Google, Yahoo and Byzantine (fault) generals problem

[remotemass]

Do you think that google and other main search engines know who searched for "Byzantine" before the bitcoin genesis block?
Would the creator of bitcoin search for: "Byzantine" without using Tor browser and/or VPN?

-remotemass

[BlackHatCoiner]

Do you think that google and other main search engines know who searched for "Byzantine" before the bitcoin genesis block?

Yes.

Would the creator of bitcoin search for: "Byzantine" without using Tor browser and/or VPN?

Probably no. I'd expect him to be extremely cautious with his privacy. Tails didn't exist in 2008, but he must have had different user in his computer for this kind of activity. For example, anything related with the "Satoshi" identity would occur there. Coding, forum posting, emails, domain name registration etc.

None of our business, though.

[NotATether]

Would the creator of bitcoin search for: "Byzantine" without using Tor browser and/or VPN?

Probably no. I'd expect him to be extremely cautious with his privacy. Tails didn't exist in 2008, but he must have had different user in his computer for this kind of activity. For example, anything related with the "Satoshi" identity would occur there. Coding, forum posting, emails, domain name registration etc.

None of our business, though.

Debian running as a live CD would be almost as secure though. Sure, it doesn't tunnel everything through Tor (it doesn't even have Tor installed), but it is lean enough that you can configure everything and you can be reasonably sure that there isn't an hidden software that is leaking your information.

[Stalker22]

Even if Google and other search engines have data on who searched for what and when, pinpointing the exact time period Satoshi became aware of the Byzantine Generals Problem would likely be difficult.  I am sure that Satoshi was aware of the problem long before he started working on the Bitcoin protocol.  Even his whitepaper clearly references previous digital currencies that attempted to solve the double-spending problem.

[odolvlobo]

Do you think that google and other main search engines know who searched for "Byzantine" before the bitcoin genesis block?
Would the creator of bitcoin search for: "Byzantine" without using Tor browser and/or VPN?

The Byzantine Generals problem is very old. I assume that there have been millions of searches for the term before 2009.

According to Wikipedia, "The problem of obtaining Byzantine consensus was conceived and formalized by Robert Shostak, who dubbed it the interactive consistency problem. This work was done in 1978..."

[NotFuzzyWarm]

And it's a safe bet that many/most of those searches would not have been through Google. Most likely Gopher or AltaVista et al.

[takuma sato]

Plausible denniability would be usable here. Consider that cryptopunks have been trying to make a Bitcoin for decades, it was a dream since the 70's. Previous attempts such as Bitgold were already there and im sure all of these developers would have googled similar terms so that wouldn't uncover satoshi even if he used his real ip, plus those are broad interesting topics in science and mathematics. It's only Bitcoin and satoshi related posts that he had to cover. As long as he did not tie his identity to anything Bitcoin then he should be ok.

[remotemass]

Anyway, it could help narrow the possibilities.
Even if one million different people searched for it, many may have died before Satoshi's last contact.
Other people may have such a low profile for being Satoshi that end up not being relevant.
At the end of the day, this could help narrow possibilities.
People can search for "Byzantine" without it meaning this specific computer science dilemma.
So you would have to try to understand why the search and if it was more or less related with digital cash and computer science.
You could give different weights to make correlations. It is about narrowing the search.
Our job is to be curious but if you are not, or resisit being, it's perfectly fine and okay to be that respectful. Peace.

[vjudeu]

Debian running as a live CD would be almost as secure though.

Satoshi used Japanese version of Windows XP, and was running Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 SP6 as the main compiler, and also used "MinGW GCC (v3.4.5)" to produce Linux versions. You can confirm all of that by reading the code of "BitCoin v0.01 ALPHA".

Anyway, it could help narrow the possibilities.

Not really. If I read something about RIPEMD-160, does it mean that I am Satoshi? Many people explored similar topics, and if you dig into the past, then you can learn, why Satoshi did something in this way, and not another. But you won't discover his true identity, because that kind of information is simply no longer there. You can only follow his way of thinking, to discover, why he designed things the way they are.

