013, 11:54:02 PM
Let's not immediately believe every paper we read, especially ones without peer review.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1reuwq/vigorous_debate_over_shamirrons_supposedly/



Damn straight: In the immortal words of Timothy Leary,"Think for yourself, Question authority."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5i73-SnLEg


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Sergio_Demian_Lerner on November 26, 2013, 02:41:26 PM
(Also posted on reddit)
From the "paper":

"The Bitcoin community believes [9] that the vast majority of the early mining operations were carried out by Satoshi Nakamoto, and that during this early period he accumulated about one million bitcoins (..) by mining most of the first 20,000 blocks. "

[9] Lerner S. D.: The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator, Vi-sionary and Genius, Bitslog, 17 april 2013, http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/

This is totally misleading!

From my a post just a few days after that: http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/satoshi-s-fortune-a-more-accurate-figure/

"Another interesting fact is that the pattern starts just after the genesis block, in block 1. ...It seems that block 12 is the first mined by another user."

So two hours after the true Bitcoin genesis block was released, there were other people mining. And other early miners during 2009 accumulated more than 300K bitcoins.

Also the older generation txs received by that address (block heights 357 and 509) does not seem to be part of the Satoshi mining pattern (this I will re-check today)

So the conclusion of the paper is completely flawed.

Sergio D. Lerner.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Sergio_Demian_Lerner on November 26, 2013, 07:12:34 PM
New evidence of the non-existent connection between Satoshi and DPR:

http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/11/26/refutation-to-ronshamir-paper-on-dprsatoshi-link/

Two of the oldest blocks rewards (used by the paper authors to relate DPR to Satoshi) that were collected by 12higDjoCCNXSA95xZMWUdPvXNmkAduhWv and that not part of the Satoshi mining pattern.

http://bitslog.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/block357.png?w=234&h=215

http://bitslog.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/block509.png?w=234&h=170

Best regards, Sergio.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Sammey on November 30, 2013, 03:29:49 PM
I must admit most of the words in your blog post was beyond me at this point. The notion that Satoshi could've left us a message for us to see in the future gives me a thrill for some reason.

-Sammey
/post


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: bill.joy on December 02, 2013, 09:48:07 AM
I think it's simple. Satoshi was using a standard PC plus a custom FPGA (just doing SHA256), so the nonce incremented not very fast. He knew his rig was too fast, he needed to reduce his chance of finding a block, so that other miners could also mine bitcoins. So he left some holes in the LSB of his nonce to reduce his chance of finding blocks.

In summary, Satoshi was clever enough that he mined enough coins without being noticed that he had a powerful rig.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: rarkenin on December 02, 2013, 11:37:04 AM
That's not necessarily the way it works. No matter which nonce you try, in the end you're goingto have a similar mining success at the same speed.

Imagine buying lottery tickets, and the tickets only having one number to match. Let's say you start buying a ticket each second. No matter how you select these tickets you're going to have the same chance, whether 1, 2,3,4,5..., 2,4,6,8,... 1,2,3,5,8,13,... assuming the same speed.

No number is inherently "more random" or "better".


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: bill.joy on December 02, 2013, 01:20:40 PM
That's not necessarily the way it works. No matter which nonce you try, in the end you're goingto have a similar mining success at the same speed.

Imagine buying lottery tickets, and the tickets only having one number to match. Let's say you start buying a ticket each second. No matter how you select these tickets you're going to have the same chance, whether 1, 2,3,4,5..., 2,4,6,8,... 1,2,3,5,8,13,... assuming the same speed.

