Hell yes, he did.  I'm the guy who went over the blockchain stuff in Satoshi's first cut of the bitcoin code.  Satoshi didn't have a 1MB limit in it. The limit was originally Hal Finney's idea.  Both Satoshi and I objected that it wouldn't scale at 1MB.  Hal was concerned about a potential DoS attack though, and after discussion, Satoshi agreed.  The 1MB limit was there by the time Bitcoin launched.  But all 3 of us agreed that 1MB had to be temporary because it would never scale.

Several attempted "abuses" of the blockchain under the 1MB limit have proved Hal right about needing the limit at least for launching purposes.  A lot of people wanted to piggyback extraneous information onto the blockchain, and before miners (and the community generally) realized that blockchain space was a valuable resource they would have allowed it.  The blockchain would probably be several times as big a download now if that limit hadn't been in place, because it would have a lot of random 1-satoshi transactions that exist only to encode information for altcoins etc.

At this point I don't think random schmoes who would allow just any transaction are getting a  lot of blocks. The people who have made a major investment in hashing power are doing the math to figure out which tx are worthwhile to include because block propagation time (and therefore the risk of orphan blocks) is proportional to block size. So at this point I think blockchain bloat as such is no longer likely to a problem, and the 1MB limit is no longer necessary.  It has been more-or-less replaced by a profitability limit that motivates people to not waste blockchain bandwidth, and miners are now reliably dropping transactions that don't pay fees. 

I'll go on record as saying I never knew a face, nor additional identifying information, to associate with the 'Satoshi' name.

I think several people have strong suspicions of Satoshi's RL identity - but nobody has evidence, and that's the way the people with strong suspicions of Satoshi's RL identity like it.

Don't expect any help outing Satoshi from anybody who might actually have a reason to suspect a particular person.

The guys with the expensive sunglasses and cheap shoes get around. 

Intel is far too big a place for them not to've gotten around to.

So, yes.

Okay, I'm going to start by saying that in the short run (next four or so years) there is no escaping an increase in maximum block size.  So yes, definitely do that.

However, in the longer term, that's still supralinear scaling and still potentially faces scale problems.  So we need another solution.  We don't need altcoins whatsoever.  It's possible for a single cryptocurrency to exist as multiple blockchains.   There can be a central blockchain that does hardly anything else than mediate automatic exchanges between address spaces managed by dozens of side chains.

Transaction times where you have coins on one side chain and need to pay into an address that's on a different side chain would become longer, because now two transactions that mutually depend on one another must appear in two separate blockchains.   So that's annoying if your wallet can't find coins that are in the same chain as the address you are paying to. 

Within chain A, a cross-chain tx might appear as "Han paid Chain B in tx foo-a" and in chain B it appears as "Chain A paid Chewie in tx foo-b"  And if that result would cause chain A to have a negative balance, it triggers "Chain B paid Chain A half of chain B's positive balance in tx foo-central" in the central blockchain.

Anyway, you'd have to at least temporarily track the central chain, any chain into which you're paying, and any from which you're being paid, like a lightweight client.  Beyond that, you'd have the option of actually having the full download and proof all the way back to an origin block of any subset of chains that interest you.

http://lyle.smu.edu/~tylerm/fc15.pdf


Seems like it might be important for people to read.

The market is hard to predict.

Real analysis is very hard, because of the tendency to see in the data what you hope for or expect, rather than what is there.  The same difficulty applies to all of life, of course; financial analysis is only a distillation of it.

Some people do analysis.  This involves not only learning and/or making up a bunch of plausible-seeming rules, but actually applying those rules to at least a dozen past situations to see how valid they are and eliminating rules which aren't, before attempting to apply those which are to the current situation to see what they predict.  But there is always guesswork in determining which past situations are sufficiently "like" the present situation to be good tests for your rules.  And this guesswork is always sabotaged by your own subconscious because you know how those past situations turned out. Your mind will inevitably try its best to justify a rule you like as applied to the current situation by picking as "tests" past situations which justify it. 

