After feedback from others, further thought and investigation, I now think it is
unlikely that the programmer of Bitcoin and the guy who interacted with community through mailing lists and this forum was the famed mathematician John Nash.However, I think John Nash is still possibly involved unwittingly. It seems it was intentionally made to appear that John Nash could have been Satoshi (which thus of course means Satoshi isn't Nash).
However, it is very peculiar that Nash did not ever speak to the fact that Satoshi's PoW was discovery of a Shapley value for his research on Cooperation in Non-Cooperative Repeated Games and that Bitcoin was the better (more stable) gold that his ideal money plan needed to force nations to compete to make their currencies more stable which is precisely what he predicted could happen by a process of evolution.So it occurs to me to think that that which is not achieved by a grand action of establishment by “fiat” may alternatively tend to come into existence as a consequence of a process of evolution. And of course, after a certain degree of progress by “evolution” the rest of the progress could possibly be realized by a convention or a process of “fiat”.
And that Nash specifically demurred when asked about Bitcoin, but then cryptically explained that gold and silver were worse, thus implying that he knew that Bitcoin was what his ideal money planned needed to kickstart the evolution he wrote about. So that is very strange.
And I still have no explanation for the timing of Nash's absence from public activity from the late 2008 to early 2010 timeframe, which coincided with Satoshi's public communication.
Here is evidence that Nash wasn't the Satoshi speaking to us:
1. If John Nash wanted secrecy he would never have embedded his name so obviously in Sato
shi Nak
amoto. If he didn't need secrecy, then he would have been more open.
2. Satoshi was not working on the source code from 2004 to 2008. The period in which Nash become very active touring again for ideal money in summer 2008, was when Satoshi claims he was still coding:
I believe I've worked through all those little details over the
last year and a half while coding it, and there were a lot of them.
3. The use of the word 'right' instead of 'correct' is not indicative of someone of Nash's attention to detail in the use of language:
Right, nodes ...
Right, exactly ...
You're already right about most of your assumptions where you filled in the blanks.
4. As for the claims about the original source code of Bitcoin, note that
Hal Finney was working on the code before anybody else saw it.
Note that the person who was communicating as Satoshi obviously knew some economics because he corrected James A. Donald about the distinction between inflation and debasement (which is a common conflation many retards in our community continue to make every damn day):
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.
The above quote is I think Satoshi trying to defend Bitcoin as a better gold. However, this "Satoshi" also makes statements indicating he hasn't really thought out the game theory of Bitcoin's future very well:
Coins have to get initially distributed somehow, and a constant rate seems like the best formula.
If you're having trouble with the inflation issue, it's easy to tweak it for transaction fees instead. It's as simple as this: let the output value from any transaction be 1 cent less than the input value. Either the client software automatically writes transactions for 1 cent more than the intended payment value, or it could come out of the payee's side. The incentive value when a node finds a proof-of-work for a block could be the total of the fees in the block.
5. Although the "Satoshi" who is speaking to us is aware of the key innovation he has solved w.r.t. to Wei Dai's original work, he explains in terms of synchronization instead of game theory of non-cooperative repeated games:
> Distributed databases are *hard* even when all the
> databases perfectly follow the will of a single owner.
> Messages get lost, links drop, syncrhonization delays
> become abnormal, and entire machines go up in flames,
> and the network as a whole has to take all this in its
> stride.
A very good point, and a more complete specification is necessary in order
to understand how the network will respond to imperfections like this. I
am looking forward to seeing more detail emerge.
One thing I might mention is that in many ways bitcoin is two independent
ideas: a way of solving the kinds of problems James lists here, of
creating a globally consistent but decentralized database; and then using
it for a system similar to Wei Dai's b-money (which is referenced in the
paper) but transaction/coin based rather than account based. Solving the
global, massively decentralized database problem is arguably the harder
part, as James emphasizes. The use of proof-of-work as a tool for this
purpose is a novel idea well worth further review IMO.
Hal Finney
The proof-of-work chain is a solution to the Byzantine Generals' Problem. I'll try to rephrase it in that context.
...
The proof-of-work chain is how all the synchronisation, distributed database and global view problems you've asked about are solved.
6. On the marketing side, Satoshi seemed to obfuscate when told his design would not scale to the necessary geek-cool-libertards would want, as Satoshi's only response was #2 quote above:
> It's very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if
> we can explain it properly. I'm better with code than
> with words though.
No, it is very attractive to the libertarian if we can
design a mechanism that will scale to the point of
providing the benefits of rapidly irreversible payment,
immune to political interference, over the internet,
to very large numbers of people. You have an outline
and proposal for such a design, which is a big step
forward, but the devil is in the little details.
Poll
