
Is Craig Wright? - Alexey_Nigin
https://cp4space.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/is-craig-wright/
======
jordigh

        The little-blockians want the block sizes of Bitcoin to remain
        small, and thus for it to be a pure decentralised currency that
        can be used by anyone with a computer. This would maintain it as a
        peer-to-peer currency, but would limit its growth.
    
        By comparison, the big-blockians believe Bitcoin should grow into
        a universal currency, expanding the block size to accommodate
        absolutely every transaction. The downside is that this is beyond
        the computational limits of domestic machines, thereby meaning
        that Bitcoin could only be regulated by banks, governments, and
        other large organisations: thereby moving it away from a
        libertarian idyll into something more akin to a regular currency.
    

Oh my god, I finally understand the block size debate. I've been hearing about
it forever but never understood why the size mattered to so many people so
much or why there was a debate at all.

~~~
morsch
That's only one of many aspects of the whole block size debate.

And I'm not sure there's a lot of merit to this specific aspect. From what I
can tell[0], the "computational limit" is primarily in increased bandwidth and
storage requirements in running a full node (2.8 GB per day for a block size
of 20 MB).

While that's not trivial, it hardly limits adoption to institutions like
banks. 2.8 GB is about 45 minutes of 1080p video, which people seem to manage
even on domestic connections. At the same time, even with the current block
size, very few people (less than 1%?) currently run a full node; so maybe it's
not the "computational limits" stopping people?

[0] A better, if outdated, list of pros and cons:
[http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/36085/what-are-
th...](http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/36085/what-are-the-
arguments-for-and-against-the-increase-of-the-block-size-limit)

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Well the 2.8gb is to download all confirmed blocks, say a copy of the blocks
added 10 days ago.

But the actual bandwidth exceeds that significantly. Both transactions that
never make it into actual blocks (like bad transactions or double spends) and
blocks that are orphaned are part of the bandwidth too.

More importantly, even if you were just sending and receiving the transactions
that end up in the final longest blockchain, you're communicating hopefully
not with 1 other node, as that'd mostly defeat the purpose, but rather tens of
nodes, meaning you're perhaps seeding yourself the new blockchain data to tens
of other nodes.

In fact, if you look at nodes today, the average daily bandwidth is pretty
much the 2.8gb you mentioned for blocks 20x the current size. e.g.
[http://213.165.91.169/](http://213.165.91.169/)

So if we'd go 20x, you're talking about 50gb a day, or 1500gb a month. And
that just doesn't fly with most consumer ISPs. It's something we could
certainly move towards in 2020 or 2025 though.

Now you can limit your node of course, but that limits the utility, too few
connections means you're just receiving data and not passing through actually
hurting the health of the network. This node transmits only about 20% more
than it receives, so it's not some kind of super node that delivers data to
lots of others. There are nodes like that which today rack up 800gb of monthly
data already, this one is closer to 100gb per month, which already is a lot
just 'on the side', in countries with shitty bandwidth caps. (US) Plus, a lot
of the traffic is burst traffic, so it's not like we're talking about 3gb
daily = 35kb/s (which sounds fine) 24/7\. For example, he's had days reaching
30gb of traffic, and again this isn't some industrial node. You have to be
able to deal with that as well. If you cut your node when the going get's
though on days like these, then it defeats the point and means the blocks are
too big to handle.

So I think we can go a lot bigger with nodes, but we shouldn't downplay the
traffic increases too much, 20mb blocks for example aren't trivial and can't
just be compared to some 1080p video (although I make similar comparisons from
time to time). At some point, you have to give away autonomy if you increase
blocks too much. We already see with 1mb blocks today that lots of peeps run
nodes on a VPS, so they can offload the hassle of a home setup. But this means
lots of nodes already are being run by commercial providers, which are
susceptible to government influence. Now I'm in no way anti-government, but
the whole point of bitcoin is decentralisation, gateless, disintermediated,
resistant to power etc... removing this leaves you a database that can be
manipulated by those with power, just like an ordinary financial system we
already have.

Tricky debate this!

edit: just to add for others who are interested... If the blockchain has
value, people will use it, and keeping blocks small just forces transactions
off-chain. And these can themselves be controlled by various gatekeepers and
intermediaries. So on both sides you're losing out. A balance is necessary,
everyone agrees there. Where the balance is, they don't. And it's made
difficult by the need to 'get it right' right away, as changing the protocol
in 5 years becomes way harder. Every day that goes by, more actors move in,
making change a political process. So simply making blocks 2mb and saying
'let's get back to it in two years when blocks are getting full again' could
actually be worse than delaying it shortly now and forcing a good permanent
solution. While at the same time, every single day, bitcoin is treading
uncharted waters, none of this has been done before in this particular
context, so the foresight for a long-term solution is incredibly hard and
already incredibly political.

~~~
morsch
Thanks for the link, seems like the post I was going by was underestimating
the traffic quite a bit (though to be fair, they allude to it and it was
probably my reading at blame).