In a similar way, you could try to find all people talking about "Proof of Work". And guess what: you would find Adam Back, the creator of HashCash, which is not Satoshi. Or: you can dig into "Bit gold" and find this post: https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html (it is fundamentally different approach than in Bitcoin, because of the architecture).

The main problem with all these schemes is that proof of work schemes depend on computer architecture, not just an abstract mathematics based on an abstract "compute cycle."

See? It is completely different, than what Satoshi did. But by digging for "proof of work", you can easily encounter that, and think "hey, Nick Szabo is Satoshi!". But it is not true. The whole Script is not "wrapped x86 architecture", as described by Nick Szabo. Also because he paid a huge attention into details like that, and in this case, Nick could easily avoid "Value Overflow Incident", while Satoshi didn't care about internal processor assembly that much (and replaced simple for loop with additions, into a bunch of bitwise operations like right shift).

Our job is to be curious but if you are not, or resisit being, it's perfectly fine and okay to be that respectful. Peace.

You can be curious about design decisions, made by Satoshi, because you need that kind of background, if you plan to change the code, write your own altcoin, or just make some test network. However, digging into his identity is a completely different matter, and that kind of things should not be done.

Fortunately, most traces are gone, and as we get better and better in crypto, more ways to prove that "I am Satoshi" will be gone, for example if secp256k1 will be broken, then the signature using the public key from the Genesis Block would be worthless, so the identity of Satoshi would get more and more protected, after each breakthrough. Currently, most e-mail addresses and domain names simply expired, or changed hands, so it is harder to trace Satoshi, than it was. And I hope it will get even harder in the future, as more legacy things will be broken, and replaced with new versions.

[Medusah]

Satoshi used Japanese version of Windows XP

How do you know it was the Japanese version? 

The whole Script is not "wrapped x86 architecture", as described by Nick Szabo. Also because he paid a huge attention into details like that, and in this case, Nick could easily avoid "Value Overflow Incident", while Satoshi didn't care about internal processor assembly that much (and replaced simple for loop with additions, into a bunch of bitwise operations like right shift).

Satoshi's whitepaper shares notable similarities with Nick Szabo's writings though.  The use of phrases like "for our purposes", "it should be noted", "can be characterized" and more by both people is quite odd.  Perhaps Szabo penned the whitepaper, while the technical design originated from a different mind. 

[vjudeu]

How do you know it was the Japanese version?

1. Because it is hard to get this Visual compiler in another language version, including English.
2. There were some bugs, related to ¥ character in paths, which usually happens, if you use Japanese version of Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yen_and_yuan_sign#Microsoft_Windows
3. You have to use Japanese system to handle Visual in Japanese version. If you have English system, it will display strange squares, or not render the font at all. Also, the language is integral part of the program, and there is no option to change it easily in some menu, so you need both software in the same language (the system and the compiler).

Satoshi's whitepaper shares notable similarities with Nick Szabo's writings though.

Their style of writing text is completely different. For example, Satoshi is known for using double spaces as a separator, instead of a single space, between sentences, after each dot. Another reason is the whole construction of each text, where Satoshi starts creating it from the bottom to the top, while Nick simply uses top to the bottom approach. Also, this is another reason to read the whitepaper in the right order: Satoshi first tested hash functions, and calculated probability for chain reorganizations, and so on. The same pattern can be observed for his posts on forum.

Perhaps Szabo penned the whitepaper, while the technical design originated from a different mind.

I am quite sure that everything was done by a single person. If you ever tried to coordinate any group, then you probably know, what am I talking about. Even when I am trying to create something with Garlo Nicon, it is sometimes hard to plan our actions in advance, and when the group is even larger, then it becomes harder and harder.

