1) Thanks for the info. You seem like a "straight shooter" so Ive always reguarded your posts as being honest.

2) I agree that the person some of us suspect did not leave enough hard evidence that could result with his "true name".

3) I don't ask those original guys(especially the ones first contacted by Satoshi) about this stuff anymore because their responses are all scripted. I can put their emails side by side and they say the same thing "word for word" *exactly* copy and paste style. Those guys are obviously part of the mystery. I won't show those emails here because they are personal emails and not public record like the ones we normally post.

Note: Sorry for quoting you in a lot of my posts, but as I stated you always seem to be straightforward and honest.

To really understand the Economics of Bitcoin:
http://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/

Bitcoin acts as a commodity:
http://unenumerated.blogspot.ca/2008/06/commodity-hysteria-overview.html?m=1

Bitcoin is a scarce object:
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/scarce.html

Bitcoin enables trust & security concerning money:
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ttps.html
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/securetitle.html

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=890233.msg10321992#msg10321992
I think we came to a good consensus in the thread linked above that BitCoin was mostly created in the comment sections of the "Nanobarter", "BitGold" & "BitGold-Markets" blogs. What happened in private emails and Meet-ups may never be known. Szabo & Zooko or maybe Jim McCoy or Hal? We may never know. IMHO...Nick Szabo's "BitGold" and Hal Finney's "RPOW" along with Jim McCoys "MojoNation" and Adam Back's "HashCash" made all this possible in one way or another. They had dedicated their lives since at least 1993 to bring p2p anonymous digital currency to us.
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2007/06/nanobarter.html?m=1
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html?m=1
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.html?m=1

We just covered this VERY thoroughly in another thread....I think it covers everything with links to all facts.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=890233.msg10321992#msg10321992

This video is kind of funny because as Gavin is explaining what really happened with Satoshi, there is a guy(Legendary Member) in full conspiracy mode talking right over what Gavins trying to tell us. This may be the point that Gavin and Satoshi decided to let the stories run wild, because this video shows the conspiracy theories are more fascinating than the truth that Gavin was trying to let us know.

Start @01:05
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDRwgbWkxFw

It will involve you in researching true uncensored history........

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."

That quote is not just from an X-Man movie.....

Its from a dystopian novel Titled "1984" by George Orwell published in 1949.

The statement is saying that history is written by the victors. Basically, we are taught by powers of the present how to view the past, and our views of the past affect how we endeavor to build the future.

It is the victor who writes the history books, controls the press, frames your point of view and offers things to you that you do not need or want.

So with the "who the f@#k cares" attitude we give the victor of the present total control of all messages from the past which will influence the people to build the future of the victors desire..... instead of one with freedom, equality and safety that we all deserve and could strive to achieve through unaltered history and knowledge.

The Concept of Bitcoin:

The Internet and Bitcoin were created to allow people to solve social problems in a novel way: Instead of the ancient formula of “the strongest wins and then beats the crap out of the loser” we all can achieve a peaceful society where both rich and poor, strong and weak can protect their property and freedom on more equal grounds without relying on violent institutions like governments.


Note: Satoshi intentionally left a lot of information hidden for us to find, you just have to take the opportunity to assess the structure and think with an open mind.

*One of the first places where Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned bitcoin was at the P2PFoundation.ning.com.

When you register there, you have to give your birthdate.

Satoshi gave April 5th 1975.

April 5th was one of the most significant dates in history. On that day in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102, which made it illegal for American citizens to own gold.

So what happened in 1975?

1975 was the year it became legal for American citizens to own gold again.

He will remain anonymous. It was designed that way a long time ago..........

Satoshi was anonymous for a reason:

Tim May quote: “Anyone contemplating building such a system, or entity, or cybercorporation, should think long and hard about the wisdom of ever having an identifiable nexus of attack. Money must be collected in untraceable ways. This is what I meant about it being time to rethink the theory of the corporation.”

"Where once a corporation existed to both protect the rights of shareholders (against lawsuits and partners having to pay for losses) and to enable the group participation of many workers, corporations for the things Cypherpunks think are interesting is just a bad idea. And given the growing trend toward trying to prosecute the V.P of Yahoo-Europe because some bit of Nazi history was sold to some German citizen, etc., corporations are becoming a liability in cyberspace”.

"The answer is to vanish into cyberspace. Not an easy task, maybe, given the state of today’s tools, but the long term trend".

*Ray Dillenger (Bear) quote: “Look, (Satoshi) was a construction made explicitly for the purpose of launching Bitcoin……That purpose is fulfilled.  The person who created (Satoshi) has no further need for him.  Thus ends the story”.

NOTE: When you research where he could have came from, you find the hidden history and knowledge that really explains The Bitcoin Revolution....that's what the search is really all about......