Some people try to find out everything they can, form a gut instinct, and, if they believe it's undervalued, they buy it and hold it until it seems overvalued. 

Some people make up a bunch of plausible-sounding rules, skip the validity checks, draw a lot of lines on graphs, and then make a somewhat-educated wild-assed guess based on where the lines fall. 

Some take stock of what they know and suppose that others don't, and conclude that they should value something higher or lower than others because of that knowledge.   For example, someone who knew that Satoshi's coins can never be spent, could conclude from the knowledge that because he knows this and others don't, he should value Bitcoin higher than they do as having that much less risk.

In a speculative market the crowd is wrong.  A successful speculator is not making money from the issue itself; he is making money from the other traders.  He makes money by believing the opposite of what those around him or her believe.  When the market is rocketing upwards at awe-inspiring highs and everybody is yelling "TO DA MOON, BABY!!" the speculator who makes money is very carefully selling to them.  When the market is plumbing new depths and everyone despairs, the speculator who makes money is quietly, steadily, buying in at the lows. 

One of the easiest strategies for human beings is listening to and believing the wisdom of others.  It's a human default; we are social animals, and living in a shared reality, shared wisdom is usually applicable.  Moreover, shared belief makes for cultural compatibility and trust, and cultural compatibility and trust lead to friendship. 

Most of these, believe it or not, are fairly valid strategies, though the markets in which they work best vary.  The last however will never earn more than market rates, and, contrasted to the one above it, is a prescription for losing everything you have in any market whose movements are driven mainly by speculation.

Now, simply ask yourself;  What kind of a market do we have here?  To what degree is it fundamentals-driven?  To what degree is it speculative?  Is it subject to real analysis, or is it too novel for there to be applicable precedent?  Do you feel that you know enough for your 'gut instinct' to be valid?  Do you know anything that others do not know?  Are there *specific* things  you think the crowd is wrong about?  Has your opinion about the *value* of the asset remained stable through its last several movements of *price* and if so which is now higher? Are you making decisions on the basis of believing others?

What kind of strategy works well or poorly in the kind of market you think we have?  Your course of action should be one you figure out yourself, based on that strategy.

Cryddit.

The assertion that a fee market only works if miners act as a cartel is false.  The situation in which miners do not act as a cartel simply presents the consumer with a range of prices which they can choose among, paying a premium if they are willing to pay for high-priority or prompt service or taking a discount for making low-priority or slow transactions.

Imagine a market in which there is no cartel.  To make it simple, suppose that there are ten miners each with ten percent of the hashing power, and that the block size limit is not routinely reached.  Because they are economically rational and facing different prices for bandwidth and electricity in their respective neighborhoods, they all set different minimum-fee policies.

The consumer is faced with ten different price points for a "minimum acceptable" fee, which determines how many of these miners would accept his or her transaction.  

So... paying a minimum fee would get your tx accepted by one miner.  On average you're going to have to wait ten blocks before that miner gets a block, so your expected tx time is about 100 minutes.  Paying a median fee would get your tx accepted by any of five miners.  On average you're going to have to wait two blocks before one of those five gets a block, so 20 minutes.  Paying the highest fee would get your tx into any block regardless of who mines it, so you'll be in the very next block in around 10 minutes.  

The point is that consumers are not faced with a binary "pay enough" or "don't pay anything" choice; they are faced instead with the opportunity to select a level of responsiveness desired and pay for the priority they want or need on a by-transaction basis.  

America has been discriminating against its Sasquatch minority for ages now.  They're living here undocumented and can't even get work permits or social security services.  But every last one of them was born in the USA, to parents born in the USA, and they ought to be treated as citizens!

Some say it's their own fault for not getting on board with the peace treaties as other native tribes did.  But, honestly  that was a century ago!  Can't we let bygones be bygones and welcome our native sons?