If Satoshi would be a group of just two people, it would create a lot of different patterns, than what you can observe. It is much more common to split a single identity between many accounts, than to merge more than one person, behind a single account. Been there, done that, the initial idea of the Garlo Nicon group was to publish all posts under a single name, and it quickly failed, so we registered separately.

For example: imagine that there are two people, and they disagree about anything. The first person wants 10 minutes per block, and the second one wants 15 minutes per block. One wants "explosion of special cases", and another wants "the Script". One thinks about "simple for loop with additions", and another wants to "optimize every bit of that, and do right rotation". Even between Bitcoin developers, there is a huge space to disagree about some details. How do you imagine to handle all of that? Who would be in charge, and decide, what is published or not?

And there is another problem: if there are more people, then what happened, after Satoshi disappeared? All members of the group died simultaneously? Nobody wanted to take the lead? And what about private keys? They shared all of them? What about GPG keys? What about all kinds of accounts? Having a group of just two people leads to a lot of problems, to do all of that correctly, not to mention about any bigger group.

Also, when it comes to the amount of work, produced in a given time, if there would be just two people, then they would produce more content, and you could catch it immediately. Which means, that if you have any larger group, and you want to pretend, that you are a single person, then you have to introduce delays in publication. And even then, to reach a huge level of agreement, you need some kind of coordination, like putting everything through a single person, before publishing it, to not introduce some small and subtle changes, which can be used to easily separate each author.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Satoshi's whitepaper shares notable similarities with Nick Szabo's writings though.

That's what I was thinking as well.

Perhaps Szabo penned the whitepaper, while the technical design originated from a different mind.  

There's a theory that makes Len Sassaman a potential candidate for that: https://evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c85c2b10.

I am quite sure that everything was done by a single person.

If everything was done by a single person, then why was Satoshi a big blocker in forum posts and emails, and a small blocker when writing software? In this mail, Satoshi argues for 100 GB added in the blockchain everyday. In this forum post, he makes it clear that running a node is not the intended configuration for the average user, which is another way to say "only large farms will verify the blockchain".

In the software, he lowered the block size limit from 32 MB to 1, IIRC. That doesn't make sense, even for 2010. It would be trivial to add a lot more than 144 MB every day for "large server farms". Or was this arbitrary? AFAIK, the 32 MB limit wasn't a deliberate decision, it was just naturally the maximum size, if we ignore the number of database locks, which made it effectively 500-750k bytes.

Edit: If you're not convinced about Nick being Satoshi, then have you read this?

[cryptosize]

Debian running as a live CD would be almost as secure though.

Satoshi used Japanese version of Windows XP, and was running Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 SP6 as the main compiler, and also used "MinGW GCC (v3.4.5)" to produce Linux versions. You can confirm all of that by reading the code of "BitCoin v0.01 ALPHA".

So was he really Japanese or was that a red herring?

Some people argue he was British:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2n2n2y/hmmm_i_think_satoshi_is_probably_british/

[cryptosize]

Satoshi's whitepaper shares notable similarities with Nick Szabo's writings though.

That's what I was thinking as well.

Perhaps Szabo penned the whitepaper, while the technical design originated from a different mind.  

There's a theory that makes Len Sassaman a potential candidate for that: https://evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c85c2b10.

I am quite sure that everything was done by a single person.

If everything was done by a single person, then why was Satoshi a big blocker in forum posts and emails, and a small blocker when writing software? In this mail, Satoshi argues for 100 GB added in the blockchain everyday. In this forum post, he makes it clear that running a node is not the intended configuration for the average user, which is another way to say "only large farms will verify the blockchain".

In the software, he lowered the block size limit from 32 MB to 1, IIRC. That doesn't make sense, even for 2010. It would be trivial to add a lot more than 144 MB every day for "large server farms". Or was this arbitrary? AFAIK, the 32 MB limit wasn't a deliberate decision, it was just naturally the maximum size, if we ignore the number of database locks, which made it effectively 500-750k bytes.

