Not exactly, that guy I'm talking about came forward, he wanted to be known - otherwise why the article? - but wasn't taken seriously due to his social status.

Also the article was pure hearted as you expect Satoshi to be, not taken from a greedy PoV as CW for an instance.

Average hashes to find a block within 10 minutes at difficulty 1: ~7 Mhash (1*2^32/600), though we are talking about an 100% coverage, whereas it's safe to assume in brute force that with a 50% coverage you've a good probability of hit a valid result already, bringing this number to 3.5 Mhash. A Pentium III Coppermine would provide about 0.4 Mhash/s, 240 Mhash/10 minutes.

As of a set of hashrate tests, even a MIPS from an old Asus router (WL-500G) would provide enough hashrate to beat the 1 block/10 minutes cadence at difficulty 1.
( https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Non-specialized_hardware_comparison )

The first block took 5~6 days to mine, yet there's no tell if it was a constant work and the total hashes produced is also unknown. So any exercise on such grounds leads nowhere.

Assuming it was a continuous work, then his computer was way worse than a 1.3 Ghz Sempron, probably Pentium II or III (which were way old by then).

As for Vista, someone with more resources would be able to get the software tested with it. Bitcoin project took him some time wasn't like he was in a rush to release it.

From the Bitcoin 0.1.0 release notes:




About the article, which I don't remember the newspaper it was on, what I can remember:

• He wasn't asking for anything (such as recover his keys or anything Craig Wright alike)
• He said to be done with Bitcoin
• He said to had told his wife about it just shortly before the article
• He said that after the hardware incident he published here a post about the importance of keep a backup of your keys

Let's see if someone has it, as it is either vanished from internet or really hard to find.


There was a reason for it; Visual Studio 2002 introduced .NET Framework, without retro compatibility, meaning VS6 was the last one to support Visual Basic or ASP.


My first Bitcoins were mined using a Sempron 1300 Mhz, 1024 Mb RAM... Bitcoin has no hardware requirements on its own, its the miners competing with each other that causes difficulty to grow.

Craig is just ridiculous, not only his story is full of holes as he doesn't seem to even know how Bitcoin works ("I can't sign because I put the coins in a fund!" - seriously?! Which fund will take the keys when they worth a round zero?!) as he is the opposite of Satoshi, as his mind is 110% into fiat money.


That was part of the article I unfortunately can't find again. Hope someone kept it and post here.

That's false for a C programmer, as it would cost a LOT of time compiling, a C programmer always try to have the best possible CPU he can get. Imagine take 2 hours+ for a build to find a bug, fix it and take more 2 hours+ to rebuild... Building C/C++ sources with old CPUs wasn't like nowadays, it takes ages for compile and link!
Nick Szabo would have resources for test it with Vista, and probably MacOS and all Linux flavors, even if not his own hardware, as he works with universities.

This also give Bitcoin the aura of being created by a common person, "for the people, by the people".

Though yes, I keep respecting his privacy, if that's his wish, yet from all the stories I read about the attempts to get his identity or people coming forward claiming to be him, that story was the only one I can give some credit.

@swogerino;

Magnetic disks can suffer catastrophic failure and be impossible to recover at all. I've two here, one even went to a lab at USA and no chance, the other suffered an electrical surcharge.


@ololajulo

Programming is cheap, the outcome can be PhD level but there isn't any price tag attached to it, all you need is a brain and skill, specially taken the tools used were outdated at the time, making it a sign the hardware was also outdated. He also hadn't made any marketing other than this community. Look at my account, I'm here from May 2010 (even if I came to BTC around December 2009, just had nothing to do at the forum) and I'm #217, in its first year of existence just 216 users registered before me.

