Why did satoshi develop bitcoin in windows?

[DooMAD]

Bit of a far-flung theory, but I think it might have been a deliberate ploy to cover their tracks and keep their identity a mystery.  If it was someone closely connected to Unix development, but they didn't want people to connect the dots and discover they started Bitcoin, what better way to do it than to make the first version Windows-only?  Secure in the knowledge that if it was successful, it wouldn't take long for Bitcoin to migrate back to Unix, the spiritual home of open source.  Never underestimate Satoshi's brilliance and forward-thinking.

I don't think it's far flung at all and you're right, this to me is a perfect example of forward-thinking... that actually you might realise seems to remain with the bulk of Bitcoin core developers.

Satoshi were a group of highly intelligent people - near flawless communicational language, extremely sound coding. From the beginning, they were already keen to safeguard their identities and part of the strategy would have to include deliberate inconsistencies in character, to complicate any potential profiling they were sure to attract. I think using an OS more common for programmers is part of that obfuscation, and would have helped narrow down any such attempt.

It could also be practicality. If you wanted adoption beyond the confines of cypherpunkery you want Bob and Alice's PCs to be able to run the early clients.

Ah, good, so it's not just me then.  So if we are looking at prominent Unix developers, is this theory plausible?  It would certainly explain Satoshi's absence, but obviously not in nicest of circumstances.  

It just seems to fit somehow.  Think about it this way, if you had been a primary contributor to something as innovative as Unix, you had now retired from working, you had experience with ciphers and cryptography, plus you just so happened to be a goddamn visionary genius, why would you not take a shot at trying to fix money by applying the same open-source principles?

[1714992622]

1714992622

[1714992622]

1714992622

[1714992622]

1714992622

[1714992622]

1714992622

[Jet Cash]

I believe that Bitcoin was created as an experimental project by the Fed, or some other agency of the banking elite. Of course, they would use Windows so that they could check to see what people were doing with their baby.

[DooMAD]

I believe that Bitcoin was created as an experimental project by the Fed, or some other agency of the banking elite. Of course, they would use Windows so that they could check to see what people were doing with their baby.

Not the greatest plan when it's open source.  I don't credit the Fed with a vast amount of intelligence, but even I don't think they're stupid enough to surveil people with code you can check for backdoors and tracking malware, along with being able to port it to any *nix, Android, MacOS, etc system.  It just doesn't seem feasible.

[cellard]

Well, back than windows was at it's best - that's a very simple answer. If windows would not become that bad, I would not switch to Linux.
Now I'm on Linux for over two years and not even once looked back. But Back than - yea, Windows was the key.

Can you tell me what do you mean when saying windows was at it's best? Depends on what are you looking for. For games, graphics and for almost everything, windows was and is still the best. But here we talk about bitcoin which is known for it's decentralization (currently not decentralized for me as it has to be) and privacy. Windows isn't for privacy, only winner here is Linux.
Seems answer is his lack in knowledge of linux platform.

Windows had no real privacy issues until Vista upgrade, really. But you could be right, may be he did not know any better.

Windows is closed source! C'mon man. Would you use a closed source currency? nope, same goes for the operating system. Why would you or anyone with a functional brain use an OS that's closed source and holds your private keys at any point in time? that goes against the very principle of cryptography and satoshi used it to develop bitcoin which is hilarious, but I can understand how if that was all that he had to develop it's better than nothing. But I wouldn't feel too safe holding 1,000,000 BTC in a windows machine that was online at any point in time... not a very good idea. I know that Bitcoin wasn't worth anything back then, but he was still around in in late 2010 when the price was around 30 cents, 30 cents x the supposed 1,000,000 BTC = that's $300,000, a decent amount. I hope he moved these coins from the initial windows online computer, but we know he never moved his stash so...

[Jet Cash]

I believe that Bitcoin was created as an experimental project by the Fed, or some other agency of the banking elite. Of course, they would use Windows so that they could check to see what people were doing with their baby.

Not the greatest plan when it's open source.  I don't credit the Fed with a vast amount of intelligence, but even I don't think they're stupid enough to surveil people with code you can check for backdoors and tracking malware, along with being able to port it to any *nix, Android, MacOS, etc system.  It just doesn't seem feasible.

