Bitcoin Forum

Hey how did did it take for satoshi to make the blockchain?

In November 2008, a paper was posted on the internet under the name Satoshi Nakamoto titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. This paper detailed methods of using a peer-to-peer network to generate what was described as "a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust".[8][9][10][11] In January 2009, the bitcoin network came into existence with the release of the first open source bitcoin client and the issuance of the first bitcoins,[9][12][13][14] with Satoshi Nakamoto mining the first block of bitcoins ever (known as the "genesis block"), which had a reward of 50 bitcoins. The value of the first bitcoin transactions were negotiated by individuals on the bitcointalk forums with one notable transaction of 10,000 BTC used to indirectly purchase two pizzas delivered by Papa John’s.[9]

On 6 August 2010, a major vulnerability in the bitcoin protocol was spotted. Transactions weren't properly verified before they were included in the transaction log or "block chain" which let users bypass bitcoin's economic restrictions and create an indefinite number of bitcoins.[15][16] On 15 August, the vulnerability was exploited; over 184 billion bitcoins were generated in a transaction, and sent to two addresses on the network. Within hours, the transaction was spotted and erased from the transaction log after the bug was fixed and the network forked to an updated version of the bitcoin protocol.[17][18] This was the only major security flaw found and exploited in Bitcoin's history.[15][16]

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

pic very nice information you have there but no one truly knows how long he spent on this project hell for all we know he spent a lifetime planning and thats why it was near enogh perfect when released except the bug outlined above to only have one major bug in the software takes a genius especially on such a complex matter

True genesis of bitcoin is not really well documented at all. Besides these facts taken from wikipedia we really don't know much. We do not know how long and since when 'Satoshi' was working on creation, then perfecting and finally implementation of whole concept known as blockchain. We don't even know if satoshi was a person or a group of scientists or maybe he worked for and was part of some organisation or government agency. Creation of bitcoin is shrouded in mystery and I am afraid it will be forever...

Not much is known as to how long it really took him to make but a lot of code sure has gone into making Bitcoin and made it completely open source so everyone in the future can also edit made copy's and make their own pretty amazing could of made closed and not done but so much has come since BTC and many brothers and sisters of Bitcoin and many clones some really good ones and too many scam or just pump dump BS. Would be Nice for satoshi to come back and give a nice chat and some statements and a massive update to what he did why he created it and left. Satoshi come back and give updates and make some more new coins.

Yea was wondering how much time he spent before he published the bitcoin whitepaper.

Fast. It's a lot simpler than most people make it out to be.

talking about clone coins, most people know ltc, doge, drk, nmc and all others, but what was the second coin after bitcoin? can't find much about it. and was it a 1:1 clone or did it have improvements.

He was able to create his masterpiece in under 10 days, but it took almost 18 years to fly here in his spaceship!
In case you don't know, when Satoshi returns rides on his ship will cost only 10 BTC.  :)

Yup. I knocked one out in an hour or so in 1997 when I was stuck waiting for a bus. I was originally going to buy a bar of chocolate and pick my nose but then decided it would be less calorific to create a decentralised currency. I was just about to forge the genesis block when my bus arrived. I had some top boogers to deal with so I deleted everything. Hey ho.

I would think that the inception of it was a long process gaining all the knowledge for it.

Just like the BigBang :)

One day it will be remembered as one of the wonders of the world. Archive this post so I can be the first to say it.

Years of study, meditation thought went into it... the history was well known on the cryptography forums; The powers that be were too powerful, every attempt had been thwarted. It was the amalgamation of decades of research from thousands of contributors, every attempt was studied and analyzed, all eventualities and paths had to be thought; there are originals from that work floating around. The First Blockchain existed before the official blockchain, if you look around this forum, you can find pieces of the original: From this we can see the bitcoin prototype. formed by collaborators from the cryptography forum.

 I haven't checked the code myself but I can imagine that Bitcoin prototype was much different than the official Bitcoin client; Only pieces of the code are known. the one that I saw had only parts of the entire system working, available only for inspection nothing more without revealing anything of the main design.

The true History is out there, but there are many peoples accounts to consider, to put all the pieces together and truly see what a monumental achievement this was. It was the work of many people collaborating through space and time, hoping their words would be heard by someone who had a solution.

I think I read somewhere that Satoshi mined the genesis block for 7 days, mirroring God's creation of the world either directly or just a mere coincidence.

To add to this, does anyone know how long the idea of Bitcoin/blockchain was being brewed? have we carried out it's once planned vision?