The best thread I've seen on this subject:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=890233.msg10321992#msg10321992

I definitely agree with some of the issues you are addressing.......I'll check out the white paper when released.

My concerns with replacing POW and consensus mechanisms are with the following:

1) Trust concerning the security of money?
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ttps.html

2) The crucial Byzantine-replicated chain-of-signed-transactions?
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/securetitle.html

Hal Finneys “RPOW” that is used to solve the Byzantine General’s Problem, a problem in ordinary computing that demonstrates through “game theory” how a group of potential co-operators can come to the best consensus even with the possibility of having malicious operators among them.
http://cryptome.org/rpow.htm
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dawn-of-trustworthy-computing.html

A proof-of-work that is a node in the Byzantine-resilient peer-to-peer system to lessen the threat of an untrustworthy party controlling the majority of nodes and thus corrupting a number of important security features.
http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
http://cryptome.org/rpow.htm
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs614/2004sp/papers/lsp82.pdf

Does your new paper contain the advance in technology and knowledge that is needed to produce a truely trusted solution that equals or surpasses the security of proof-of-work and Nakamoto Consensus?

Note: I follow your posts and have a lot of respect for your work with CIYAM/AT but IMHO I DO NOT see the need. I do, on the other hand, see room for subjects like the ones in these three links:
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/548/469
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dawn-of-trustworthy-computing.html
http://www.coindesk.com/sidechains-white-paper-ecosystem-reboot/


Bitcoin itself had in the past been vulnerable to very similar things that you said happened and now see happen with altcoins these days, but fortunately THAT WINDOW IS NOW CLOSED.

Part of the definition of the bitcoin protocol includes the checking of the proof of work put into various block chains, and then choosing the one with the most work. Bitcoin has more proof-of-work in its blockchain than any other competing cryptocurrency, and so by definition it must be the one chosen, and all others ignored.

Altcoins are all very similar to Bitcoin: there is a block chain to store transactions, a consensus mechanism to build the block chain, and a cryptographic protocol to register transactions. Some prominent examples are PPCoin, Primecoin, Litecoin, and Freicoin.

Some altcoins incorporate interesting new ideas, but there is an essential feature of Bitcoin which they all lack. It is not a matter of its technology, but rather of history and community. Quite simply, a medium of exchange that is more widely accepted on the market is more useful than one which is not. This is known as the network effect. An initial imbalance between two nearly equal media of exchange will benefit whichever is more widely accepted until a single one overwhelms the rest. There is no limit to this effect: ultimately one would always expect a single currency to overcome all its competitors.

Because it was started earlier and has had a greater opportunity to grow and attract users, Bitcoin has a market larger by a wide margin than all the markets of all the altcoins put together, and this makes it vastly more useful as a currency. To defeat Bitcoin, an altcoin would require not just superior technology, but such vastly superior technology as to be an advance over Bitcoin comparable to the advance Bitcoin represents over fiat currency. Furthermore, a truly great innovation would much better serve people by being incorporated into future versions of Bitcoin rather than by requiring them to switch to something else. Indeed, the people who have proposed new ideas that are actually good, such as Zerocoin and mini-blockchain, did not develop their own currencies around them, but have simply described their usefulness as features.

The Bitcoin community is not just overwhelmingly larger but of overwhelmingly better quality as well. Bitcoin is surrounded by real entrepreneurs working hard to create new and useful services for Bitcoin. Altcoins are surrounded by loud-mouthed pretenders with irrational hopes of duplicating Nakamoto's success. This does not mean that there is anything intrinsically wrong with altcoins: the problem is simply that once Bitcoin exists, then there is no additional value, from a monetary standpoint, of creating knock-offs. Can anyone really expect to create something of value by rereleasing Bitcoin under a new name and with a few tiny changes to its source code? What makes Bitcoin great cannot easily be duplicated. Thus, while the Bitcoin community matures and grows as more and more entrepreneurs are attracted to its potential, the altcoin communities can only whine for attention.

For a new currency to take bitcoins place it would have to represent a significant improvement over bitcoin, or bitcoin would have to first FAIL before this could happen. So the question is not will bitcoin become obsolete, but will (your proposed new coin) overtake bitcoin? I don’t see any reason to believe that Altcoins represents a fundamental new innovation with meaningful improved functionality.

In physics, we learn about the concept of entropy. Entropy is often described as “chaos”, “randomness”, or “disorder”. To simplify quantum mechanics as much as possible, imagine a basket with a line drawn down the middle, and throw some balls into the basket. If all the balls are on one side of the line, that is an ordered state and has low entropy. If the balls are spread across both sides then it has higher entropy.

