He has had enough time to respond to things and so far has elected not to (beyond a brief admission that "it is possible" he could have been tricked).

As for maintaining Bitcoin code he hasn't done that for years.

His agenda has been to try and wrest control back of the project (after he willingly had given up that anyway) for the last couple of years so it isn't surprising that a con-man who seems to be very pro huge blocks would be someone whose audacious claims he doesn't thoroughly verify himself.

Don't you think that it is strange that none of the core devs fell for this charade?

(my guess is that you're a Gavin supporter)

Yes - the extra funds can be transacted (only the 50 BTC "coinbase" amount is not indexed and so can't be spent).

Then why lie and copy and paste Satoshi's signature pretending that he created it from the hash of a Sartre document?

For someone trying to prove they are Satoshi it would have been very simple just to provide a signed message rather than all the nonsense and plain lies that this guy has been publishing.

You're not wrong about the 50 BTC - but other coins have been sent to the same address - those could be moved (as those txs are indexed).

The fact that Gavin has said he believes this guy to be Satoshi when his false signature claim was debunked within hours shows that Gavin has lost all credibility (where is Gavin's response to the debunking?).

Someone who (still?) likes to call himself the Chief Bitcoin Scientist (although he should not be using such a title as he doesn't even have commit access to the repo now) should lose all credibility for simply being so easily fooled.

Yup - considering that his first example of "extraordinary proof" was to simply copy and paste a signature from Satoshi (which anyone could do as that signature is in the blockchain) and then lie that he created that signature himself using the private key (as well as lying that the hash being signed was that of a Sartre document rather than simply the hash of the tx content of Satoshi's tx).

Again - those funds (sent to that address) *other than the coinbase* actually *can be moved*.

And owning the private key to the genesis block would be far more convincing than moving funds from say block 700.

Also - he doesn't need to move funds but simply provide a signature (the very thing he failed to do with his last stunt which simply was a copy and paste of Satoshi's signature taken from the public blockchain).

You perhaps missed my previous post - but it is technically possible to move the funds other than the coinbase (i.e. the initial 50 BTC cannot be spent).

Actually I am pretty sure that it is only the "coinbase" amount (the initial 50 BTC) that can't be spent (due to a glitch in the software).

Later amounts that were sent to it (and there have been quite a lot of those) actually can be spent (so if he really owns the private key to the genesis block then he should prove it by moving some of those amounts).

In his most recent stunt he re-used Satoshi's signature trying to pretend that it was a newly generated signature applied to the double hash of a document (a bit silly to not realise that he would be found out within hours of publication) so now he is stating that he is going to move funds sent to one of Satoshi's early addresses.

I would be pretty close to certain that he is going to attempt another trick - so anyone thinks that they can guess what he'll do?

I wouldn't use the term POS as *stake* has nothing to do with it (i.e. how many coins you do or don't have is irrelevant) so it would require a new initialism (perhaps "proof of account" although I think POA has been used to mean other things already).

But yes the proof is only used to create/verify a new/existing minting account and results in no direct reward itself (any rewards for fees and/or new money supply are simply awarded to valid minting accounts in what is effectively a random manner).

I think that Gavin should be put through the wringer if he really is backing this bullshit story (just shows how ridiculous he has become in order to try and wrest control over the project).

What I am working on is a method to reduce the amount of "work" required for a POW implementation by limiting the work to instead be more of a "proof of active account" (with all blocks needing to be minted by such proven active accounts).

One way to picture this would be if we had 1 in every 1,000 blocks requiring proof from every possible minting account and the blocks between these proofs being minted in accordance with a PRNG that will determine the "best account" for producing each block.

So it doesn't attempt to replace POW with something else but instead "spaces that work out" allowing for much greater energy efficiency (with the trade-off being that it does require the use of accounts for minting).

I certainly wouldn't expect Bitcoin itself to use this approach, however, it might be something that will appear in a side-chain down the track.

Hey @Tuck - am sorry I wasn't aware of your articles before so thanks for pointing that out.

I don't know if any math analysis has been done to work out at what % such an issue/attack would start to wreak havoc but as stated if all parties "acted selfishly" (which is what is assumed in Bitcoin) then there is no reason to think that even small % holders wouldn't create multiple blocks (one for each possible fork) so they would all end up colluding in what would then amount to most likely an even bigger problem than >50% (as the forks would never end).

