Satoshi's Fortune lower bound is 100M USD(DEBATE GOING ON, DO NOT TWEET!)

[deepceleron]

Bitcoin was never once publicly discussed prior to its release.

Wrong: http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/thread.html

Wow didn't even notice that FUD.  

Here is another post about the whitepaper (2008-10-31):
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/12588/

A more accessible view of discussion in that archive (which is a metzdowd mirror):
http://pl.it-usenet.org/group/11834/2008/11/
http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/thrd10.html

And interesting posts, Satoshi had been working a while on it:

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.

and about inflation or deflation from coin creation rate:

The fact that new coins are produced means the money supply increases by a planned amount, but this does not necessarily result in inflation.  If the supply of money increases at the same rate that the number of people using it increases, prices remain stable.  If it does not increase as fast as demand, there will be deflation and early holders of money will see its value increase.

Coins have to get initially distributed somehow, and a constant rate seems like the best formula.

Satoshi Nakamoto

Almost 4000 BTC a day is still getting printed ($4M USD worth), and it hardly debases the currency.

[Etlase2]

Bitcoin was never once publicly discussed prior to its release.

Wrong: http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/thread.html

I'm sorry, that was a brain-dead mistake. It has been awhile since I've bothered discussing the satoshi drama. But the point remains that he indeed was anonymous and clearly spent lots of time and attention to detail in everything he did, so to somehow conclude after knowing this that he was careless when it came to his bitcoins is an asinine assumption. It doesn't matter what the exact amount is, whatever satoshi controls exists and is significant unless you want to put your head in the sand. There are other players like mtgox and slush and pirate and knight that may have as many or more. It is as easy to imagine 10-15% of all the bitcoins to ever be mined being in the hands of half a dozen people as it is to imagine that a vast portion of early coins have been lost. Just because an argument can be made for the latter does not mean that the former is not a distinct and realistic possibility.

The argument will continuously boil down to "you can't prove it, pseudononymous lol", with terrible evidence from both sides. However...

I have strong evidence the same computer AND JUST ONE  mined blocks 1-10
(edit: or a group of computers turned on exactly at the same time)

Just look at the extra nonce in the coinbase field of the coinbase transaction.

The counter is monotonically incrementing at a constant pace.

Also this can be used to find how many computers/threads where mining at  some  time (until they get powered-off). Each thread has another monotonically incrementing ExtraNonce variable.

So from that we can infer Satoshi PC Resources. Those resources allowed him to mine a block with 32 leading zeros every 6 minutes.

While Sergio has had a couple bad arguments in this thread, if this is true--I can't verify it because blockchain.info does not display the extra nonce and I don't see a raw copy link anymore--this would certainly have strong implications that satoshi indeed had the resources to mine 50BTC/~13min throughout the difficulty 1 period. 70 minutes passed between blocks 1-10. lol @ 14kh/s between blocks 0 and 1, that's obviously satoshi trying his hardest to mine for a week rather than him waiting for public release before mining.

[deepceleron]

lol @ 14kh/s between blocks 0 and 1, that's obviously satoshi trying his hardest to mine for a week rather than him waiting for public release before mining.

Wrong. (you should stop posting now...)

The genesis block, Sat, 03 Jan 2009 18:15:05 GMT, had to be included in the c++ code before it was compiled. Then the code had to be tested and packaged before it was released. Bitcoin probably was "premined" before release by some testing, but any blockchain testing was discarded.  Satoshi appears to have had working near-Bitcoin code for quite a while (see quote above).

Since the genesis block also has an extranonce of "4" like the first block does, it is likely generated with the same Bitcoin mining code as in the client, and took no more effort to find than the first block (3-4 nonce cycles).

The freenode #bitcoin channel (now used for discussion) is where Bitcoin originally connected to find peers. It would be interesting if there are any logs of how early this channel first appeared to see pre-release testing activity.

[Etlase2]

lol @ 14kh/s between blocks 0 and 1, that's obviously satoshi trying his hardest to mine for a week rather than him waiting for public release before mining.

Wrong. (you should stop posting now...)

The genesis block had to be included in the c++ code before it was compiled. Then the code had to be tested and packaged before it was released. Bitcoin probably was "premined" before release, but any blockchain testing was discarded. Satoshi appears to have had working near-Bitcoin code for quite a while (see quote above).

