Dear Satoshi Nakamoto

[Crypt1x]

Dear Satoshi Nakamoto I would like to know your opinion about all the blocksize bitcoin drama.
I believe a brilliant mind as your surely thought of this when developing Bitcoin in the ol' days. I know you couldn't quantify the time needed for this to happen but I'm sure you already thought about this evenience.

Personally i believe that Bitcoin is one of the greatest invention of the modern industrialised epoch, I'm supporting it since 2013 and still loving, but i'm really pissed off by this new way of thinking bitcoin as the product of a company. In example BU seems one of the biggest fail in Bitcoin history, and I'm not talking technically but about the bitcoin philosophy instead: they tried to corrupt morally all the community to follow their "altcoin" while trying to subvert in a corporative way the original meaning of BTC.

I would very pleased to know your opinion on this, I'm not asking to take a position on this just know what you think about it.
If you are ever going to read this post i would be happy to tip you if you're going to give me an answer (lulz).

Cheers & have a bright life,

thanks again for your invention.




Bitcoin means from the community to the community, following the community not leading it.

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[dinofelis]

Dear Satoshi Nakamoto I would like to know your opinion about all the blocksize bitcoin drama.
I believe a brilliant mind as your surely thought of this when developing Bitcoin in the ol' days. I know you couldn't quantify the time needed for this to happen but I'm sure you already thought about this evenience.

I think your genius already considered that question in 2008:

http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/

Only people trying to create new coins would need to run
network nodes. At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the
network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to
specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would
only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with
that one node.
...
That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or
2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.

He's talking about one or few centralized miner nodes, everyone directly connecting to it, and blocks of about 1 GB.
(the 100 GB is daily).

Then, he screwed up:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347

[BitcoinHodler]

why do you even want to know what Satoshi Nakamoto says! he is just a developer and one opinion at best and bitcoin is not centralized that you want to ask the owner what he thinks to follow it.

in the spirit of decentralization you either educate yourself to understand what is happening and support something that you, based on your knowledge think is best, or keep your fingers crossed that the overwhelming majority does it properly without ending up in chaos.

[gentlemand]

He's talking about one or few centralized miner nodes, everyone directly connecting to it, and blocks of about 1 GB.
(the 100 GB is daily).

Then, he screwed up:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg23049#msg23049

Possibly the most prescient message on this forum. Who knows what the technical environment was like back then, I certainly don't, but they really should've seen this one coming and indeed this fella did.

[dinofelis]

He's talking about one or few centralized miner nodes, everyone directly connecting to it, and blocks of about 1 GB.
(the 100 GB is daily).

Then, he screwed up:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg23049#msg23049

Possibly the most prescient message on this forum. Who knows what the technical environment was like back then, I certainly don't, but they really should've seen this one coming and indeed this fella did.

Indeed, I saw it too in that thread !

The only guy that understood "immutability" (of the protocol) at that time !

This one, just before, is edifying too:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg17804#msg17804

I agree, especially since generators are both the source of blocks and "votes" in the network.  Since a block restriction would allow generators to charge higher transaction fees, they might "vote" against an increase in the max size in the future.

It seems unlikely to be a real problem though.

[mk4]

very unlikely to get a reply; but nice try though.

[Emoclaw]

why do you even want to know what Satoshi Nakamoto says! he is just a developer and one opinion at best and bitcoin is not centralized that you want to ask the owner what he thinks to follow it.

in the spirit of decentralization you either educate yourself to understand what is happening and support something that you, based on your knowledge think is best, or keep your fingers crossed that the overwhelming majority does it properly without ending up in chaos.

Satoshi is the founder of Bitcoin. His vision of what Bitcoin is and should be is what made a lot of people sign up for it.
He designed Bitcoin so that everyone can decide on its future (that's decentralization), he doesn't get to decide by himself, nevertheless many individuals would value his opinion for that.

