

What Satoshi Didn't Know [video] - xsb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ3e1Pzu7iI

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firasd
I converted this talk to mp3 audio to listen to it more conveniently:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/cr388hk0uarg90j/DevCore%20Boston%2...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/cr388hk0uarg90j/DevCore%20Boston%202015%20l%20What%20Satoshi%20Didn%27t%20Know%20l%20Gavin%20Andresen%2C%20Bitcoin%20Foundation.mp3?dl=0)

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dutchbrit
Is there a tldr (or in this case tldw)?

~~~
xsb
Satoshi Nakamoto is/was the anonymous creator of Bitcoin. He voluntarely
disapeared a few years ago. Gavin Andersen is the lead developer of the open
source Bitcoin project since then. In this video he talks about the past and
the future of the cryptocurrency, and touches some parts of Bitcoin history
and his relationship with Satoshi.

~~~
jsprogrammer
But what didn't Satoshi know?

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marcell
From the video:

\- That you can compress ECDSA public keys from 64 to 33 bytes

\- Compression techniques that can be applied to the bitcoin protocol, such as
inverted bloom lookup tables

\- SNARKS

\- Fully homomorphic encryption

\- Various bugs in the initial bitcoin implementation, including one that
created ~2 billion BTC

\- Whether bitcoin was legal

\- Whether it would take off

~~~
kolinko
Fully homomorphic encryption is a really big one. It allows to perform
operations on an encrypted data - in theory you could run a computer program
that would have it's memory contents encrypted at all times.

In case of cryptocurrencies it means that it's possible to create a
cryptocurrency that has all the advantages of bitcoin, but also guarantees
total anonymity - i.e. you're able to prove that you have the coins and _not_
show where the coins come from. Mixers would not be necessary, and it would
not be possible to track the coins.

The practical implementation of this is called DarkCoin. When we were doing
Orisi we considered launching a sidechain to Bitcoin that would do similar
stuff. But abandoned the project - privacy is important, but we all know who
would be the first clients would be ;)

Also, it is be possible to create computer programs that run on your computer
and have their own money, but that money is impossible to be stolen from them
(the private key is never decoded and never reaches the computer memory).

Imagine a frustration of a computer hacker that gets a program which will pay
him 1 BTC if, and only if he solves a specific equation. The program is open-
source, and yet there provably is no way to hack into it.

Or a program that sends you money when it sees phrase "XXX" on Hacker News
(you cannot cheat by providing altered HN website, because the program
verifies HN SSL certificate on a homomorphically encrypted virtual machine).

~~~
jsprogrammer
Is there a runnable, fully homomorphic encryption program that allows running
turing complete languages?

~~~
kolinko
IIRC it's a very fresh research. From what I heard It's definitely possible,
but I don't think there are any working implementation of a turing complete
machine on this.

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mcs
Never roll your own crypto, unless you're a cryptographer.

At least he realized that.

~~~
dutchbrit
But he did design his own protocol