Since the genesis block also has an extranonce of "4" like the first block does, it is likely generated with the same Bitcoin mining code as in the client, and took no more effort to find than the first block.

Your argument for me being wrong does not follow.

I would also not assume that the timestamps on the pre-public blocks are accurate— all we really know for sure was that there were at least two blocks created between 03/Jan/2009 and 11/Jan/2009. Rounding that down to 7 days suggests a lower bound hashrate of 14 KH/s.  Even if Satoshi had more computing power he might have simply been borrowing it for testing.

gmaxwell, a respected and very highly knowledgeable member of the bitcoin community, just made the argument for Satoshi's initial hashing power being in the order of 14kh/s because of the length of time between blocks 0 and 1. As if he created the genesis block then immediately started mining, waited until he had the first block 6 days later, and then released it and immediately there was enough hashpower to mine the next 9 blocks very close to 10min/block. That is one dopey argument.

[danyy]

so.. if i had mined just one week during the first two years, i were rich now.

[DeathAndTaxes]

so.. if i had mined just one week during the first two years, i were rich now.

Well no.

If you had mined during the first week, and properly safeguarded your wallet.dat, had managed not to lose them to hackers or scammers over the next 4 years,  AND seeing the price go from $0.05 to $1 (a 2000% gain) hadn't sold a single coin, and then after watching 90% of your wealth be destroyed in the last major crash had held strong THEN today you would likely be "rich" assuming that you can liquidate (either to other currency or hard assets).  Of course if you had done all that I would say ... great job you deserve it.

[Sergio_Demian_Lerner]

lol @ 14kh/s between blocks 0 and 1, that's obviously satoshi trying his hardest to mine for a week rather than him waiting for public release before mining.

Wrong. (you should stop posting now...)

The genesis block had to be included in the c++ code before it was compiled. Then the code had to be tested and packaged before it was released. Bitcoin probably was "premined" before release, but any blockchain testing was discarded. Satoshi appears to have had working near-Bitcoin code for quite a while (see quote above).

Since the genesis block also has an extranonce of "4" like the first block does, it is likely generated with the same Bitcoin mining code as in the client, and took no more effort to find than the first block.

Your argument for me being wrong does not follow.

I would also not assume that the timestamps on the pre-public blocks are accurate— all we really know for sure was that there were at least two blocks created between 03/Jan/2009 and 11/Jan/2009. Rounding that down to 7 days suggests a lower bound hashrate of 14 KH/s.  Even if Satoshi had more computing power he might have simply been borrowing it for testing.

gmaxwell, a respected and very highly knowledgeable member of the bitcoin community, just made the argument for Satoshi's initial hashing power being in the order of 14kh/s because of the length of time between blocks 0 and 1. As if he created the genesis block then immediately started mining, waited until he had the first block 6 days later, and then released it and immediately there was enough hashpower to mine the next 9 blocks very close to 10min/block. That is one dopey argument.

I've already explained in another thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=172009.0) that the 6 days of work in block 0 matches the PoW of the genesis block (I think it was 43 zero bits). That does not is irrefutable proof, but it's a good indicator of Satoshi PoW: 2^23 hashes/second.

[moni3z]

Hal Finney kept all his early coins. Satoshi for all we know has zero bitcoins he could've just walked away from the project and given them all to Hal, or deleted the keys so he wouldn't be tempted to spend them and risk being tracked down.

[BitcoinFX]

No mention here yet of the 'block lock' ? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=437.0 hehe

"We know its true, because we made it up ourselves!" 

You can never really know anything, unless they want you to know.

"The Color Blue's frangibility is a necessity"

[DeathAndTaxes]

No mention here yet of the 'block lock' ? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=437.0 hehe

"We know its true, because we made it up ourselves!" 

You can never really know anything, unless they want you to know.

"The Color Blue's frangibility is a necessity"

the block lockin is just another word for the checkpoints.  Multiple checkpoints have since been aded to the QT client (and many other clients).

The last one is at block 225430.  Even with 100% of hashing power it not possible to modify the blockchain prior to block 225431.