Edit: If you're not convinced about Nick being Satoshi, then have you read this?

If he's Nick Szabo, then I really don't understand why he's sitting on 1.1m BTC and not spending a single satoshi...

Unless it was a team of people and someone else did the initial mining and held the keys (most likely Len Sassaman in his encrypted laptop).

A dead person losing the keys makes far more sense than a living one.

I'm not going to believe that someone like Nick Szabo (a computer scientist) could accidentally lose his keys.

So yeah, that's another contradiction in the "Satoshi was one person" speculation...

[franky1]

If everything was done by a single person, then why was Satoshi a big blocker in forum posts and emails, and a small blocker when writing software? In this mail, Satoshi argues for 100 GB added in the blockchain everyday. In this forum post, he makes it clear that running a node is not the intended configuration for the average user, which is another way to say "only large farms will verify the blockchain".

In the software, he lowered the block size limit from 32 MB to 1, IIRC. That doesn't make sense, even for 2010. It would be trivial to add a lot more than 144 MB every day for "large server farms". Or was this arbitrary? AFAIK, the 32 MB limit wasn't a deliberate decision, it was just naturally the maximum size, if we ignore the number of database locks, which made it effectively 500-750k bytes.

Edit: If you're not convinced about Nick being Satoshi, then have you read this?

1. satoshi was not a small blocker in software
satoshi did not need to expand the blocks to what you think is "big blocker 100gb" because bitcoin 2009-2011 only filled by les than 0.25mb

2. satoshis motives were not small blocker to exclude bitcoiners or tell them to use other payment systems away from the bitcoin network

3. satoshi cared about LEANNESS he wanted every byte to count and not be bloated, he was not trying to support bloating/spamming the blockchain and then decrease the actual bitcoiner transaction count

[vjudeu]

If everything was done by a single person, then why was Satoshi a big blocker in forum posts and emails, and a small blocker when writing software?

Because the whole network was in its infancy, and people thought in terms of hard-forks, not soft-forks. For example:

It can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.

See?
1. Doing that "if" statement directly is a hard-fork. It could work, when the coin is just a small altcoin with free, or almost-free transactions, but it is not serious, when it grows bigger than that.
2. It is treating the network in a semi-centralized manner, when you can ask everyone to upgrade, and they will obey without asking questions.
3. The centrally-controlled alert system was still there, and it was actively used, after Value Overflow Incident.

In this mail, Satoshi argues for 100 GB added in the blockchain everyday. In this forum post, he makes it clear that running a node is not the intended configuration for the average user, which is another way to say "only large farms will verify the blockchain".

There is no contradiction. In the same way, you can say that the blockchain will have enormous Proof of Work, so it will be well-protected from any chain reorganization, and a single confirmation would be sufficient in 99% cases. And at the same time, you can say that regular users won't have enough power to mine it, so there will be some non-mining clients.

After taking that sentence, someone could say: "Hey, why everyone is not a miner, if 1 CPU = 1 vote?". But there is no contradiction there. You actually can be a miner, even on CPU. Nobody will ban you for doing so. And you can even receive millisatoshis in LN for mining very weak blocks, but don't expect to get it supported on the main layer, because it would cause a flood of transactions, each sending single satoshis over and over again. Or: another way to say the same thing, is that you can mine on CPU, but the estimated time would be for example one block per 1234 years, or worse.

In the software, he lowered the block size limit from 32 MB to 1, IIRC.

1. The 32 MiB limit was indirectly specified, as a maximum size of the P2P message.
2. This 1 MB was still unreachable, because of BDB locks.
3. He didn't lift that 32 MiB limit, it was still there. He only introduced block size limit, without even touching P2P message limits.

That doesn't make sense, even for 2010.

It makes sense, if your rule of thumb is that you would have some kind of control over the code, and anyone could just raise this limit, and it will be followed by all users.

It would be trivial to add a lot more than 144 MB every day for "large server farms".