I remember seeing a reddit post about a while back when someone back in 2005-2006 posted an idea about a digital currency and it was speculated that it was satoshi who was working on the development then. But I would still say would have been close to 2-3 years for him to come up with the idea and develope it.

Well after the aliens abducted him, it went quickly....  ;D ;D

I think when someone finds a GREAT disruptive technology like this, he/she would have had little sleep to get it done.

If it was a group of people, it would have been quicker...

The thing is, we will never know.... Gavin often talked to him, it's a pity he did not ask him, when he was still active.  :( Good question b.t.w OP } 

LOL you are right :)
It's not the most important question really How long did it take for Satoshi to make the blockchain?
More important is quality and security of this service and if Satoshi have some future plans regarding BTC.
Nobody can answer this questions (only Satoshi), so we can just wait and see what happen next.

Satoshi could not have created the blockchain without Hal Finney contributing POW. He created the first reusable proof of work system years before Bitcoin had been created. Without that POW system Bitcoin's blockchain could never have been created.

Is this relevant?
He  may have been thinking about it for 10 years. Who knows? Who cares besides OP?

from 1992
http://originalcontroltheory.tumblr.com/post/99362091259/the-creation-of-bitcoin

Ah I see, maybe his ship was broken and blockchain technology was the easiest way for him to make the billions needed to fix it?

Well it is speculated that Satoshi had posted on an internet forum about the concept of bitcoin in the early 2000's, around the time that paypal first came out.

FYI to the OP - satoshi did not actually "make" the blockchain, the blockchain is the data of the various blocks and is growing roughly once every 10 minutes, by a maximum of 1MB each time it grows. It seems that most people have answered on here as if you were referring to the Bitcoin protocol

how do you figure?  the concept is simple but there are many details.  it's like saying a combustion engine is a lot simpler than most people make it out to be.

Approximately 4,000 years of mathematics brought us to this point.

When "Satoshi" the alias appeared in late 2008, his code for Bitcoin was already mostly complete.  I had an archive of it in my inbox less than six days after his first post on the Metzdowd cryptography list.   

There's no knowing how long he spent writing it.  But there was unused code in the first released version relating to even larger ideas which ultimately didn't make the cut -- bits of a market, which looks to have been an attempt to do something like a decentralized version of ebay.  -- bits of a reputation tracking system, which looks to have been something like ebay's feedback system and something like a pseudonymous "reputation capital" system.  Ultimately all of that got cut out and just keeping track of the coins became the sole focus.

It looked like a very big project -- bigger perhaps than we know even yet -- but one that got cut back ruthlessly to what could actually be finished and deployed. 

Anyway - there's no knowing really how long he spent on the code. 

It looks like he put all the compute power at his disposal to work for about six days to get the hash on the genesis block that forms the root of the current block chain though - that's judging by the timing of the headline it refers and the timestamp of that block. 

Before that, there were a couple of testing block chains that came to an end when something about the block format needed fixed. But none that ran for more than a day or two.

Also, I want to point out that Satoshi was not working ex nihilo.

HashCash - a proof-of-work to show that you have irreversibly invested resources into what you're trying to do or asking someone to accept - was Adam Back's invention.

David Chaum developed the idea of block chains using hashes to prove that each was descended from the last and had no modifications of history.

Dozens of people, including David Chaum, had published cryptographically sound digital-cash systems of various kinds - and it had been a sort of holy grail of the cypherpunk crew for decades, starting with James Bell IIRC.  But all digital cash protocols up to that point had required a trusted party, and to the extent they had been deployed, many had been deployed by untrustworthy parties.  There were a number of arrests and charges filed by everyone from the FBI to the SEC to outraged investors.  By the time Satoshi got there, the entire topic of digital cash had reached a sort of scorched-earth status among professional cryptographers;  we'd seen dozens of these systems and every last one had either been a cryptographically unsound construction, a snake-oil solution from a scamster who could abuse the 'trusted party' role to steal stuff, an entrepreneurial proposal which the market more or less ignored because it would involve making payments on pretty much the same order as existing payment networks, or, once in a while, a cryptographically sound proposal that wasn't a scam but which was also never meaningfully deployed.  

Heck, even I had come up with a digital cash system back in 2004, but it didn't achieve Bitcoin's decentralization; there was no proof-of-work involved, but the individual coins were tiny block chains where each block recorded one transfer of that coin between holders.  Holders could transfer coins between themselves offline without communicating with the rest of the system, but those coins eventually had to go back to an issuer (double spent coins had to wind up in the same place for a double spend to be detected and the double spender unmasked, and also otherwise they'd just get bigger and bigger as each one of them dragged its own little block chain around).  Everybody had to have an authenticated identity (which would be revealed for prosecution purposes via a cut-and-choose/split-secret protocol if anybody did a double spend).  And so it required a trusted party to assign and keep track of the authenticated identities.  I never even attempted to deploy it because the trusted parties who do that (CA's) are completely corrupt and useless, but it was at least fun to design.