No number is inherently "more random" or "better".

nonce in this case is different from lottery in that it can increment to cover the entire range (from 0 until overflow) so it's 100% sure to be able to find a match. It's like you buy every possible number in lottery. Say if the answer is distributed equally within 0 ~ 255, if you intentionally restrict your coverage within 0 ~ 58, then in (255-58)/255 = 77% of the time you can never find the answer.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: gmaxwell on December 02, 2013, 05:05:13 PM
nonce in this case is different from lottery in that it can increment to cover the entire range (from 0 until overflow) so it's 100% sure to be able to find a match. It's like you buy every possible number in lottery. Say if the answer is distributed equally within 0 ~ 255, if you intentionally restrict your coverage within 0 ~ 58, then in (255-58)/255 = 77% of the time you can never find the answer.
No. That is completely wrong and confused. You are not 100% sure to find a match. Unless the hash function is broken, every attempt is unrelated— there could be 5 matches in a row, or a whole nonce range which doesn't match. When it fails, it just increments the extranonce or timestamp and carries on. At the current difficulty the probability of any value being a match is around one in seven hundred million. Puncturing the nonce space does not reduce your probability of success in the slightest.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: riX on December 03, 2013, 09:42:31 PM
nonce in this case is different from lottery in that it can increment to cover the entire range (from 0 until overflow) so it's 100% sure to be able to find a match. It's like you buy every possible number in lottery. Say if the answer is distributed equally within 0 ~ 255, if you intentionally restrict your coverage within 0 ~ 58, then in (255-58)/255 = 77% of the time you can never find the answer.
No. That is completely wrong and confused. You are not 100% sure to find a match. Unless the hash function is broken, every attempt is unrelated— there could be 5 matches in a row, or a whole nonce range which doesn't match. When it fails, it just increments the extranonce or timestamp and carries on. At the current difficulty the probability of any value being a match is around one in seven hundred million. Puncturing the nonce space does not reduce your probability of success in the slightest.

Unless you also hash for the nonces in between but discard the results.. which is of course stupid.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: NewLiberty on December 03, 2013, 11:24:59 PM
nonce in this case is different from lottery in that it can increment to cover the entire range (from 0 until overflow) so it's 100% sure to be able to find a match. It's like you buy every possible number in lottery. Say if the answer is distributed equally within 0 ~ 255, if you intentionally restrict your coverage within 0 ~ 58, then in (255-58)/255 = 77% of the time you can never find the answer.
No. That is completely wrong and confused. You are not 100% sure to find a match. Unless the hash function is broken, every attempt is unrelated— there could be 5 matches in a row, or a whole nonce range which doesn't match. When it fails, it just increments the extranonce or timestamp and carries on. At the current difficulty the probability of any value being a match is around one in seven hundred million. Puncturing the nonce space does not reduce your probability of success in the slightest.

Unless you also hash for the nonces in between but discard the results.. which is of course stupid.
Under the assumption that profit is the motive


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: riX on December 04, 2013, 02:41:33 PM
nonce in this case is different from lottery in that it can increment to cover the entire range (from 0 until overflow) so it's 100% sure to be able to find a match. It's like you buy every possible number in lottery. Say if the answer is distributed equally within 0 ~ 255, if you intentionally restrict your coverage within 0 ~ 58, then in (255-58)/255 = 77% of the time you can never find the answer.
No. That is completely wrong and confused. You are not 100% sure to find a match. Unless the hash function is broken, every attempt is unrelated— there could be 5 matches in a row, or a whole nonce range which doesn't match. When it fails, it just increments the extranonce or timestamp and carries on. At the current difficulty the probability of any value being a match is around one in seven hundred million. Puncturing the nonce space does not reduce your probability of success in the slightest.

Unless you also hash for the nonces in between but discard the results.. which is of course stupid.
Under the assumption that profit is the motive

No, under the assumption that there is no benefit at all, including profit, of calculating hashes you will not publish. Unless he was testing the randomness of the algorithm, but I doubt it.

OffT: Why don't we just ask this guy? http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.45.1255&rep=rep1&type=pdf


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: maaku on December 04, 2013, 06:44:43 PM
Because Naoshi Sakamoto is not even a remotely related name to Satoshi Nakamoto, and if you spoke Japanese you would know that. Please don't give this poor guy the nightmare of public scrutiny.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: NewLiberty on December 04, 2013, 09:19:36 PM
Because Naoshi Sakamoto is not even a remotely related name to Satoshi Nakamoto, and if you spoke Japanese you would know that. Please don't give this poor guy the nightmare of public scrutiny.