[doomistake]

Dear Satoshi Nakamoto I would like to know your opinion about all the blocksize bitcoin drama.
I believe a brilliant mind as your surely thought of this when developing Bitcoin in the ol' days. I know you couldn't quantify the time needed for this to happen but I'm sure you already thought about this evenience.

Personally i believe that Bitcoin is one of the greatest invention of the modern industrialised epoch, I'm supporting it since 2013 and still loving, but i'm really pissed off by this new way of thinking bitcoin as the product of a company. In example BU seems one of the biggest fail in Bitcoin history, and I'm not talking technically but about the bitcoin philosophy instead: they tried to corrupt morally all the community to follow their "altcoin" while trying to subvert in a corporative way the original meaning of BTC.

I would very pleased to know your opinion on this, I'm not asking to take a position on this just know what you think about it.
If you are ever going to read this post i would be happy to tip you if you're going to give me an answer (lulz).

Cheers & have a bright life,

thanks again for your invention.




Bitcoin means from the community to the community, following the community not leading it.

Satoshi Nakamoto won't reveal himself just because of this dilemma, bitcoin itself could solve the problem because it is a decentralized one, and we are here, all of the bitcoin users around the world will defend bitcoin until the end. Maybe Satoshi Nakamoto is making a move silently about this problem. And we don't have to worry about this problem because it is just for temporary, they are just making us to panic about this.

So, we are going to sell our bitcoin and they are the ones who are going to make profits out of it, if bitcoins price PUMPs again.

[SONG GEET]

Dear Satoshi Nakamoto I would like to know your opinion about all the blocksize bitcoin drama.

Blocksize drama will not over for sure and all these spam attacks on bitcoin network can't last long because it will cost so much for attackers. When all this attacks will be over, there will be no any problem regarding mempool being full with unconfirmed transactions and rise in transactions fees. 

[Kprawn]

Satoshi predicted that nodes would become to "BIG" for everyone to run and that it would be centralized at some point in the future. We have

reached a point where "BIG" Pools are running the show and they are determining the future code for Bitcoin. We can only change this, if we

grow bigger than these pools. { By we... I am saying ... everyone needs to run a full node...  and force the change } 

Satoshi went away when the first attack was looming... { Gavin } 

[topesis]

why do you even want to know what Satoshi Nakamoto says! he is just a developer and one opinion at best and bitcoin is not centralized that you want to ask the owner what he thinks to follow it.

in the spirit of decentralization you either educate yourself to understand what is happening and support something that you, based on your knowledge think is best, or keep your fingers crossed that the overwhelming majority does it properly without ending up in chaos.

In time like this the opinion of someone like Satoshi can't especially when there seems to be some cabals who wants to hijack the network. All of us won't be on this forum if not for the great Satoshi

[dinofelis]

Satoshi predicted that nodes would become to "BIG" for everyone to run and that it would be centralized at some point in the future.

Not quite.  He said that the only MEANINGFUL nodes would be the miners, that there would be only some specialized ones of them, and that the normal users should give up on having full nodes, and connect directly to the miner's nodes with a light wallet.  Read his 2008 post again, where he was implicitly talking about 1 GB blocks.

And then he screwed up, introducing 1 MB blocks, and thinking that it would be a small issue changing that, but when a guy proposed a work-around, he said that it would render him "incompatible with the network".  When some very insightful posters indicated all the problems this limit in the protocol introduced, no more Satoshi comments.

Of course, people liking conspiracies thinking of Satoshi as an evil genius, exactly wanted a small block, to keep bitcoin only for the rich, and to keep his mega mining farms financed, but couldn't acknowledge that at that time, because he needed useful idiots promoting it amongst the sheeple to pump up the money until they could be stripped off by the whales, and so waved away the "concern" by others, seeing the "problem" coming, by a simple "we would simply change it when it is appropriate" kind of comment - even though people were pointing out that miners would just LOVE small blocks and predicted the current situation already 7 years ago.