I've never actually care much about doxxing Satoshi, he wanted his privacy and I just respect that, but this issue keep coming up with the community. So, from those who came out or get named as a possible Satoshi, I think the major error of the research is to keep looking into "hot shots", whereas Satoshi was most likely "poor" or at least unable to buy the latest hardware at the time, as the versions he used to code the first version of what is now Bitcoin Core were way outdated at the time; Windows XP, Visual Studio 6. Nick Szabo, for an instance, would have access to all the new stuff of the time, such as Visual Studio 2008 and probably Windows Vista (even if this last one was a failure of an OS and 7 would be released later on 2009).
Also Satoshi stated he wasn't able to test his software with Vista, which may mean his computer wasn't enough for that OS, which included some heavy visual features (for the time, obviously) and required fairly expensive hardware.

So, out of all stories around, the one I found more plausible was of a British-Indian guy who came out at a newspaper a few years ago explaining he was Satoshi, what happened to his coins in a hardware failure and showing a picture of the computer used to create the first Bitcoin ever. His story was promptly discarded or overlooked and somehow I'm unable to find it again, as the noise caused by the imbecile CW just pops up at all results, but would be interesting to look into it again and probably give credit to the right person, even if the keys for his "magnificent fortune" are gone forever.

Bitcoin... What else?

Happy Pizza Day everyone.



It doesn't matter in the long run, if you want an instant millionaire formula, well... There's none.

Let me clarify then; I said if only gets white noise, means if the receiver is so bad that isn't able to receive any broadcast at all. White noise is obviously welcome for entropy.

Update on the first attempt:

As I said this week I'll start trying around (time permitting), and for this first attempt I used a cheap analogical AM receiver. But the results were a disaster. I started to get a pattern, and it turns out the only thing the receiver was receiving was interference from the electronics around.
Will retry next week changing some stuff.

Thank you for the suggestion, yet SDR radios are both too expensive (can range up to hundreds of USD) and too good for the desired effect. For the intent the radio mustn't have good reception, the more interference the better, as long as it isn't just white noise, I don't actually want to be listening to whatever is said over radio waves.
So one of those inexpensive soap-shaped AM receivers that old men used for listen to football matches when I was a kid seams more appropriate. Turn the varicap around can be achieved either by a small stepper or servo.
I'll start drawing and testing around this week, to see what I can achieve with that setup.

Indeed, totally agree there.

FM seams to be unsuitable for the purpose, I'm currently looking into MW/SW/LW, the more promising to be MW and SW, LW never been quite used so the band is pretty much left to static. The issue is; I don't know any module as the FM module referred to work with those frequencies, but I'm thinking on using a stepper to tune around an analogical MW/SW receiver circuit.

1) I mean events that either because we don't yet know or are unpredictable on nature, doesn't allow anyone to predict or replicate the result.

i.e. if you seed your computer randomness at the current microtime, it may sound like the result will be unpredictable, but if I know the second it was generated, all I have is to generate 1000 keys with the same algorithm within that second. A hard task by hand, but an easy pick for any computer.

Usually for entropy (other unpredictable events) computers uses parts of the user interaction. Now let's say we add to the previous example the current position of your mouse pointer. Well, it can be at any point in the Cartesian plane represented by your screen resolution. So let's say it's 1920x1080, so now I've 1920*1080*1000, or 2,073,600,000 keys to generate, at 2 Mh/s this would take 1037 seconds, or ~17 minutes to brute force, if I take more points from the cursor, I'll get a number so big that would take millenniums to break, this is actually how Bitcoin is kept secure, it's possibilities are a number so huge that we would be long dead before generate a significant amount of the possible keys.

2) Mine isn't "more random" than yours, the question is, for you to have mouse moves, to have the memory contents changing, to have all the entropy elements a computer being used normally has, someone has to be operating it, otherwise it's pretty much dormant, so it's pseudo-randoms will be weak due to lack of entropy elements.

I believe that would be interesting if you are near a road or railroad where trucks or trains may shake things around. Not the case, as the intended generator is a warehouse.



That's quite interesting too.


Updating: after checking some waves around, I'm now thinking on use AM or SW bands rather than FM.

