Bitcoin Forum

I am trying to list the wise decisions made by Satoshi. Can you help me list some more?

• He used two rounds of hashing in the nonce finding process so as minimize the risk of SAT solving the nonce at higher difficulties (http://jheusser.github.io/2013/02/03/satcoin.html)
• He used the elliptic curves which were luckily not the problematic curves suggested by NSA
• He made the transaction scripting language non-Turing complete so as to avoid very hard to detect security risks (like escaping the interpreter to root the underlying OS and weird cases of halting problem like having an SPV client embedded in the transaction script)
• He made the Bitcoin divisible into 100 million satoshis so as to avoid the Capitol Hill Babysitting Cooperative problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Babysitting_Co-op) with deflationary currencies.
• His initial code release was remarkably free of buffer overflows, and other security vulnerabilities

He used hashing function to protect the pubkey (we send funds to an address which is the pubkeyhash) providing a measure of security in the event ECDSA is compromised by crypto analysis or quantum computing (as long as the address is no re-used).

He designed the system such that SPV nodes were capable even though the need didn't exist until five years after the whitepaper.

He used the block reward (subsidy) to solve three problems simultaneously, providing a fair initial distribution of money, subsidizing the cost of the network security, ensuring that those with hashpower are economically incentivized to "do the right thing").

He taught Gavin Andresen about smart contracts, although they aren't popular yet.

I'm trying to figure out why you aren't posting from your main.
Just curious.

What is an SPV client?

Simplfied Payment Verification:
   A Bitcoin implementation that does not verify everything, but instead relies on either connecting to a trusted node, or puts its faith in high difficulty as a proxy for proof of validity. BitCoinJ is an implementation of this mode.
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4649/what-is-an-spv-client

Satoshi recognized that replace-by-fee was a very bad idea (except where the inputs and outputs were unchanged).

Additionally, he understood that each node accepting the tx it sees first is a key concept in the distributed consensus mechanism:


(emphasis mine)

To take his BTC and store it and then disappear.

While he may use it one day, it allowed BTC to blossom into what it is today.  If one person owns 5% of the coin (which he will once all 21 million are mined), the currency would never take off.
Bravo for recognizing this.

This article might be relevant:

Satoshi’s Genius: Unexpected Ways in which Bitcoin Dodged Some Cryptographic Bullets (http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7781/satoshis-genius-unexpected-ways-in-which-bitcoin-dodged-some-cryptographic-bullet/)