Now, let us take the concept of entropy and apply it to cryptocurrencies. We can imagine each cryptocurrency created has a possibility that some value can be placed within it. If all possible value is placed in bitcoin, and none in litecoin or altcoin, then this is a low entropy state. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that entropy in a system should always increase. So we should expect the total cryptocurrency value to be spread among all the possible altcoins.

Going back to our example of balls in a basket, one can easily get all the balls onto one side of the line simply by tilting the basket. This represents the concept of enthalpy, or energy within the system. Just as gravity pulls the balls onto one side of the basket, enthalpy can pull things into a higher entropic state. The most proof-of-work has been put into bitcoin, and so it takes higher energy to put any value into an altcoin.

From an entropy standpoint, there will always be alternate currencies, and the value assigned to them will always be greater than zero. But from an enthalpy standpoint, bitcoin is favored over altcoins, so the total value of each altcoin will remain very low compared to bitcoins.

Don't get me wrong, I understand Bitcoin with smart contracts would only be general AI, the "Chinese Room" type but it is still is the foundation for the beginning of strong AI.

The Singularity (Strong AI):

The human brain doesn't need to build a smarter brain. It just needs to build something of equivalent smartness (which should be theoretically possible, there's no reason to believe the human brain is the upper bound for all generalised reasoning ability) on a substrate like silicon which is subject to Moore's Law (and thus gets inherently faster with time) and which is immortal and duplicable.

Build 1 functioning brain in silicon, and:

- 18 months later you can build one that's twice as fast using the same principles

- duplicate this brain and get the power of multiple people thinking together (but with greater bandwidth between them than any human group)

- run this brain for 100 years and get an older intellectually functioning human than has ever existed before

- duplicate whatever learning this brain has accumulated over 100 years (which, say, brings to the level of an Einstein) as many times as you have physical resources for (so, clone Einstein)
All those are paths to super-human AI from the production of a human-intelligence brain in a non-biological form.

So, if a human brain can make a computer brain, which is a reasonable assumption, then a human brain can make a brain smarter than itself.

Building a human brain in a non-biological substrate is not a miracle. It would be a miracle in the same way that transistors and penicillin are, not in the way that Jesus' resurrection is. I.e., a fantastic, happy, unlikely but possible event that will change the world for the better.

We know that human brains can be built in some way: we have the evidence for that claim inside billions of skulls. The question is then not to push the theoretical boundaries of computational capability beyond some theoretical level - but merely to achieve it again artificially.

Bitcoin is only general AI for now.

Smart contracts are single-minded even for (AI)'s; while some may have very advanced pattern recognition or legal thinking modules the "only" thing they care about is performing their contractual function. They might know major secrets, but if they are written to be quiet about certain aspects, they will remain quiet no matter what.

It can reach the point where your own pc, house, car or phone might be hired by a contract to check certain information. A high tech "wire tap" investigation of sorts built into the agreement of the contract. This would occur when the contract has started to think one of the parts is doing advanced cheating that it cannot detect online.

With respect to strong AI, Nick Szabo(as you can read in his blogs) is very close to the problem, and that's the issue. Like any good engineer/scientist, he sees problems everywhere. Yes, there are many problems before we get to strong AI. That's not news. There were many problems to resolve before people could pay a small sum of money and let a giant metal tube take them through the air to a destination halfway round the world without killing them - but those problems got resolved, one by one. Many problems do not amount to an impossibility, only a damn hard problem (which we knew strong AI was anyway).

You do see a lot of it in books and movies, some very well thought. Referring back to Nicks blogs, his other assertion, that the concept of the singularity is mostly a fantasy, Nick's main argument is that the singularity will only last "for a time", and that it will turn into a classic S-curve. He waves Feynman's name around as supporting evidence, but does not address the fact that intelligence (and artificial intelligence in particular) is not subject to the Malthusian laws which have caused other phenomena to follow S-curves. Yes, we only have access to so many particles, but the whole point of exponential AI is figuring out better ways to use the same number of particles. There may be a theoretical limit to how efficiently we can use those particles, but even so there are a lot of particles, and if we can manufacture even just human-equivalent computing matter in factories, that's already enough to achieve a singularity.

Today Bitcoin is "unaware" but everything is being put in place for the next step in the plan "Bitcoin 2.0" with Smart Contracts.

Bitcoin already has become an autonomous agent which utilizes humans to build itself and issues autonomous payments for improvement work done.