That's why they used Windows. We know that Microsoft provided backdoors for US government departments to use. Why would they need to include anything in the Bitcoin software. I think they wanted to see what the anti-globalists could do with the concept. Right now it looks as if they are doing a pretty good job.

[deevan]

as windows is very user friendly , not like linux command base very techie , he wanted to to be used by every common man.

[MkGregor]

Windows is closed source! C'mon man. Would you use a closed source currency? nope, same goes for the operating system. Why would you or anyone with a functional brain use an OS that's closed source and holds your private keys at any point in time? that goes against the very principle of cryptography and satoshi used it to develop bitcoin which is hilarious, but I can understand how if that was all that he had to develop it's better than nothing. But I wouldn't feel too safe holding 1,000,000 BTC in a windows machine that was online at any point in time... not a very good idea. I know that Bitcoin wasn't worth anything back then, but he was still around in in late 2010 when the price was around 30 cents, 30 cents x the supposed 1,000,000 BTC = that's $300,000, a decent amount. I hope he moved these coins from the initial windows online computer, but we know he never moved his stash so...

Well. One thing is - I believe, that he could have mined his coins later on in the development, let's say in first 1000 users of the bitcoin. This way he would still get his mnoney, but he would never have to touch his "original" wallet. Another possibility is that he never minded the money. May be he is already dead from an old age by now.
And the windows - as someone above noted: he could want it to be able for use by everyone, not just linux geeks, I believe these days Linux is much more available and common, than before.

[yg10]

IMVHO initial  release was on Windows for two reasons:
1. Developer(s) wanted to reach the broad audience.
2. Convenience. Specialist in cryptography was developing on ready available computer. Linux on home computers was not so polished  as today.

Funny, that prevented me to look at Bitcoin core till v. 0.2.

[Kakmakr]

I think Satoshi had a much bigger vision for Bitcoin that most people give him credit for. Let's take someone that write virusses. What platform <OS> will you target for your virus, if you want it to go viral <literally and figuratively> : The answer is simple - You target the platform with the most users for maximum exposure.

If he wrote this in some obscure code, most people would have recognised his work from previous projects. He can hide much easier in a community with thousands of developers coding for the most popular OS.

[LeGaulois]

Have you thought the reason could also be that he used windows to help the adoption? If he used something else, people would say "ahhh again something for geeks"

as windows is very user friendly , not like linux command base very techie , he wanted to to be used by every common man.

You maybe have never tried GNU/Linux, because the time when everything was done in a terminal is gone since decades. You can do almost everything with a GUI and now some OS are more "friendly" to use than Windows OS. I can customize a Linux OS you won't really be able to make a difference with Win 7

[cellard]

Windows is closed source! C'mon man. Would you use a closed source currency? nope, same goes for the operating system. Why would you or anyone with a functional brain use an OS that's closed source and holds your private keys at any point in time? that goes against the very principle of cryptography and satoshi used it to develop bitcoin which is hilarious, but I can understand how if that was all that he had to develop it's better than nothing. But I wouldn't feel too safe holding 1,000,000 BTC in a windows machine that was online at any point in time... not a very good idea. I know that Bitcoin wasn't worth anything back then, but he was still around in in late 2010 when the price was around 30 cents, 30 cents x the supposed 1,000,000 BTC = that's $300,000, a decent amount. I hope he moved these coins from the initial windows online computer, but we know he never moved his stash so...

Well. One thing is - I believe, that he could have mined his coins later on in the development, let's say in first 1000 users of the bitcoin. This way he would still get his mnoney, but he would never have to touch his "original" wallet. Another possibility is that he never minded the money. May be he is already dead from an old age by now.
And the windows - as someone above noted: he could want it to be able for use by everyone, not just linux geeks, I believe these days Linux is much more available and common, than before.

I don't get it. In the early releases the mining client was the same as the wallet client because satoshi's idea was that everyone could be able to mine, so this means that the biggest bulk of coins was mined with whatever initial software was availble which again was also the wallet. This means

1) The computer was online
2) The computer was running windows

When was the first linux ever release? Some guy here said 0.2 I think... I wonder what amount of coins got mined by then? So unless im missing something, a big chunk was mined in an online windows computer which means a compromised computer.