Bitcoin thrives from the very beginning with bad publicity.
Everyday you get FUD from somewhere, ever since 2009. And at every step BTC has overcame it and became stronger.

So, who cares about China? They want to go back in time and rub sticks to start a fire? Let them go for it...

Thank you for your answers.
I'm of a philosophy that in cryptography no "secure is secure enough" and no level or paranoia or far fetched attack vector is too much. So your input was highly appreciated.

I strongly disagree with your instance about "external variables"; computers are precision machines, that's why they are unsuitable for generate true randoms on their own. Much of the entropy pools are user generated, or "external variables", such as mouse movements, keys entered, pixel color swaps and so on. All of them, if we ever manage to control quantum mechanics become pretty much predictable, but taken we don't they're pretty good.
Likewise radio waves are much unpredictable out of the quantum level. Yes, if a known song is being broadcast at the frequency the radio is listening, one second of such song = one chunk of the key, but entropy here is naturally given because it's highly unlikely that the radio will have perfect reception, a "crack" and "fizzz" will make a whole difference at the end result.
Also on the "attacker", there's one thing to take to account; one thing is to be physically attacked the other remotely, there're way more kids with VPN and TOR than James Bonds around. The attack vector is very physical, the attacker will have to be in a very short range of the receiver in order to overcome bad reception entropy. And don't forget that the system will pick a random frequency each time, the MCU RNG entropy pool will be keep changing as its memory contents change from the radiowaves being processed. Given enough running time (and it is never meant to stop, regardless if the contents are being used or not) it becomes more and more unpredictable.

One of the most basic electronic random generator is the electronic dice, it's a capacitor that will feed a 555 timer to a decade counter, the timer will oscillate accordingly to the charge at the capacitor, which is set by the amount of time a user is pressing a button, where a microsecond of charge will make a whole difference to the pulses generated and input voltage adds an entropy level. You can "cheat" this by creating a machine that presses the button a very accurate amount of time, thus controlling the capacitor charge and therefore the pulses, for sure, but if you go to use this to play Monopoly with a friend, I believe he will find pretty much strange that you bring your timer device along.

1 second in loop, not 1 second only.
1 second -> change frequency -> 1 second -> change frequency... at all time the data at the pointer is being append and changed accordingly.
Microphone and camera are pretty much useless, as the place is silent, buttons are just one and spool is erased after each print. No wifi is used and ESP doesn't start wifi unless told to, also an Arduino without Wifi shield can be used.

Let's assume for the sake of the example that the seed is 100 bytes long and each 1 second capture renders 10 bytes of data, so that just after ~10 seconds (+ i2c and code loop) the system is able to return a random.
init: 00 00 00 00 00 00 //init all bytes as 0x00.
loop1: AF DE 3E 21 21 89 39 40 FF FE 00 00 00 00... //one sequence, pattern detected (00 00 00...) -> invalid
loop2: EF EA A1 00 22 11 FA 2F 1A 3B AF DE 3E 21 21 89 39 40 FF FE 00 00 00... //two sequences, pattern detected (00 00 00...) -> invalid
... and so on until the buffer is filled up at loop10.
When the buffer if full, the next loop will remove the last 10 bytes and append the new ones at the beginning of the sequence, repeating this all the time.

First of, thank you for the valid and pertinent answer.
I hadn't think of #1, but I can add a response validation algorithm, either at the MCU or computer checking for patterns or repeated bytes.
As for #2, it has to be potent enough, has to "guess" when the print key would be pressed, as that the only time the random bytes are actually used, and it has to be a FM jammer, as the attacker has also to "guess" which frequency is being listen to and if or not shifted. Thus a jammer would probably render a pattern, throwing an error with the fix applied to #1 and having to running it in continuum, people around would start to complaint of bad radio reception.

It doesn't listen anything on 16hz to 32khz, just between 88 and 108 Mhz, so your farts wouldn't add nothing to it.