Code:

    static MapCheckpoints mapCheckpoints =
        boost::assign::map_list_of
        ( 11111, uint256("0x0000000069e244f73d78e8fd29ba2fd2ed618bd6fa2ee92559f542fdb26e7c1d"))
        ( 33333, uint256("0x000000002dd5588a74784eaa7ab0507a18ad16a236e7b1ce69f00d7ddfb5d0a6"))
        ( 74000, uint256("0x0000000000573993a3c9e41ce34471c079dcf5f52a0e824a81e7f953b8661a20"))
        (105000, uint256("0x00000000000291ce28027faea320c8d2b054b2e0fe44a773f3eefb151d6bdc97"))
        (134444, uint256("0x00000000000005b12ffd4cd315cd34ffd4a594f430ac814c91184a0d42d2b0fe"))
        (168000, uint256("0x000000000000099e61ea72015e79632f216fe6cb33d7899acb35b75c8303b763"))
        (193000, uint256("0x000000000000059f452a5f7340de6682a977387c17010ff6e6c3bd83ca8b1317"))
        (210000, uint256("0x000000000000048b95347e83192f69cf0366076336c639f9b7228e9ba171342e"))
        (216116, uint256("0x00000000000001b4f4b433e81ee46494af945cf96014816a4e2370f11b23df4e"))
        (225430, uint256("0x00000000000001c108384350f74090433e7fcf79a606b8e797f065b130575932"))
        ;

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/checkpoints.cpp

[Sergio_Demian_Lerner]

While Sergio has had a couple bad arguments in this thread, if this is true--I can't verify it because blockchain.info does not display the extra nonce and I don't see a raw copy link anymore--this would certainly have strong implications that satoshi indeed had the resources to mine 50BTC/~13min throughout the difficulty 1 period. 70 minutes passed between blocks 1-10. lol @ 14kh/s between blocks 0 and 1, that's obviously satoshi trying his hardest to mine for a week rather than him waiting for public release before mining.

Use blockexplorer.com. It shows the coinbase script. The last bytes are the extranonce:

e.g. :  "coinbase":"04ffff001d0104"

then the extra-nonce is 04.

Regarding the speed of a computer in 2009, my computer was almost as fast as Satoshi's. A Core 2 Duo. And because it has two cores, it can run two mining threads.

Why does gmaxwell says such an erroneous fact about hashing rate in 2009 ? Maybe he had a Commodore 64 back in 2009.

See http://www.cryptopp.com/benchmarks.html. At the bottom of the page says it was last edited on 2009.
The CPU is a Intel Core 2 1.83 GHz. The performance is 3.4 MHash/sec (111 MiB/sec)

So who's making FUD ?

[Peter Todd]

So who's making FUD ?

The sheer intensity of this thread puzzles me.

Lets assume you're right, Satoshi really does have 1 million coins all to himself. Currently there are 11 million coins in circulation, and that number is growing by 1.3 million per year. (~12% inflation)

So he dumps every last coin, all at once. That's 9% of the market cap, maybe 18% if you assume half the coins mined to date have been lost. In a rational economy I'd expect that to make the price drop by 18% Lets triple that for good measure, giving us 60% In the past week Bitcoin has gone from a high of $265 to a low of $55, an 80% drop, and Bitcoin is still going strong. I dunno about you guys, but I have a double-digit % of my wealth tied up in Bitcoins, and I spent the past week thinking "Cool!" and having a good laugh at Gavin's twitter comment about speculators and squirrels - if you can't afford to lose 100% of your high-risk investments, you shouldn't have them. I know I could walk away from every bit of time and money I've invested in Bitcoin thinking it was fun while it lasted. But my other hobbies include cave exploration and rock climbing; activities with a very real possibility of losing your life give you some perspective about the meaning of risk. That perspective might explain why in my experience caving, unlike Bitcoin, is dominated by average middle-aged men and women (nearly 50:50) with average jobs who take a sober, calculated approach to taking risks.

In any case, Satoshi selling every single one of his supposed 1 million BTC hoard just won't affect the economy all that much in the grand scheme of things. If anything, I think it would be a positive development removing a lot of uncertainty: he can only do it once!

[DeathAndTaxes]

See http://www.cryptopp.com/benchmarks.html. At the bottom of the page says it was last edited on 2009.
The CPU is a Intel Core 2 1.83 GHz. The performance is 3.4 MHash/sec (111 MiB/sec)

So who's making FUD ?