[MysteryMiner]

Properly secured Windows (except Windows10) computer is unbreakable. Even for NSA. Why? Because a 0-day in network stack or network card drivers is only way to hack it. Manually install all security patches. Disable all auto updates. Disable unnecessary services and configure firewall to reduce attack surface. It is it. I challenged to hack my Windows 7 or Windows XP machine to steal all my coins back then. Nobody succeeded. In such case the NSA/CIA/FBI will try to get physical access to machine to install malware or read disk contents.

It is ridiculous how paranoid some Windows haters are. They obviously never been hackers themselves and also dont know how police and spy agencies do things.

More notable thing that probably nobody noticed is that Satoshi's hard drive was using NTFS compression, most likely on whole partition. This is very untypical to have NTFS compression enabled on whole partition upon manual formatting.

[2112]

More notable thing that probably nobody noticed is that Satoshi's hard drive was using NTFS compression, most likely on whole partition. This is very untypical to have NTFS compression enabled on whole partition upon manual formatting.

How would you know this fact?

Edit: restored message from crash

This made some followers think that Satoshi was a good cryptographer and mathematician but he was not a good programmer.

The alternative theory is that he was an "experienced programmer" with an equivalent of black-belt in billable hours padding. That doesn't preclude being "good programmer", just puts in the background to the primary goal.

Yet another alternative theory is that initial coding was done by Satoshi's contractor, not Satoshi himself; and that later on they split for whatever reason.

Those then segue to the whole group of theories that Satoshi was an employee of some government spying agency. Those theories further split into two subgroups:

a) intentional covert work for which Satoshi was normally paid
b) after-hours personal project that unexpectedly grew, possibly affecting negatively his normal duties.

[Wind_FURY]

Bit of a far-flung theory, but I think it might have been a deliberate ploy to cover their tracks and keep their identity a mystery.  If it was someone closely connected to Unix development, but they didn't want people to connect the dots and discover they started Bitcoin, what better way to do it than to make the first version Windows-only?  Secure in the knowledge that if it was successful, it wouldn't take long for Bitcoin to migrate back to Unix, the spiritual home of open source.  Never underestimate Satoshi's brilliance and forward-thinking.

I don't think it's far flung at all and you're right, this to me is a perfect example of forward-thinking... that actually you might realise seems to remain with the bulk of Bitcoin core developers.

Satoshi were a group of highly intelligent people - near flawless communicational language, extremely sound coding. From the beginning, they were already keen to safeguard their identities and part of the strategy would have to include deliberate inconsistencies in character, to complicate any potential profiling they were sure to attract. I think using an OS more common for programmers is part of that obfuscation, and would have helped narrow down any such attempt.

It could also be practicality. If you wanted adoption beyond the confines of cypherpunkery you want Bob and Alice's PCs to be able to run the early clients.

I believe the part about "extremely sound coding" is wrong.I have heard some comments that Bitcoin's early code was full of bugs and was basically spaghetti code and it started to improve when the first contributors came in.

This made some followers think that Satoshi was a good cryptographer and mathematician but he was not a good programmer.

[cellard]

Properly secured Windows (except Windows10) computer is unbreakable. Even for NSA. Why? Because a 0-day in network stack or network card drivers is only way to hack it. Manually install all security patches. Disable all auto updates. Disable unnecessary services and configure firewall to reduce attack surface. It is it. I challenged to hack my Windows 7 or Windows XP machine to steal all my coins back then. Nobody succeeded. In such case the NSA/CIA/FBI will try to get physical access to machine to install malware or read disk contents.

It is ridiculous how paranoid some Windows haters are. They obviously never been hackers themselves and also dont know how police and spy agencies do things.

More notable thing that probably nobody noticed is that Satoshi's hard drive was using NTFS compression, most likely on whole partition. This is very untypical to have NTFS compression enabled on whole partition upon manual formatting.

Doesn't make sense to me. In order to be sure that something is not hacked, you would need to at least know what the code is doing. Sure this doesn't mean that Linux isn't hackable, everything with code is, but my point is.. how do you even know what updates to enable and what other updates to ignore? Updates are packages of closed source code. You are trusting to believe what it says on the description but you don't know what you are actually installing with each update, one of these updates could contain a backdoor for the NSA or something. You can block ports with a firewall, but that's about it. A keylogger that's embedded in a file that is part of the OS would go ignored by firewalls for instance. For example, imagine that the reporting tool in windows which is just an exe, sends a text file with keystrokes to someone... how would you even notice if you can't see what Dw20.exe is doing? (or any other closed source executable for that matter).

