@ slaveforanunnak1
I thought we were looking for a "c++" programmer like Zooko, but it seems we are looking for a "c" programer(like Hal) trying to make the protocol work in an unfamiliar code of "c++".
Where does the "usual suspects" fit in here?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=146383;sa=showPosts;start=60Quotes from Cryddit (aka Ray Dillinger "Bear" original cypherpunk-mentored by Tim C. May himself)
"Speaking as someone who reviewed some of his code in late 2008, I think I can express a pretty strong opinion that it was probably written by one person."
"Every coder has his or her "fist" -- a set of quirks of indentation, delimiter placement, commenting style and placement, use of/familiarity with libraries, thinking style, and etc... A lot of companies try to enforce a "standard style" but they never completely eradicate all bits'n'pieces of individual style."
"The early bitcoin sources had no identifiable influences of any "company style."
"The author clearly did not trust himself to manage c++'s notoriously finicky memory issues and completely defend against buffer attacks, so he made heavy use of STL and Boost to do that - at times going through contortions specifically to avoid having raw buffers anywhere. He was very clearly a C programmer before he was a C++ programmer, judging by his iteration style. And his placement of opening and closing braces around blocks of code and indentation relative to those braces was kind of a minority choice -- not strange enough to be peculiar, but unusual enough that it would be surprising if a project written by multiple people used it completely consistently. The earliest code also uses no 'tab' characters, which tends to indicate that the files were written in the same editor or with the same editor macros - again not peculiar in itself, but it would be unusual for it to be completely consistent in a project by more than one person."
"As for comments, he rarely used one word where none would do. His comments were mostly limited to notes to himself to do stuff later or resolve design issues, not explanations. In itself, not unusual, but again, you wouldn't find it completely consistent across a project by multiple people."
"I should clarify this last. What I mean is that people who are coding as part of a team usually use comments to explain the code they're writing to the other members of the team. So-called "lone wolf" programmers making something all by themselves usually are in the habit of not needing to explain anything to anyone so they don't."
"Now that I think of it, we did talk about the floating point format in that discussion. 8-decimal divisibility was the maximum Satoshi would consider, for that reason (although he was a fanatic about doing everything with unsigned integers). Hal's point about the smallest division being less than a penny, and that being possible even if the whole world's money supply were denominated in Bitcoin, meant no extraordinary measures were necessary."
"One thing I learned, was that in C, numeric overflow is undefined behavior on signed integers, and some compilers (notably gcc, which Satoshi was using) will even eliminate overflow checks, and then drop any error handlers or commands to output debug messages as dead code. Which is a reason why Satoshi was such a fanatic about using unsigned integers everywhere."
"Both Hal and Satoshi preferred FORTH because it had the simplest (easiest to verify correct/secure) implementation of any useful scripting language."
"Look, "Satoshi" was a construction made explicitly for the purpose of launching Bitcoin."
"That purpose is fulfilled. The person who created "Satoshi" has no further need for him. Thus ends the story."
"He *was* just about ready to post the code. This was a debate about what value an already-defined constant ought to have. In fact I've already posted an archive of his code from just a few *days* later in another thread here for historical interest."
"Hal and I were essentially giving it a last-minute looking over to see if we thought there was any way to attack it."
*"I have the impression that Hal communicated with Satoshi a lot more than I did, but he was looking at a much tougher problem."
"The blockchain structure is essentially a mathematical proof -- very straightforward, you follow it and you can say with reasonable certainty that it's right or not. But a scripting language is generative. And generative structures present exponentially more attack surfaces."
"I remember this discussion, actually."
"Finney, Satoshi, and I discussed how divisible a Bitcoin ought to be. Satoshi had already more or less decided on a 50-coin per block payout with halving every so often to add up to a 21M coin supply. Finney made the point that people should never need any currency division smaller than a US penny, and then somebody (I forget who) consulted some oracle somewhere like maybe Wikipedia and figured out what the entire world's M1 money supply at that time was."
"We debated for a while about which measure of money Bitcoin most closely approximated; but M2, M3, and so on are all for debt-based currencies, so I agreed with Finney that M1 was probably the best measure."
"21Million, times 10^8 subdivisions, meant that even if the whole word's money supply were replaced by the 21 million bitcoins the smallest unit (we weren't calling them Satoshis yet) would still be worth a bit less than a penny, so no matter what happened -- even if the entire economy of planet earth were measured in Bitcoin -- it would never inconvenience people by being too large a unit for convenience."
Note: Hal's "RPOW" is used to solve the Byzantine General’s Problem, a problem in ordinary computing that demonstrates through “game theory” how a group of potential co-operators can come to THE BEST CONSENSUS (Nakamoto Consensus) even with the possibility of having malicious operators among them.
http://cryptome.org/rpow.htmSzabo: "Only Finney (RPOW) and Nakamoto were motivated enough to actually implement such a scheme”.
*Szabo’s relationship with Finney provides a link between Satoshi Nakamoto and Nick Szabo. Both had a relationship with Hal Finney. Had Satoshi been someone other than Szabo, it’s very unlikely that they would also have had a trusting relationship with Finney, and even less likely that Finney would be willing to help someone who stole his friend Nick Szabo’s idea.
So we know that Nick Szabo has known Hal Finney since 1993, and we know that “Satoshi Nakamoto” trusted Finney as the recipient of the first ever Bitcoin transaction. We also know that Nick Szabo laid the blueprints for a system identical to bitcoin in 2005, with a name quite similar to bitcoin, and asked someone to help him code it in 2008, 7 months before Bitcoin was announced.
We also know BitCoin was mostly created in the comment sections of the "Nanobarter", "BitGold" & "BitGold-Markets" papers. What happened in private emails and Meet-ups may never be known.