Look at the blockchain.  The Satoshi coins remain unspent.  There is no lambo collection. 

If one day they should suddenly start moving again, my computer will send me a text immediately and run a whole directory of other scripts that I've prepared and tested.  I doubt that I am the only one.

Not spending the coins is the cost of remaining anonymous.  I believe Satoshi fully intends to bear that cost for the rest of his life.

Some of us have suspicions and speculations.  None of us as far as I know have evidence.  Also?  I don't think anyone who has real grounds for suspicions and speculations really wants to know.

The Satoshi part has been played.  There is no reason to revisit it, and the play goes on.

People keep thinking that the 'bitcoin whales' are living these high lifestyles in multimillion dollar mansions, spending money fast, needing huge incomes to keep their lifestyles up, and judging from the few I know, it isn't that way.

I know five different people any one of whom own enough Bitcoin to cause a panic if they should try to sell out in a single day.  Two of them are college students living in dorm rooms. To them their bitcoin holdings mean they can take as many semesters of college as they damn well want without worrying about graduation, getting a job, etc.  But they're feeling no need to live any higher on the tree than a dorm room that's paid for.

Three don't own cars and one of the others has an old used car.  He says he was channeling Sam Walton when he bought it - "with as much money as I have, I can have any car I want.... Well, exactly.  With this much money I no longer have to care what anyone else thinks of my car.  I can just buy the one I want."

One guy cashed out enough to buy his current house (which aside from a nice location in San Francisco is nothin' special - just an ordinary 2 bedroom 1 bathroom house), and two of them have used bitcoin money to buy cars. 

One of them (the biggest holder) says he's never going to sell any more.  Ever.  Because it would be bad for the bitcoin economy.  Maybe when he passes on, his granddaughter might.  And she might not.  She's never going to know about it until she inherits anyway, and even then it'll be a trust - she's not going to get more than 5% of his holdings per year. 

To the extent they've sold bitcoin, yes, they've banked a few million, but they've done so mainly just to redistribute assets for a more reasonable investment risk profile.  Aside from their accountants and maybe a few other serious early-days people, nobody really has any idea how much they've got. Or how much more they used to have.

And I'm eating crow every time I talk to these guys because I'm the guy who said, Naw, CryptoCash has been tried before and it's ALWAYS crashed or been a scam or failed or gotten shut down by the SEC or whatever.  So even though I was there at the very beginning and *could* have made stupid money from CPU mining like they did, I didn't buy in until three years later. 

Anyhow, these are your whales, guys.  They're just people.  Mostly cryptographers, whether amateur or professional, but only because that's where the thing popped up first.  And to be honest most of them don't give a rat's ass about being rich, aside from it making their life more convenient or making them free to work on what they WANT to work on.  They're a very different group from people like the Winklevii who came in for NO OTHER PURPOSE besides getting rich as fast as possible.

Way back in the day, when people really cared about such things, misuse of strong verbs was a good way to get your ass kuck.

It appears that the paper on bitcoin.org is a lightly polished revision of the original. There are no changes in basic information, but a few sentences are rephrased for clarity.

I think the regulated exchange laws and KYC stuff have pretty much become international at this point.  I don't know how it looks where you are, but in pretty much every nation where I have correspondents who know about such things, the basic rules are pretty much as they are here.  You have to get licensed to run an exchange, and ensure that customers provide ID to open a bank account or use a trading account, whether you are in New York, Hong Kong, or Cartagena.  I'm not sure how it works in Istanbul or Cairo, but I expect it's the same. 

Cryddit

Remember that one of the first merchants to accept Bitcoin for purchases was a spinner of yarn and maker of Alpaca socks....

Cryddit.

I did not save a copy of the original bitcoin paper.  A URL for it was posted to several mailing lists I was on, but the paper itself was not.  The version of the paper now hosted at that URL is - although I can't spot the differences on a casual reading - not the same version.  It appeared a few months later. 