How do you get 3.4 MH/s from 111 MiB/sec.   The SHA-256 digest is 512 bytes.  Thus 1 hash per second would be 512 bps. However bitcoin does a double SHA-256 hash so 111 MiB/sec * 8 / 1024 = 0.867 MH/s = 867 KH/s.  The miner in v0.1 was very crude it lacked acceleration using SSE2 making it significantly slower, that came later with the first dedicated CPU miners.

On edit: fixed bits vs bytes error.  DOH.  Thanks mrb.

[gmaxwell]

gmaxwell, a respected and very highly knowledgeable member of the bitcoin community, just made the argument for Satoshi's initial hashing power being in the order of 14kh/s because of the length of time between blocks 0 and 1. As if he created the genesis block

I was actually taking Sergio's dopey argument and substituting in the data we actually had, I never said it was a good argument.  I also said _lower bound_, which you deceptively omitted in your repetition there.  I also gave a much higher number which was my measurement with contemporary hardware in software, which you've helpfully omitted.

Why does gmaxwell says such an erroneous fact about hashing rate in 2009 ? Maybe he had a Commodore 64 back in 2009.
See http://www.cryptopp.com/benchmarks.html. At the bottom of the page says it was last edited on 2009.
The CPU is a Intel Core 2 1.83 GHz. The performance is 3.4 MHash/sec (111 MiB/sec)
So who's making FUD ?

Because I actually tested the openssl code in the reference software on a PIII that I had been using at the time and got somewhere around ~47KH/s. I'd offer to run it again but I've since moved across the country and no longer have any old computers. But heck, you won't even try the actual software— you keep _miscalculating_ (SHA256 processes 512 bytes at a time, 111 MiB/sec ~= 113KH/s of SHA256^2) based on unrelated software (and even then, it doesn't sound too inconsistent with my figures)! What the heck!  Are you allergic to actually using a computer?

That does not is irrefutable proof, but it's a good indicator of Satoshi PoW: 2^23 hashes/second.

By your own MIB/s numbers you're arguing that satoshi was had roughly <s>73</s>9 of your reference machines worth of computing power. (corrected per posts below)

[Etlase2]

I was actually taking Sergio's dopey argument and substituting in the data we actually had, I never said it was a good argument.  I also said _lower bound_, which you deceptively omitted in your repetition there.

  I didn't omit it the first time in the post you didn't reply to. Let's go over your propaganda post in a little more detail, because there are quite a few subtleties.

I would also not assume that the timestamps on the pre-public blocks are accurate

What are the pre-public blocks? For what reason should we question the timestamps? If we look at just 1-10, the timestamps are minutes apart. Would Satoshi purposely fudge the clock just to make it look like he had more hashing power? Is that what you're suggesting?

— all we really know for sure was that there were at least two blocks created between 03/Jan/2009 and 11/Jan/2009.

That's all we know for sure? We don't know that the next blocks were all minutes apart and there was hashing power at the very dawn of the network to maintain something close to 50BTC/10min? And your argument for completely ignoring this is "the timestamps may not be accurate"?

Rounding that down to 7 days suggests a lower bound hashrate of 14 KH/s.

Rounding that down clearly shows that Satoshi was not mining from the time he created the genesis block to the approximate time he released the software to the public. I am not sure how the timestamps align between the block chain and the message board, that might be something worth investigating. If processors were so slow, as you claim, then some 30-40 processors (estimating 100kh/s) were connected and mining at the dawn of bitcoin (block one). From a message board post that had responses from about 4 people? And this pace went on relatively uninterrupted for 30k+ blocks?

Even if Satoshi had more computing power he might have simply been borrowing it for testing.

What does this even mean? Are you conceding that maybe he did have most of the power, but he was only borrowing it? As if this somehow makes the problem go away?


Your post was horrific, and everyone should feel dumber for reading it. There was not one cogent sentence. Just a bunch of buzz-word ramblings trying to sound like you know what you're talking about for the newbie-folk who will just eat it up as gospel.

edit: and I know that you are damn well smarter than that post, which led me to the conclusion of you being outwardly deceptive

[mrb]

111 MiB/sec / 1024 = 0.1084 MH/s = 108 KH/s.

Wrong.