Read these two links. This is where the planning of Bitcoin AI started:

Tim May email: (Crypto + Economics + AI = Digital Money Economies)
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg00964.html

Nick Szabo reply:
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg01303.html

The next phase of enlightenment:

Smart contracts are contracts that are not just legal documents but actually active AI code. In the beginning smart contracts are just computer programs that facilitate, verify or enforce the performance of a contract. A simple example would be “digital repo”, where access to certain information or a machine would be granted or not depending on whether one party had paid the other. More advanced digital repo contracts can recognize if the seller went absent or bankrupt, and then allow access with no constraints. Over time the intelligence could increase, allowing contracts to actually gather information, check that they are obeyed and even take action.

http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/548/469

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=502359.0

When based on the same evidence, the predictions of the AI "statistical prediction rules" are as reliable as, and are typically more reliable than, the predictions of human experts for problems of social prediction.

Disclaimer: (AI) does not always mean (Singularity).
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/01/singularity.html?m=1


@ Shattered
Update: Sarah Connor first learned about Judgment Day in 1984 from Kyle Reese, a soldier sent from the future to protect her from an assassination by a Terminator. The exact date has changed due to terminators being sent back in time on several occations.

Any new updates on the death/disappearance/abduction of PG? This community is slowly disappearing without him....

I think we came to a good consensus in this thread that BitCoin was mostly created in the comment sections of the "Nanobarter", "BitGold" & "BitGold-Markets" blogs. What happened in private emails and Meet-ups may never be known. Szabo & Zooko or maybe Jim McCoy? We may never know. IMHO...Nick Szabo's "BitGold" and Hal Finney's "RPOW" along with Jim McCoys "MojoNation" and Adam Back's "HashCash" made all this possible in one way or another. They had dedicated their lives since at least 1993 to bring p2p anonymous digital currency to us.
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2007/06/nanobarter.html?m=1
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html?m=1
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.html?m=1

Great topic....we don't get good topics like this much anymore.

The problem with Jim McCoy is his location during 2008-2010. He has normally been based out of Texas. That's not the right time zone for Satoshi. I don't have any info on his location during the time Satoshi was posting, so I have to assume he was still in Texas, which removes him from the list.(even though he is one of the best possibilities)

Thanks for the pdf.....here is a couple of Satoshi posts that used to link to the original. They link to new version now.


https://web.archive.org/web/20090131115053/http://bitcoin.org/

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdowd.com/msg09959.html

https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdowd.com/msg09964.html

I hope you don't end up completely disappearing like you did with your last pseudonym?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2228.msg29479#msg29479
"There's more work to do on DoS, but I'm doing a quick build of what I have so far in case it's needed, before venturing into more complex ideas."


Good luck on the new endeavour's......

That's a very possible theory.....

“Satoshi is first and foremost a coder, not a writer. Szabo is a writer first and coder second.” ~ Wei Dai

Satoshi states early in the mailing list that he did it backwards, writing code first then writing the white paper:

Satoshi quote:
"I appreciate your questions. I actually did this kind of backwards. I had to
write all the code before I could convince myself that I could solve every
problem, then I wrote the paper. I think I will be able to release the code
sooner than I could write a detailed spec. You're already right about most of
your assumptions where you filled in the blanks." ~ Satoshi Nakamoto
http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdowd.com/msg09980.html

NOTE: There is someone else who had this habbit to "code first" with no white paper and very little notes:

Jim McCoy
http://www.salon.com/2000/10/09/mojo_nation/
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.network.peer-to-peer.p2p-hackers/1953
https://www.mail-archive.com/p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com/msg01620.html
https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2008-March/000461.html

Jim McCoy quote:
"A lot of our various ideas and implementation changes were either lost when whiteboards were re-tasked (at one point we were actually using polaroid snapshots of whiteboards to maintain internal history or never explained even in the code......((((no one really had the inclination to write up white papers or discuss design decisions in email, so we ended up leaving less of a digital trail)))) than anyone would have liked."
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2007/06/nanobarter.html?m=1


Szabo, Zooko & McCoy:

Jim McCoy quote:
"I'd be quite interested in more detail about what you tried to implement and how it compares to what I have proposed....At some point we should sync up over vast quantities of alcohol and I can describe various approaches that were proposed, implemented, or abandoned."

Nick Szabo quote:
"Jim, I do appreciate your comments, and I'd love to learn more over beer (but not until August -- bar exam :-)."

"I have extensively studied barter and money systems (in addition to working for David Chaum and playing a major role setting up a certificate authority) and do believe I have some insights."

Note: The relation between Zooko and Jim McCoy needs to be understood.....Zooko was just using Jim's earlier work to create a new system using parts of MojoNation. Understand that Jim McCoy is the real "Drive" behind the creation of these types of p2p schemes. McCoy has spent most of his life and millions of his own dollars in trying to find the best scheme for his MojoNation ideas.(That's right, he's extremely wealthy.)

Nick Szabo: “(assuming Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai)”…..Only Finney (RPOW) and Nakamoto were motivated enough to actually implement such a scheme”.
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-ye-so-long.html?m=1