[Crypt1x]

What i meant is basically: why all this FUD from community members themselves and not just trying to understand tht Bitcoin protocol ISN'T perfect, as anything made from humans can be absolutely perfect, but IS enough perfect to sustain a long way until a real saturation will occur so far?
If you ever had a read on the original mailing list conversation between SN and his first repliers you should notice how SN was able to solve pragamtically and theoritically all the limits he encountered when planning theory about Bitcoin itself and which other people pointed out.
I simply cannot believe that he eventually thought that a 1 MB block would be ok to handle a certain amount of transaction in a mass scale view: ok it was 2008/2009 (and maybe even years before while he was working hidden from public announcements) but already at that time the HDD capabilities and internet connections speeds were enough over the 1 MB scale.
There should be something hidden between the lines that community still doesn't know.

And then another question I just went speculating on myself: what if SN is already working on a Bitcoin derived project and he still have in closed private versions?

[dinofelis]

If you ever had a read on the original mailing list conversation between SN and his first repliers you should notice how SN was able to solve pragamtically and theoritically all the limits he encountered when planning theory about Bitcoin itself and which other people pointed out.

That is because at that moment, SN was the centralized, undisputed authority of bitcoin's protocol (something that Core thought, had inherited for good from SN, like the Pope from Jesus himself).   Satoshi decided by himself, after hearing about remarks and so on, about bitcoin and its protocol.

I simply cannot believe that he eventually thought that a 1 MB block would be ok to handle a certain amount of transaction in a mass scale view: ok it was 2008/2009 (and maybe even years before while he was working hidden from public announcements) but already at that time the HDD capabilities and internet connections speeds were enough over the 1 MB scale.
There should be something hidden between the lines that community still doesn't know.

Well, obviously, 1 MB blocks were not OPENLY part of his view on bitcoin, nor in his 2008 post, nor in the thread I linked.  After people pointing out the fundamental difficulty of changing a protocol rule in a large network (especially a network which has been designed to resist change) he replied that "one simply would have to change the few lines of code".

Now, this can only mean two things.

1) Satoshi, being so used to be able to change the rules all by himself, had difficulties imagining that this would not be possible some years later (like Core attempted) - even though people told him that miners might oppose to a change as it would be lucrative to them.  In other words, Satoshi didn't fully grasp the immutability of the protocol himself (that's what I think).

2) Satoshi secretly wanted small blocks for different reasons that he could not admit publicly at that time:
a) because he was an evil genius on the payroll of the Rothschilds
b) because he had realized that his sound money doctrine, and reducing the block reward, would need fees for his mega mining farms to exist, so the miners should be able to squeeze out the users and he had secretly given up on bitcoin becoming money to buy your coffee with, and only gold for rich whales
c) Satoshi had build in a self-destruction bomb in bitcoin if ever the community couldn't come to a positive consensus over it
d) some other reason that could not be admitted back then but that were part of his almighty genius

I go for 1), because there are many OTHER issues with bitcoin, where Satoshi said that one could change the protocol if the need arose, like if ever the elliptic curve signature scheme became compromised, or some other cryptographic aspect turned out not to be secure, like when the hash function for PoW turned out to be cracked or so.
Also, all his solutions for that (namely, nodes automatically submitting transactions of all the existing wallets to new cryptographical protocols) would generate so many transactions (essentially a transaction per UTXO) that 1 MB blocks could never sustain such a protocol change.

[Qartada]

Satoshi predicted that nodes would become to "BIG" for everyone to run and that it would be centralized at some point in the future.

Not quite.  He said that the only MEANINGFUL nodes would be the miners, that there would be only some specialized ones of them, and that the normal users should give up on having full nodes, and connect directly to the miner's nodes with a light wallet.  Read his 2008 post again, where he was implicitly talking about 1 GB blocks.

And then he screwed up, introducing 1 MB blocks, and thinking that it would be a small issue changing that, but when a guy proposed a work-around, he said that it would render him "incompatible with the network".  When some very insightful posters indicated all the problems this limit in the protocol introduced, no more Satoshi comments.