(SHA256 processes 512 bytes at a time, 111 MiB/sec ~= 113KH/s of SHA256^2)

Wrong.

SHA256 processes 512 bits, not bytes, per block. A double-SHA256 is 1024 bits. So:

111 MiB/sec * 8 (bits/bytes) / 1024 ~= 870 khash/sec.

[gmaxwell]

— all we really know for sure was that there were at least two blocks created between 03/Jan/2009 and 11/Jan/2009.

That's all we know for sure? We don't know that the next blocks were all minutes apart and there was hashing power at the very dawn of the network to maintain something close to 50BTC/10min? And your argument for completely ignoring this is "the timestamps may not be accurate"?

Ignoring??? I'm drawing what I'm saying precisely from there.  The dates in my post are from the headline in the genesis block and from the public announcement.  We don't actually know which blocks were when, because god knows how things were moved around and restructured while testing or in preparation for release.

[gmaxwell]

SHA256 processes 512 bits, not bytes, per block. A double-SHA256 is 1024 bits. So:
111 MiB/sec * 8 (bits/bytes) / 1024 ~= 870 khash/sec.

Indeed. And I've said this about a zillion times on IRC whenever someone asks about using commercial crypto accelerators for mining. ... But in all those times I'm talking about megabits not megabytes. Doh. It's easy to make doofus mistakes when they agree with the values you expect. Still doesn't get within a factor of factor of four of the numbers I was disputing, and it's still a measurement on unrelated software.  Thank you for the correction.

[Etlase2]

— all we really know for sure was that there were at least two blocks created between 03/Jan/2009 and 11/Jan/2009.

That's all we know for sure? We don't know that the next blocks were all minutes apart and there was hashing power at the very dawn of the network to maintain something close to 50BTC/10min? And your argument for completely ignoring this is "the timestamps may not be accurate"?

Ignoring??? I'm drawing what I'm saying precisely from there.  The dates in my post are from the headline in the genesis block and from the public announcement.  We don't actually know which blocks were when, because god knows how things were moved around and restructured while testing or in preparation for release.

You are drawing what you're saying from the time differential between blocks 0, a block that comes with the software, and block 1, the first block to presumably be mined either in anticipation of immediate release, or just after release. From block 1 on, there is hashing power to maintain a near 50btc/10min, yet you continue to argue about the haziest of hazy possibilities other than occam's razor. And more technical gobbledygook "moved around and restructured while testing or in preparation". Maybe people's brain will fall asleep while reading that and assume that you're making sense.


PS - the announcement and the first blocks mined "in the wild" were on the 9th, not the 11th of January. But of course that ever devious satoshi cooked up a plan to make it look like he had enough hashing power for a difficulty of 1 on his own, and then to hide his tracks and make people not realize this, he manipulated the timestamps to make it look exactly like he had what he was trying to hide. BRILLIANT!

Still doesn't get within a factor of factor of four of the numbers I was disputing, and it's still a measurement on unrelated software.

It sure does bring the total hashing power of the network well within one person or a small group for the first 30k+ blocks, though.

[gmaxwell]

You are drawing what you're saying from the time differential between blocks 0, a block that comes with the software, and block 1, the first block to presumably be mined either in anticipation of immediate release, or just after release. From block 1 on, there is hashing power to maintain a near 50btc/10min,

I'm ignoring the timestamps in the blockchain, as I said.

PS - the announcement and the first blocks mined "in the wild" were on the 9th,

You might want to update the wiki.

But of course that ever devious satoshi cooked up a plan to make it look like he had enough hashing power for a difficulty of 1 on his own, and then to hide his tracks and make people not realize this, he manipulated the timestamps to make it look exactly like he had what he was trying to hide. BRILLIANT!

I dunno who you're arguing with there, cause that all sounds just as nuts as Sergio's claim that he had some multiple of the hashpower required for diff 1 and but mystically the network stayed at diff 1 because??? If anything that crazy argument suggests, perhaps, that Satoshi didn't mine full time. (not that I believe it— but it's the logical conclusion of the argument that he had more hashpower than was observed in the network)

It sure does bring the total hashing power of the network well within one person or a small group for the first 30k+ blocks, though.

Sure, even if it was 100 machines worth that would have been true regardless— even if it took a sold 100 machines to get there.. And?