[jhean_arcane]

Properly secured Windows (except Windows10) computer is unbreakable. Even for NSA. Why? Because a 0-day in network stack or network card drivers is only way to hack it. Manually install all security patches. Disable all auto updates. Disable unnecessary services and configure firewall to reduce attack surface. It is it. I challenged to hack my Windows 7 or Windows XP machine to steal all my coins back then. Nobody succeeded. In such case the NSA/CIA/FBI will try to get physical access to machine to install malware or read disk contents.

It is ridiculous how paranoid some Windows haters are. They obviously never been hackers themselves and also dont know how police and spy agencies do things.

More notable thing that probably nobody noticed is that Satoshi's hard drive was using NTFS compression, most likely on whole partition. This is very untypical to have NTFS compression enabled on whole partition upon manual formatting.

Okay. I am interested in about windows as unhackable as you said.... but why except Windows 10? it's still windows... forgive my ignorance. I just want to know so that I can buy better OS in the future.

[pebwindkraft]

Properly secured Windows (except Windows10) computer is unbreakable. Even for NSA. Why? Because a 0-day in network stack or network card drivers is only way to hack it. Manually install all security patches. Disable all auto updates. Disable unnecessary services and configure firewall to reduce attack surface. It is it. I challenged to hack my Windows 7 or Windows XP machine to steal all my coins back then. Nobody succeeded. In such case the NSA/CIA/FBI will try to get physical access to machine to install malware or read disk contents.

It is ridiculous how paranoid some Windows haters are. They obviously never been hackers themselves and also dont know how police and spy agencies do things.

More notable thing that probably nobody noticed is that Satoshi's hard drive was using NTFS compression, most likely on whole partition. This is very untypical to have NTFS compression enabled on whole partition upon manual formatting.

Doesn't make sense to me. In order to be sure that something is not hacked, you would need to at least know what the code is doing. Sure this doesn't mean that Linux isn't hackable, everything with code is, but my point is.. how do you even know what updates to enable and what other updates to ignore? Updates are packages of closed source code. You are trusting to believe what it says on the description but you don't know what you are actually installing with each update, one of these updates could contain a backdoor for the NSA or something. You can block ports with a firewall, but that's about it. A keylogger that's embedded in a file that is part of the OS would go ignored by firewalls for instance. For example, imagine that the reporting tool in windows which is just an exe, sends a text file with keystrokes to someone... how would you even notice if you can't see what Dw20.exe is doing? (or any other closed source executable for that matter).

It goes even further... last year it was discovered, that all HP machines had a sound driver, which would log all keystrokes into a log file. The original intend is for sure unknown, but the idea was, that you had to capture the control keys to change the volume (and more). So there was debug code in the executables, and they have been detected fairly late. There is no evidence, that this data was used to be sent anywhere, but if a sound driver is able to log keystrokes, even those which are irrelevant for its function, then security in a layered fashion is not one of the strong points of this operating system. Now try to get the source code of this sound driver! You won’t, it’s also closed source. Same could be true for WiFi cards... closed source. Now compare this to Unicode systems. You can install proprietary software, but you must not! And you can read source codes of majority of the OS, and you can even modify it in a way, that you see, what is going on under the hood. You can’t do this with Windows. There is a reason, why this OS is not used in high secure environments...

[CineXMike]

I think he just liked Windows over linux

[DispatchLabs]

I see two reasons bitcoin was developed on Windows:

- Satoshi wanted bitcoin to be accessible to as many people as possible so Windows at the time would have been a good choice. 

- Also, Unix development of bitcoin may have given clues to the identity or identities of Satoshi being that the platform was smaller.

[NadiaHel]

You are trying to create a decentralized, censorship resistant, open source form of money, and you build it on top of a closed source operating system which is known for it's ties with three letter agency, hidden exploits, and all sorts of these bad things.

I find it weird that he would develop on windows. As far as I know, his first release was for windows only, and from what I've read, some code analysts claimed that he was a windows guy.

What is your take on this?

Well, this is ironic to create an open source code in a restricted one. Maybe they were just trying to make a point, or maybe they just wanted blockchain to go into everyhouse.

But to me is not relevant, to be honest.