How long did it take for Satoshi to make the blockchain?

[poncom]

Satoshi could not have created the blockchain without Hal Finney contributing POW. He created the first reusable proof of work system years before Bitcoin had been created. Without that POW system Bitcoin's blockchain could never have been created.

[countryfree]

Is this relevant?
He  may have been thinking about it for 10 years. Who knows? Who cares besides OP?

[World]

Hey how did did it take for satoshi to make the blockchain?

He was able to create his masterpiece in under 10 days, but it took almost 18 years to fly here in his spaceship!

from 1992
http://originalcontroltheory.tumblr.com/post/99362091259/the-creation-of-bitcoin

[leopard2]

Hey how did did it take for satoshi to make the blockchain?

He was able to create his masterpiece in under 10 days, but it took almost 18 years to fly here in his spaceship!
In case you don't know, when Satoshi returns rides on his ship will cost only 10 BTC. 

Ah I see, maybe his ship was broken and blockchain technology was the easiest way for him to make the billions needed to fix it?

[rikkie]

The design and coding started in 2007.

Well it is speculated that Satoshi had posted on an internet forum about the concept of bitcoin in the early 2000's, around the time that paypal first came out.

FYI to the OP - satoshi did not actually "make" the blockchain, the blockchain is the data of the various blocks and is growing roughly once every 10 minutes, by a maximum of 1MB each time it grows. It seems that most people have answered on here as if you were referring to the Bitcoin protocol

[jonald_fyookball]

Hey how did did it take for satoshi to make the blockchain?

Fast. It's a lot simpler than most people make it out to be.

how do you figure?  the concept is simple but there are many details.  it's like saying a combustion engine is a lot simpler than most people make it out to be.

[Beliathon]

Hey how did did it take for satoshi to make the blockchain?

Approximately 4,000 years of mathematics brought us to this point.

[Cryddit]

When "Satoshi" the alias appeared in late 2008, his code for Bitcoin was already mostly complete.  I had an archive of it in my inbox less than six days after his first post on the Metzdowd cryptography list.   

There's no knowing how long he spent writing it.  But there was unused code in the first released version relating to even larger ideas which ultimately didn't make the cut -- bits of a market, which looks to have been an attempt to do something like a decentralized version of ebay.  -- bits of a reputation tracking system, which looks to have been something like ebay's feedback system and something like a pseudonymous "reputation capital" system.  Ultimately all of that got cut out and just keeping track of the coins became the sole focus.

It looked like a very big project -- bigger perhaps than we know even yet -- but one that got cut back ruthlessly to what could actually be finished and deployed. 

Anyway - there's no knowing really how long he spent on the code. 

It looks like he put all the compute power at his disposal to work for about six days to get the hash on the genesis block that forms the root of the current block chain though - that's judging by the timing of the headline it refers and the timestamp of that block. 

Before that, there were a couple of testing block chains that came to an end when something about the block format needed fixed. But none that ran for more than a day or two.

[Cryddit]

Also, I want to point out that Satoshi was not working ex nihilo.

HashCash - a proof-of-work to show that you have irreversibly invested resources into what you're trying to do or asking someone to accept - was Adam Back's invention.

David Chaum developed the idea of block chains using hashes to prove that each was descended from the last and had no modifications of history.

Dozens of people, including David Chaum, had published cryptographically sound digital-cash systems of various kinds - and it had been a sort of holy grail of the cypherpunk crew for decades, starting with James Bell IIRC.  But all digital cash protocols up to that point had required a trusted party, and to the extent they had been deployed, many had been deployed by untrustworthy parties.  There were a number of arrests and charges filed by everyone from the FBI to the SEC to outraged investors.  By the time Satoshi got there, the entire topic of digital cash had reached a sort of scorched-earth status among professional cryptographers;  we'd seen dozens of these systems and every last one had either been a cryptographically unsound construction, a snake-oil solution from a scamster who could abuse the 'trusted party' role to steal stuff, an entrepreneurial proposal which the market more or less ignored because it would involve making payments on pretty much the same order as existing payment networks, or, once in a while, a cryptographically sound proposal that wasn't a scam but which was also never meaningfully deployed.  

Heck, even I had come up with a digital cash system back in 2004, but it didn't achieve Bitcoin's decentralization; there was no proof-of-work involved, but the individual coins were tiny block chains where each block recorded one transfer of that coin between holders.  Holders could transfer coins between themselves offline without communicating with the rest of the system, but those coins eventually had to go back to an issuer (double spent coins had to wind up in the same place for a double spend to be detected and the double spender unmasked, and also otherwise they'd just get bigger and bigger as each one of them dragged its own little block chain around).  Everybody had to have an authenticated identity (which would be revealed for prosecution purposes via a cut-and-choose/split-secret protocol if anybody did a double spend).  And so it required a trusted party to assign and keep track of the authenticated identities.  I never even attempted to deploy it because the trusted parties who do that (CA's) are completely corrupt and useless, but it was at least fun to design.