In 2010, we had zero "large server farms". If it would be unlimited back then, it could be abused. And then, people would be forced to introduce any limit anyway. But since nobody knew, how to make a temporary limit correctly, it was permanent. Because blocks are not like transactions, when you can reject them now, and include them later. If you reject a block, then it is rejected.

Or was this arbitrary?

It was just some kind of guess. Satoshi loved decimal numbers, and putting "a million bytes" as a limit was a nice, round number to start with.

If you're not convinced about Nick being Satoshi, then have you read this?

No. But let's dig into that:

I must stress this: an open, unbiased search of texts similar in writing to the Bitcoin whitepaper over the entire Internet, identifies Nick’s bit gold articles as the best candidates.

You can run a similar analysis on some forum posts for different people or groups. You could be surprised, how many times, there is a match, even though the content is not written by the same person. Often, the end result reflects more your writing style or personality, than the ownership. Which means, that between two introverts, there will be a bigger match, than between introverted and extraverted people.

For each expression, when it is possible and relevant, we will mention the proportion of cryptography papers containing the expression (using Google Scholar), to measure how common its use is among researchers, and later provide a rough value for the probability of the null hypothesis.

Note that the whitepaper was published on a mailing list, instead of being submitted formally. And that makes a lot of difference, also because of the timing: October 31, 2008. The academic year starts in October, so it was just one month after that. It was not yet polished, and thought through, to be oficially submitted as a thesis or some other kind of dissertation, to reach a particular degree. It was just some another experiment at that time, widely criticized, and many people rejected upfront the whole approach to the problem. So, if you compare it with other papers, it will naturally lead you into blogs and less formal work.

The same thing I observed in my topic: it was informal, experimental, and reached a lot of merits: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5402178
However, if I would use more formal description, with more academic approach, it would be rejected, and nobody would pay attention.

the probability of finding all of “it should be noted”, “for our purposes”, “can be characterized” and “preclude” as part of a given researcher’s vocabulary has the upper bound 0.08%

Of course. And you can CTRL+F the phrase "guess what", and find out, that the author is vjudeu. Or maybe CTRL+F the word "that". Or check, where commas are misplaced, and get some conclusions out of that. It is not important in this context, the whole system has a different technical approach to the way, how the coin should be designed, and people focus on some unimportant writing details, which could be easily simulated.

This is evidenced by Satoshi’s reference to Wei Dai’s b-money, as well as hashcash, while both of them do not even seem to have been a direct inspiration to Bitcoin.

Aha. The whole model of hashing a message was taken almost 1:1 from hashcash, and the author seems to think, that it is not related. Great. Even the initial difficulty of 20 leading zero bits is something, which was always present in HashCash, and was just copy-pasted into pre-release version. Then, Satoshi raised it to 40 leading zero bits (hence the Genesis Block), and then lowered again into 32 leading zero bits (another HashCash reference).

Code:

SHA-1("1:20:1303030600:adam@cypherspace.org::McMybZIhxKXu57jd:ckvi")=00000b7c65ac70650eb8d4f034e86d7d5cd1852f
SHA-1("0:030626:adam@cypherspace.org:6470e06d773e05a8")=00000000c70db7389f241b8f441fcf068aead3f0

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5355610.0

Code:

///static const unsigned int MINPROOFOFWORK = 40; /// need to decide the right difficulty to start with
static const unsigned int MINPROOFOFWORK = 20;  /// ridiculously easy for testing

Of course, this "main.h" file in November 2008 version was not inspired by HashCash, not at all.

Note: There was also some quite low SHA-1 hash (50 leading zero bits or something around that), but I cannot find it.

If Satoshi had been writing independently from Nick, wouldn’t he have cited his work as per proper scientific etiquette?