Also note that to start a fork you only need to withhold your "better block" just long enough after an inferior one has been minted (clearly the more minting power you have the longer you can make such a fork before it is "published" but even a fork of 1 block could start such a chain reaction and that could be done unintentionally even).

It should be noted that "automatic checkpoint" mechanisms can limit the length of any particular fork but you are still potentially just going to start up a bunch of new forks after such a checkpoint has occurred (and once faith in such a blockchain has been dealt this kind of a blow I couldn't see the coin really having a future).

Basically POS only works if the coin is controlled by a cartel (which won't work against itself in creating and continually extending such forks) or if the (vast?) majority of players do not participate in such NAS behaviour (i.e. they only use the standard software that won't behave that way).

Those that argue "but we haven't seen this happen on XYZ" simply aren't admitting the most likely reason why that would be the case (i.e. because XYZ is actually under then control of a cartel and of course this is almost impossible to either prove or disprove). Also if an alt-coin that isn't worth very much is using POS then it is far less likely to be subject to such an issue as there simply isn't the financial incentive to care (and a smaller community is perhaps more likely to have more honest players).

Of course the standard software would have to be modified to take the NAS approach (but presumably that wouldn't cost much to do if there was potentially a lot of money to be made from wreaking such havoc).

IMO there are other ways that energy consumption could be dramatically reduced that don't carry such a risk (and I'll be elaborating more upon that later this year most likely).

There are a number of possible attack vectors but perhaps the most well known is called the NAS (Nothing At Stake) issue.

Basically the whole "benefit" of POS is that it is ultra-low energy which means that solving a block takes virtually no effort (so creating 100+ different blocks at the same height would be fairly straight forward just using standard hardware).

Choosing the "best" block for the consensus chain is normally based upon the previous block and something to do with either the UTXO's being used (for Bitcoin clones) or to do with an account id (for other implementations) but it would be very simple to withhold your "best" block whilst preparing more blocks (and the more of the UTXOs/accounts you control the easier this could become) in order to do a "re-org" (i.e. to re-write history).

It should be noted that blockchains by their very nature can't avoid re-orgs as P2P consensus is dependent upon timing between nodes which is unpredictable.

If such a fork happens and other nodes aren't sure which fork will win in the long run then they would have nothing to lose (hence NAS) to simply create blocks for every fork "just in case" (to make sure they don't end up losing out) which could lead to longer and longer forks (and it would make rational sense to create blocks for each and every fork if there is any sort of block reward or other benefit from minting new blocks).

Larger re-orgs due to such an issue/attack could likely lead to a very unstable blockchain that would presumably lose the faith of its user base (basically this could be thought of as being a sort of "tragedy of the commons" issue where the common property is the various forks).

Basically the only real defense against this kind of issue/attack is centralisation (which is not at all what one hopes would ever occur with Bitcoin).

That will depend upon exactly how the design comes together (it isn't completed yet AFAIA).

Of course the more decentralised such routing is the better off we are in terms of having an anti-fragile network but also decentralisation does come at a performance cost (which is why off-chain solutions are required in order to boost the TPS to the same sorts of levels that networks such as VISA and Mastercard currently provide).

My prediction is that we'll probably end up with a somewhat centralised approach and I do agree that getting the balance right is going to be important.

The LN txs (apart from the channel opening and closing) are "off-chain" so they are not contributing to any size cost whatsoever.

It should also be noted that payment "routing" is also a key feature of the LN design (so you wouldn't need a separate channel for every possible service and/or goods provider you are paying).

Another important thing is that LN allows Bitcoin to become suitable for things like paying for "live streaming" (e.g. pay an amount per second) which is something Bitcoin itself could never scale up to do.

As it is using an unsigned 64 bit integer to store the number of Satoshi's any extension to this would not at all be trivial (it would require quite a lot of code to be reworked and a huge amount of testing) so I can't see any such thing happening for many, many years (if ever).

Understand that it affects the entire system in regards to the txs (memory, protocol and storage). Perhaps people might recall the amount of work that was done to solve the Y2K problem?

(am guessing most here are too young to know about that - but it resulted in huge numbers of retired COBOL programmers coming out of retirement to earn huge amounts for a few years)

Those that say "Bitcoin's 8 decimal places can easily be extended" do not understand software engineering.

Working is still continuing although it was paused for a while due to shifting home and taking a holiday.

Some preparatory commits for tying the Trade package to the Wallet and Transaction packages have already been pushed and work on the Trade package extensions has now begun.