The cut-and-choose/split-secret protocol I used there was not my own invention either.  Chaum's earlier digital cash system had used it first.  Bitcoin doesn't use it at all because Bitcoin doesn't need to "unmask" anyone to deal with double spends - the shared block chain allows simply ignoring them.

[teukon]

The design and coding started in 2007.

Well it is speculated that Satoshi had posted on an internet forum about the concept of bitcoin in the early 2000's, around the time that paypal first came out.

As Cryddit says, we don't know for sure.  Of all the possibilities though, I strongly favour the idea that Satoshi was simply telling the truth.

How long have you been working on this design Satoshi?  It seems very well thought out, not the kind of thing you just sit down and code up without doing a lot of brainstorming and discussion on it first.  Everyone has the obvious questions looking for holes in it but it is holding up well

Since 2007.  At some point I became convinced there was a way to do this without any trust required at all and couldn't resist to keep thinking about it.  Much more of the work was designing than coding.

Fortunately, so far all the issues raised have been things I previously considered and planned for.

Given the design and code at the time I have no good reason to doubt this.

[Eastfist]

The design and coding started in 2007.

Nope. Actually way, way, way before that. What the public "knows" as the official story isn't the real story. The "public" whitepaper isn't by the real Satoshi, it's by what I'll call "team Satoshi". I think people would really enjoy reading the original paper, which was less technical and more abstract and way more fun to read, but alas, it's lost. Satoshi Nakamoto was a boy. Just believe me.

[jeffhuys]

Sigh... The guy who received the 10,000 BTC to buy two pizzas, assuming he didn't spend those coins, now has $2,856,100. It's a crazy, crazy world we live in. Well, who knows, maybe we'll think about 0.01BTC that way in the future

[fryarminer]

Didn't Karpeles own the copyright to the word Bitcoin years before it existed? Sorry, I'm going by memory here.

[gentlemand]

Didn't Karpeles own the copyright to the word Bitcoin years before it existed? Sorry, I'm going by memory here.

I dunno about copyrights, but the bitcoin.com domain has been around for a lot longer than the system.

http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/04/22/bitbeat-the-men-who-owned-bitcoin-com/

[jeffhuys]

Didn't Karpeles own the copyright to the word Bitcoin years before it existed? Sorry, I'm going by memory here.

Would that even matter at this point? I don't think the word bitcoin will ever fade from our history at this point. Even when humanity finally dies out, bitcoin will live on forever in our written history.

[Bit_Happy]

Hey how did did it take for satoshi to make the blockchain?

He was able to create his masterpiece in under 10 days, but it took almost 18 years to fly here in his spaceship!
In case you don't know, when Satoshi returns rides on his ship will cost only 10 BTC. 

Ah I see, maybe his ship was broken and blockchain technology was the easiest way for him to make the billions needed to fix it?

Close:
His spaceship was not completely broken, just one very serious bug that was fixed within a few hours, and history reports no other serious failures. 

[jdbtracker]

The design and coding started in 2007.

Nope. Actually way, way, way before that. What the public "knows" as the official story isn't the real story. The "public" whitepaper isn't by the real Satoshi, it's by what I'll call "team Satoshi". I think people would really enjoy reading the original paper, which was less technical and more abstract and way more fun to read, but alas, it's lost. Satoshi Nakamoto was a boy. Just believe me.

Satoshi was a boy? What do you mean? A child? When did this boy write that paper? When did you come across that original paper. Your response is intriguing.

[Eastfist]

The design and coding started in 2007.

Nope. Actually way, way, way before that. What the public "knows" as the official story isn't the real story. The "public" whitepaper isn't by the real Satoshi, it's by what I'll call "team Satoshi". I think people would really enjoy reading the original paper, which was less technical and more abstract and way more fun to read, but alas, it's lost. Satoshi Nakamoto was a boy. Just believe me.

Satoshi was a boy? What do you mean? A child? When did this boy write that paper? When did you come across that original paper. Your response is intriguing.

Yes. Ask Garzik and/or Gavin.

[jonald_fyookball]

Bullshit. If there was another paper it would be downloadable

[rikkie]

The design and coding started in 2007.

Well it is speculated that Satoshi had posted on an internet forum about the concept of bitcoin in the early 2000's, around the time that paypal first came out.

As Cryddit says, we don't know for sure.  Of all the possibilities though, I strongly favour the idea that Satoshi was simply telling the truth.

I personally don't think it was him in that forum post. I think it is more likely that it was just someone throwing ideas around after PP was becoming a 'hit'