Many people think in a similar way, without being aware of that. I thought about UTXO-only model, long before I read about it for the first time, and even longer before I started to grasp the whole complexity behind it. Does it mean, that I should quote Garlo Nicon? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5197019.msg52920685#msg52920685

And the funniest thing is the first reply:

Congratulations, you've just invented Ripple.

https://twitter.com/tuurdemeester/status/1028262924987637760

This is what you will get as the result.

See? Should the current authors of "assumeutxo" quote Ripple in their work?

There is also the remarkable lack of public reaction on Nick’s part when Bitcoin started taking off.

Duh, you could say in the same way, that there was "the remarkable lack of public reaction when Ripple started taking off". Or HashCash. Or "e-cheque" (if you know what I mean, because I expect not that many people know about what James A. Donald tried to create). The communication over the network is never instant: https://gwern.net/bitcoin-is-worse-is-better

Enough for now, this post is going to be too long.

[garlonicon]

So was he really Japanese or was that a red herring?

You don't have to trust him, you can actually verify it:

1. Download the old code, and try to run it: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/code/
2. Read some README files, and try to install similar software on VirtualBox, or some physical machine, if you can:

Code:

Operating Systems
-----------------
Windows NT/2000/XP (and probably Vista)

Vista hasn't been tested yet.  All the libraries used are cross-platform, so
there's nothing preventing future Linux and Mac builds.

See? You can pick Windows NT or Windows 2000, or Windows XP. Probably Vista means that you can try it, but it is probably not the system, which Satoshi was running on a daily basis.

3. Download dependencies and compilers, and install all of that. It is in another README file, nearby the code:

Code:

Compilers Supported
-------------------
MinGW GCC (v3.4.5)
Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 SP6


Dependencies
------------
Libraries you need to obtain separately to build:

              default path   download
wxWidgets      \wxWidgets     http://www.wxwidgets.org/downloads/
OpenSSL        \OpenSSL       http://www.openssl.org/source/
Berkeley DB    \DB            http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/index.html
Boost          \Boost         http://www.boost.org/users/download/

Take your time, go on, download and install everything, what is mentioned here. You don't have to trust vjudeu, that Satoshi used Japanese version. You can see for yourself, and run it on non-Japanese version, and see, how hard it would be, to reproduce all results.

[btc78]

Do you think that google and other main search engines know who searched for "Byzantine" before the bitcoin genesis block?
Would the creator of bitcoin search for: "Byzantine" without using Tor browser and/or VPN?

The Byzantine Generals problem is very old. I assume that there have been millions of searches for the term before 2009.

You are correct, actually. If you check on google trends, the term “Byzantine Generals” has been searched multiple times even before 2009. In fact it peaked between November of 2004 and February of 2005. This term is used in blockchain technology but it is simply an analogy so we can expect that even people without the knowledge of crypto or blockchain technology has heard about this.

Now if Satoshi were to have searched this, it would be impossible to identify if it was him if he wasn’t logged in. Besides I don’t think he’d be so careless with his privacy.

[Wind_FURY]

Do you think that google and other main search engines know who searched for "Byzantine" before the bitcoin genesis block?

Yes.

Would the creator of bitcoin search for: "Byzantine" without using Tor browser and/or VPN?

Probably no. I'd expect him to be extremely cautious with his privacy. Tails didn't exist in 2008, but he must have had different user in his computer for this kind of activity. For example, anything related with the "Satoshi" identity would occur there. Coding, forum posting, emails, domain name registration etc.

None of our business, though.

With the presumption that Satoshi is one individual, not a group of individuals, it's not merely probable - it's an assurance.

Although it's just a suspicion, there are people in the community who believe that Satoshi changed his coding style, posting style/habits in the forum, and probably leaving an anti-red-herring by not citing Nick Szabo in the white paper, which Satoshi probably knew that people will be inclined to point to Nick as Satoshi - but maybe Satoshi was actually Dr. Adam Back. He's diverting us.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Plus Satoshi coded in Windows? Not in a Unix-based system? That's a give-away that he was very careful.