The names are not the same.
Also, they are not the same person.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: NewLiberty on December 04, 2013, 09:21:13 PM
nonce in this case is different from lottery in that it can increment to cover the entire range (from 0 until overflow) so it's 100% sure to be able to find a match. It's like you buy every possible number in lottery. Say if the answer is distributed equally within 0 ~ 255, if you intentionally restrict your coverage within 0 ~ 58, then in (255-58)/255 = 77% of the time you can never find the answer.
No. That is completely wrong and confused. You are not 100% sure to find a match. Unless the hash function is broken, every attempt is unrelated— there could be 5 matches in a row, or a whole nonce range which doesn't match. When it fails, it just increments the extranonce or timestamp and carries on. At the current difficulty the probability of any value being a match is around one in seven hundred million. Puncturing the nonce space does not reduce your probability of success in the slightest.

Unless you also hash for the nonces in between but discard the results.. which is of course stupid.
Under the assumption that profit is the motive

No, under the assumption that there is no benefit at all, including profit, of calculating hashes you will not publish. Unless he was testing the randomness of the algorithm, but I doubt it.

Yes, or testing something else.
We are still in beta, yes?  This is all just testing so far.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: bill.joy on December 05, 2013, 05:40:31 AM
nonce in this case is different from lottery in that it can increment to cover the entire range (from 0 until overflow) so it's 100% sure to be able to find a match. It's like you buy every possible number in lottery. Say if the answer is distributed equally within 0 ~ 255, if you intentionally restrict your coverage within 0 ~ 58, then in (255-58)/255 = 77% of the time you can never find the answer.
No. That is completely wrong and confused. You are not 100% sure to find a match. Unless the hash function is broken, every attempt is unrelated— there could be 5 matches in a row, or a whole nonce range which doesn't match. When it fails, it just increments the extranonce or timestamp and carries on. At the current difficulty the probability of any value being a match is around one in seven hundred million. Puncturing the nonce space does not reduce your probability of success in the slightest.

Unless you also hash for the nonces in between but discard the results.. which is of course stupid.
Under the assumption that profit is the motive

No, under the assumption that there is no benefit at all, including profit, of calculating hashes you will not publish. Unless he was testing the randomness of the algorithm, but I doubt it.

OffT: Why don't we just ask this guy? http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.45.1255&rep=rep1&type=pdf

The success of a currency relies heavily on attracting enough smart people to participate. The core competence is still people as a team, who have since worked together and have overcome all the difficulties and dangers along the way. Mining too many coins for oneself is short sighted and stupid. It encourages people to go the other way. That's probably why he didn't even spend the > 1Million bitcoins. The motivation has obviously been the success of bitcoin.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: jdbtracker on December 05, 2013, 02:15:02 PM
Whatever Satoshi did, you cannot deny that must have been a blazzing fast computer! Powerful computer denotes resources, resources denotes connections.... either that or they GPU mined just for fun!

I agree with the above quote... can't spend them, they have to show integrity... though I sure hope they plan something big for those Satoshi coins... Off topic but, wow just imagine how much good they could do if they unleashed that torrent to charities and organizations around the world: If everyone accepts BTC by then, it will change the world. 16 trillion global trade cap divided by amount of coins = 2 Trillion dollars of globe changing power.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: NewLiberty on December 05, 2013, 02:20:34 PM

 The motivation has obviously been the success of bitcoin.

Exactly.  Satoshi wasn't doing it to get rich.
Money is just one way of convincing people to do something that they weren't otherwise going to do.
But there are things more convincing than money.  He understood that very well.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Sava on December 05, 2013, 04:31:54 PM
Good work ! Very interesting...


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: cosreidalpa1986 on December 06, 2013, 03:12:34 AM
Thanks for the share, that was very interesting.
Yeah I agree with you guys that he didn't actually do it for money, he wanted his idea to be successful!


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: tsoPANos on December 06, 2013, 07:52:10 PM
Very interesting!
It think we could find more information with deeper research.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: vesperwillow on December 06, 2013, 07:58:52 PM
Whatever Satoshi did, you cannot deny that must have been a blazzing fast computer! Powerful computer denotes resources, resources denotes connections.... either that or they GPU mined just for fun!