I have sadly been unable to provide the original paper to several people who have asked me for it. 

However, when I asked Satoshi once to make sure we were looking at the same version of the paper, he did send me its hash to verify it, and that email is in my archive.

The magic string is: 

427c63b364c6db914cf23072a09ffd53ee078397b7c6ab2d604e12865a982faa

I mention this because, right now, there is a version of the paper at https://www.blacksheepatorenco.com/bitcoin.html  which matches.

Cryddit

It makes sense because it makes the barrier to entry high.  

The big fish can't avoid competing with each other, but by getting laws passed and law enforcement coming down on the whole "regulated money transmitter" thing they can make it require a half-million dollars or more (and half a year's delay, by which time they hope to be dominant) to get into the game.  

First of all, they want to get rid of as many people as they can who are currently established and making money in the business they want to own.  Regulatory compliance plus a heavy hammer on the unregulated means they can eliminate most competitors who would otherwise have first-mover advantages (except the Winklevii themselves weren't quite ready in time to do that).  After that, the big fish need only worry about each other. 

They can't eliminate competition completely, but they won't tolerate having to compete with insignificant little people who don't have millions to throw around.  

Now that someone with money stands to gain more in the absence of competition, expect that law enforcement against all traders not in complete compliance will start ratcheting up.

Remember, their goal is a monopoly.  They will do what it takes to eliminate the competition, especially if it is as easy as  subverting US law enforcement with bribes.  

If you think the law enforcement doesn't take bribes, just have a look at the 'massage' and 'escort' sections of the phone book in any city where prostitution is illegal.  What is obvious to you is also obvious to the police, but they aren't acting.  Why in the world not?  Could it possibly be because someone pays them off?  

And if someone else pays them for getting competition eliminated from business, expect that it will happen.

Cryddit.

Miners are in control of whether it is profitable to mine bitcoin. Take half the mining machinery offline, and the other half will generate twice as much bitcoin per hash.  It's that simple. 

The speculators are also in control of whether it is profitable to buy bitcoin.  If they offer twice as much money for the same amount of bitcoin, then the miners will miss out on their share of the additional money until they double the cost of production by spending twice as much money on hashing. 

The extent that Bitcoin has value as a currency or for being actually useful is one thing; but right now the seller side of the market is dominated by the price of production and the buyer side is dominated by speculation.

And the price of producing a bitcoin can be no higher (or the miners are losing money) and no lower (because then the miners aren't making money) than the speculators are willing to pay the miners to produce it.

We shall see a departure from this model only if and when Bitcoin has actual value for its usefulness as a means of exchange or storage of value.

Cryddit

My first modem was a 150-baud box that I wired myself using a diagram I got from somebody or other through the (postal, of course) mail.  The year was 1978.  I was starting to get into computers because my parents had forbidden me to build any more CO2 lasers after I got a burn on my hand. 

I used a computer that I built with a Z80 CPU following instructions from Popular Electronics and a book - and eventually worked out how to log into the Labyrinth BBS, which was on another machine about 40 miles from where I lived.  The first prompt was HOW MANY NULLS DO YOU NEED? meaning, how many character transmission times were required for your machine to handle the end of the line.  For me the answer was 3 because that's how long it took for the carriage return to come back to the start of the next line. 

Labyrinth was mostly American Vietnam vets who'd been specialists of one sort or another in the Police Action over there, and it was pretty clannish and distrusting until some of them finally met me in person and decided I wasn't someone they needed to be all that cautious about.  I don't know who they thought I MIGHT be, but if you think we have privacy concerns today, you never met these raging hair-triggered paranoids.

We had guessed wrong though about encoding standards.  We were using Baudot with three parity bits, because ASCII wasn't a real standard yet.

Yeah, I'm that old.  And I've been the scary kind of geeky for that long.