1.) Is it okay that we don't know who Satoshi is?
Of course it is. Just like it's ok that we don't know who invented the hammer, or the wheel, or who first discovered how to make fire.
Does it matter? I know it has been implied by the community that it's very unlikely he/she/they have ill intentions, and that Satoshi demonstrated his trustworthiness in his behavior engaging with Gavin and the public online...
His intentions and trustworthiness are unimportant. They have no bearing on what we choose to do with bitcoin.
But what of the "Satoshi fortune"? Isn't this kind of a wild card? What is the rational when a company like Microsoft stomachs this risk?
What of it? It's his wealth. He can do with it whatever he pleases. I really don't care.
2.) So, in the very first line of the abstract in the Satoshi white paper, we have him saying Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer system, absent of a trusted third party. And at the closing of the expo today we have Peter Todd letting us know that miners are actually the trusted third party in this arrangement.
Then Peter Todd misrepresented something, or you misunderstood what he said. There is no need to "trust" miners, since you can verify the entire blockchain yourself (and all full nodes do).
I think I understand the context behind both of their reasonings, but since I'm outside of the realm of technical expertise and programming language here, so I want to be damn sure I at least get the spoken language right..
Bitcoin seems like it has a lot of paradoxes going on... (transparency/privacy) (anonymity/pseudonymity), (scarcity/infinite divisibility), (tool of liberation;freedom/tool of oppression;surveillance), (miners can be decentralized/miners centralizing in China).... Anybody have any thought on these?
Transparency is available if the user chooses to be transparent (by announcing their bitcoin addresses, and transaction ID's, but privacy is also available if the user chooses to be private by keeping their bitcoin addresses to themselves and using a new address for every transaction. The point is that the user has the ability to choose their own level of transparency and privacy.
True anonymity is nearly impossible with bitcoins. Anyone that tells you otherwise is either lying to you or misunderstanding something. However, pseudonymity is built in to the system and with reasonable precautions it is possible to make it very difficult for most entities to identify who performed which transactions.
Scarcity and infinite divisibility are not opposing points. If you think that that they are then you are mis-understanding one or both concepts.
Bitcoin isn't a tool of liberation, freedom, oppression, or surveillance. It is a tool of value transfer. Like most tools, it can be used in both positive and negative ways.
Miners can choose how much they wish to consolidate, that is the nature of decentralization. There is nobody in control that can force miners to keep their activities separate (or force them to act together).
3.) What concerns are there if any regarding miner selectivity when deciding which transactions to include in a block? Is this a "nature will run it's course" kind of scenario? It seems like there would be plenty of room for miners to exhibit these exclusionary or calculated behaviors in the Bitcoin ecosystem.. In some sense, miners are free to do as the choose, so in a way this makes the system more "free". But at the same time couldn't this result in increased centralization? Isn't this just like our "free" market that currently exists, where Comcast is "free" to fuck us over so flawlessly? Or are we just truly in uncharted waters, and there is no way for anyone to know or even estimate?
If a miner chooses not to include a profitable transaction, then some other greedy miner will in a later block. The bitcoin network is global with EVERY miner in the world directly competing with every other miner for increased profits. Unlike Comcast, there is no "territory" that a miner can isolate to prevent competition.
Peter Todd basically closed with, "There is no way know what will happen, or if these issues can/will propagate." I understand this statement at face value, because obviously he and others are not wizard psychic type cryptomon... But holy shit, this was such ominous way to close the expo! I just thought I'd hear something a little more certain from one of the core devs.. Scary stuff.
Bitcoin is a an amazing and very interesting experiment. It is still in its infancy and it is impossible to predict what the end result of that experiment will be.
4.) Or maybe a participant tries to inject 1 million 1 Satoshi transactions in an under an hour? How would the network react? Like some mad garage scientist secretly some franken super hashing monster, and storms the Bitcoin beach? (i know this is ridiculous) But seriously.. what if there were an army of bots trading or spamming or dusting the network.. What kind of moat does Bitcoin Castle have against someone(s) who wants to be a dick about it? Can we handle that situation?
This is why we have transaction fee requirements on relaying transactions. If the "attacker" pays enough fees, it will be a VERY expensive attack, it will make a lot of money for miners, and eventually the attacker will run out of bitcoins. If the attacker doesn't pay enough fees, then every node will simply refuse to relay the transactions from the attacker.
5.) Can Bitcoin coexist along side future developments in quantum computing? Like SHA256 getting pwned somehow? Or couldn't we just incorporate this unlocked potential to build a kind of quantum capable blockchain. Super Shredder blockchain??
Quantum computing isn't magic. Bitcoin is safe from any near term developments in quantum computing. If quantum computing begins to make progress in a direction that could weaken the security of bitcoin, then bitcoin can move to new algorithms for signature generation and hashing.
Seriously.. All this decentralized hullabaloo, come to realize the damn miners are the third party all along? Is this just pedantic semantic gymnastics? There is no way Satoshi mis-characterized Bitcoin in the first fucking sentence of our holy white paper.. Right??
Not sure what you are trying to say here.
Bitcoin uses a proof-of-work to establish the order of transactions in a ledger. Anyone is welcome to participate in that proof-of-work if they like, and it is impossible to modify the history in the ledger unless an entity can exceed 50% of the global hash power for an extended period of time. This has been well understood from the very beginning.