Of course, people liking conspiracies thinking of Satoshi as an evil genius, exactly wanted a small block, to keep bitcoin only for the rich, and to keep his mega mining farms financed, but couldn't acknowledge that at that time, because he needed useful idiots promoting it amongst the sheeple to pump up the money until they could be stripped off by the whales, and so waved away the "concern" by others, seeing the "problem" coming, by a simple "we would simply change it when it is appropriate" kind of comment - even though people were pointing out that miners would just LOVE small blocks and predicted the current situation already 7 years ago.

What I think Satoshi got wrong though is that he didn't consider that how difficult a full node would be to run is only relative to how much people who use Bitcoin can manage.  Right now, the blockchain is moderately big but it's too late for miners to be decentralised and principled enough to vote through a high consensus change unless it's urgent like a fatal bug.

That means that as transaction fees rise, Bitcoin becomes more and more useful for wealthier people as fees are still low relative to credit cards and it offers them security over their larger amounts of funds.  They can get this security by running a node, so as Bitcoin's audience becomes wealthier the cost of running a full node to them will be insignificant compared to the increase in their perceived security.  That's why "normal users" would still run full nodes - because what a "normal user" is can change.

[gentlemand]

Indeed, I saw it too in that thread !

The only guy that understood "immutability" (of the protocol) at that time !

I'm sure full blocks felt like a stupidly ambitious idea back in the day, but had I been around at the time even I would've thought a limit of 250,000 or so transactions per day wasn't a great deal of headroom.

[Raize]

Satoshi already commented a bit on the blocksize debate here:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-August/010238.html

An analysis of the validity of the email was determined here:
https://pastebin.com/Ct5M8fa2

Regardless of people saying that the last communication from him was on the p2p foundation website, it is just as likely that this email was the last communication from him.

It was so effective and likely legitimate that both Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen didn't post anything for a few days after it hit the mailing list.

Segregated Witness came about slowly as a viable solution shortly after this email came out. The advantages that Schnoor signatures would provide also started to be spoken of around this time.

I doubt Satoshi would be fully against raising the limit or creating a method by which it could be algorithimically-increased, but he also clearly understood that political or convenience motivations to do so were the *worst* reasons to increase it. Bitcoin's fungibility is not something that can simply be discarded. In fact, its the lack of fungibility of fiat money that led to cryptocurrencies to begin with. It's upsetting to see people toss aside full node operators as unessential entities that do not need to be protected from the risks of centralization. If we make them easy targets then governments, large businesses, and central bankers will manipulate them into doing their bidding. Not today, perhaps not tomorrow, but later when it becomes easier and more politically-acceptable to do top-down governance of cryptocurrencies.

Indeed, it would appear there are already plenty of alt-coins that take this system of control by default, which is why Bitcoin must continue to remain a coin that does not have this flaw for the people that get exploited or burned on the other blockchains. The decentralization and scarcity of the Bitcoin network is what makes it a powerful and dangerous threat to government-run fiat currencies, forcing those governments to consider what happens when their citizens have an alternative way to store value. It weakens the power of governments and rent-seekers living off government largesse to choose tyrannical options for subjugating both their own citizens and innocent people living in other regions just as much as it stops fraudulent pump and dumpers or ponzi schemers. It is important we preserve this alternative indefinitely for the betterment of society as a whole.

[gentlemand]

Satoshi already commented a bit on the blocksize debate here:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-August/010238.html

Bilge. If it really had been him then he should've signed a message from one of his known blocks. Just maybe there were a few people at the time who had the incentive to spoof this.

[Raize]

Bilge. If it really had been him then he should've signed a message from one of his known blocks. Just maybe there were a few people at the time who had the incentive to spoof this.

At the time, that domain had an SPF record that prevented spoofing. The email came from the vistomail servers.

[dinofelis]

It's upsetting to see people toss aside full node operators as unessential entities that do not need to be protected from the risks of centralization.

Well, Satoshi was clearly one of those people, as he said that literally himself in 2008.