Going by previous calculations, if they are accurate, he was working with around 7mH in 2009. That's not terribly powerful.. just a decent number of new-to-the-market GPUs--or equivalent processing power.

Example, several universities and companies around the world have a GPU farm room for heavy mathematics. Could've bribed someone to let him use them.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Altoidnerd on January 23, 2014, 04:57:08 AM
Maybe he was a sys admin and just ran bitcoin on servers unbeknownst.

I need to start playing with this data. Is there a parser for python? I'm not awesome at many languages.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: LiquidNitrogen on January 23, 2014, 05:09:21 PM
For your consideration, I give you satoshi...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: NewLiberty on January 23, 2014, 05:16:49 PM
For your consideration, I give you satoshi...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth

Nope, though he is a Lutheran, so the "Reformation Day" Oct 31 release of hte whitepaper might jibe...


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: vesperwillow on January 23, 2014, 05:27:20 PM
For your consideration, I give you satoshi...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth

Best yet


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: LiquidNitrogen on January 23, 2014, 05:37:25 PM
Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms.

this could explain the 32 bit nonce thing

He has expressed his disagreement directly to both the United States Patent and Trademark Office and European Patent Organization.[6]

smart property/blockchain solves this

Oct 30, 2008 - It seems that Donald Knuth had his bank accounts attacked not once but three times using his checking account number off of checks he sent

JULY 20, 2008 · 10:46 AM
I came across an interview with Donald Knuth from June of this year, in which he throws some cold water on the current trend toward multicore computers. An excerpt:

…I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they’re trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore’s Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks! I won’t be surprised at all if the whole multithreading idea turns out to be a flop…



Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: RGBKey on January 23, 2014, 10:45:51 PM
That's some incredible detective work there.

I'm guessing that the secret message will be fully decoded by the world's best supercomputers in the future. Unfortunately, I can already tell you that the answer is:

42
Now we just need to know the question.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Altoidnerd on January 23, 2014, 11:09:49 PM
We'll find out whatever satoshi felt like letting us know.  Given cryptography is precisely the art of hiding information, and he is one of the best of all time.  Very interesting research here, I'm gonna tip sergio for this one.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Sergio_Demian_Lerner on January 24, 2014, 04:06:00 AM
:)
17mcFB7Xyymd9hxp2bgNPz1ruWsdoPoCnZ


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Altoidnerd on January 24, 2014, 04:45:26 AM
txid 194aa9f4eed82d4ba7ef837c4908ef32f467901c15b0f361df89575c38a33b33
https://blockchain.info/tx/194aa9f4eed82d4ba7ef837c4908ef32f467901c15b0f361df89575c38a33b33

Great writing too.  Awesome.

Sent WITH fee, to urgently show my gratitude ;-)

No really.  This kind of work is extremely creative and puts the fun in bitcoin.  It'll bring people to appreciate the mystery.  <3


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: smolen on January 24, 2014, 05:05:23 AM
Quote
The imbalance was due to an optimization on the hardware, such as using gray codes for counting
This part of the article seems to be completely ignored by the community...


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: Altoidnerd on January 24, 2014, 06:12:21 AM
Quote
The imbalance was due to an optimization on the hardware, such as using gray codes for counting
This part of the article seems to be completely ignored by the community...

What do you mean?


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: LiquidNitrogen on January 24, 2014, 06:22:05 AM
I am pretty convinced that Donald Knuth is Satoshi, can anyone find and compare code written by Donald Knuth and the original source code? I believe the answer to who Satoshi is lies in the original source code. The art of computer programming is a book written by Knuth and just like art created by Davinci, Bitcoin is a masterpiece with the artist's signature brush strokes developed from years of experience and unfathomable genius.


Title: Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
Post by: smolen on January 24, 2014, 06:39:24 AM
Quote
The imbalance was due to an optimization on the hardware, such as using gray codes for counting
This part of the article seems to be completely ignored by the community...
What do you mean?
It can further improve Killerstorm's idea (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55888.0;all). Well, now this is useless for anyone except ASIC designers.