The cut-and-choose/split-secret protocol I used there was not my own invention either.  Chaum's earlier digital cash system had used it first.  Bitcoin doesn't use it at all because Bitcoin doesn't need to "unmask" anyone to deal with double spends - the shared block chain allows simply ignoring them.

As Cryddit says, we don't know for sure.  Of all the possibilities though, I strongly favour the idea that Satoshi was simply telling the truth.


Given the design and code at the time I have no good reason to doubt this.

Nope. Actually way, way, way before that. What the public "knows" as the official story isn't the real story. The "public" whitepaper isn't by the real Satoshi, it's by what I'll call "team Satoshi". I think people would really enjoy reading the original paper, which was less technical and more abstract and way more fun to read, but alas, it's lost. Satoshi Nakamoto was a boy. Just believe me.

Sigh... The guy who received the 10,000 BTC to buy two pizzas, assuming he didn't spend those coins, now has $2,856,100. It's a crazy, crazy world we live in. Well, who knows, maybe we'll think about 0.01BTC that way in the future :)

Didn't Karpeles own the copyright to the word Bitcoin years before it existed? Sorry, I'm going by memory here.

I dunno about copyrights, but the bitcoin.com domain has been around for a lot longer than the system.

http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/04/22/bitbeat-the-men-who-owned-bitcoin-com/

Would that even matter at this point? I don't think the word bitcoin will ever fade from our history at this point. Even when humanity finally dies out, bitcoin will live on forever in our written history.

Close:
His spaceship was not completely broken, just one very serious bug that was fixed within a few hours, and history reports no other serious failures.  :D

Satoshi was a boy? What do you mean? A child? When did this boy write that paper? When did you come across that original paper. Your response is intriguing.

Yes. Ask Garzik and/or Gavin.

Bullshit. If there was another paper it would be downloadable

I personally don't think it was him in that forum post. I think it is more likely that it was just someone throwing ideas around after PP was becoming a 'hit'

LOLOLOL. So if it's on the Internet, it is truth. Gavin was the last guy to have the original paper. Maybe he's got it locked up in a safe someday for a museum.

Man, I'd be all over that if I could read it. One of these days I have to start making my own blog about everything I love about Bitcoin, it's History, it's Characters, The movement everything... wow.
I love Bitcoin.

Wowa, you just hit something home to me. PayPal, and eBay also for that matter, have only really been around since 2000, but today we consider them indispensable.  Theoretically that is where Bitcoin will be in 15 years.

Wait.  When you say the "original paper" are you talking about the one he put up in November 2008?  He put a link to it on the crypto mailing lists, but the paper now at that link is a slightly later version?  That one?

'Cause I've got that one saved on my hard drive.  There's really not much difference from the one that's there now except a few sentences have been straightened out for clarity.

Send me your edress and I'll shoot you the file. 

Very nice.

I often ponder about how long he actually developed the code. I mean, did it take him a couple of weeks? Months? Has he worked on this for 5-10 years already? I mean the Internet would only have been ready for this technology since maybe 2005 or so, I guess.

The sad thing is that Paypal's earliest incarnation was an attempt at BTC esque idealism and look what it became.

From here - http://money.howstuffworks.com/paypal3.htm

"Peter Thiel and Max Levchin founded PayPal in December 1998 under the name Confinity. Operating out of Silicon Valley, the idealistic vision of the company was one of a borderless currency, free from governmental controls.

However, PayPal's success quickly drew the attention of hackers, scam artists and organized crime groups, who used the service for frauds and money laundering.

New security measures stemmed the tide of fraud and customer complaints, but government officials soon stepped in. Regulators and attorneys general in several states, including New York and California, fined PayPal for violations and investigated the company's business practices. Some states, such as Louisiana, banned PayPal from operating in their states altogether."

Kinda familiar, no? 

Yes i believe the same will be with bitcoin maybe less than 10-15years and using ebay as an example someone will create a decentralized ebay but for crypto without the massive fee's that will have people piling threw the crypto doors.

Would love to see the forum where he first hinted on the idea i would screen short that and add it to the crypto memory bank.

So we are saying it took anywhere from 5-10 years what i have got from this..