That said, I stand by my point that the traffic ("computational") requirements
hardly limit running a node to large organisations: depending on where you
live, a domestic connection might not do it -- though it very well might! --
but a cheap server hosted somewhere on the "right" side of the last mile will.

~~~
newjersey
> a cheap server hosted somewhere on the "right" side of the last mile will.

I think the idea is that if a large majority of the network is on linode, then
shutting down Linode would cause the majority of whoever is left being able to
dictate what's canon?

Why is 2MB the perfect size? Will we run into the same problems in three
years? Or thirty?

------
PaulRobinson
Nice write-up explaining the problems, but the killer for me is a hint as to
how others may have been fooled:

    
    
      Note that the antepenultimate line says ‘signiture’ instead 
      of ‘signature’, so the script doesn’t do what is claimed. In 
      particular, it reads the signature from the environment 
      variable ‘signiture’ rather than from the command-line 
      argument. Hence, if you populate the environment variable 
      with your own public-key, rather than Satoshi’s, you can 
      cause the test to pass!
    

Subtle and clever, if that is indeed what has happened.

~~~
geoelectric
Without getting into Sicilian poison cup arguments around "I knew they'd think
that," I find it hard to believe that someone would go to all this trouble,
then innocently publish their magic trick to the world in a screenshot like
that.

Edit: to be clear, I'm inclined to believe Kaminsky et al that this is a ruse.
I just don't think it's _that_ ruse.

~~~
ryan-c
It isn't that ruse. I replicated the file that is verified in the screenshots
- the ruse is that it contains an old bitcoin transaction from Satoshi rather
than Sartre's writings.

[https://rya.nc/sartre.html](https://rya.nc/sartre.html)

~~~
geoelectric
Very nice writeup!

------
sktrdie
What's interesting to me is _how_ blatantly wrong Wright's post is. It seems
like he went out of his way to make it wrong (typos in the actual code). If he
was a scammer wanting to prove something, wouldn't he go out of his to way to
make sure there were at least no typos?

So what is his motive other than completely fucking up his reputation?

One freaky, and completely unfounded, hypothesis is that Wright is Satoshi,
and was pressured by government to have experts prove he was satoshi (for tax
reasons), but is willingly playing stupid publicly and releasing a blatantly
foolish post to keep his anonymity and let the world think he's not Satoshi.

Yes I know, I have a very creative mind :)

------
stelfer
Since everyone is getting called out on nits today, I'm going to point out
that he calls "Combinatorial Problems and Exercises" a paper, which means that
he's (a) not into combinatorics, because it's an important _book_ in the
field; and (b) he can't be bothered to google the thing even though he's going
to rip on Wright for referencing it.

I have no idea (or care really) about who is right but there's clearly epic
trolling going on here.

~~~
AngrySkillzz
At the same time, Wright is obviously a chimp himself. I doubt I know anyone
with any combinatorics knowledge who would describe it as "a process," mistake
permutations for subsets, and then cite Lovasz to define binomial
coefficients.

------
clemensley
Here is another test: show your mom this video and ask her whether she thinks
that the guy is either a genius mathematician or a con artist
[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36168863](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36168863)

~~~
jjuel
I find it weird that he doesn't want anything from this, and wants to be left
alone yet he is the one coming out as Satoshi. He could have stayed private,
and would have all of what he wanted. So him claiming to be Satoshi seems to
be anti to what he is saying he wants.

------
jere
Nice writeup. I know people say not to focus on Wright's writing style, but he
sure doesn't sound like someone extremely knowledgeable about bitcoin or
cryptography. He sounds like he's writing an undergraduate paper. Given enough
time, anyone can cobble together enough references to describe something
accurately. But that doesn't read anything like
[https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

It fails the sniff test for me.

~~~
aab0
If you look past the glow of history and the greatness of the underlying idea,
the Bitcoin whitepaper itself reads like an undergraduate paper. The original
abstract had flagrant spelling errors, and the discussion and C implementation
of the Poisson distribution will raise eyebrows among any statisticians or
data scientists, who would either not bother to give any proof as trivial or
would provide a one-liner in R.

~~~
jere
Good to know. I'm willing to accept that Satoshi was not a statistician or a
great writer (or even a great programmer) and yet he was still able to
succinctly describe a problem few people in the world even knew existed at the
time.

Wright, on the other hand, spends 5 paragraphs giving a repetitive and
incorrect summary of hash functions, specifically SHA-256.

I don't know how anyone in the world can look at that and think these are the
same person or even colleagues.

------
elif
Can you imagine being pulled over by a police officer, and saying:

"I have my drivers license in my pocket, but there's no reason for me to show
you. I showed Steve my license 10 minutes ago, and Steve will vouch for my
identity"

If you think that's fishy, and don't think this is fishy... consider that in
this metaphor, the person pulled over spent a great deal of his life
advocating for the use of physical licenses to prove identity rather than
social authority.

------
biot
Is it possible to transfer bitcoin from and to the same wallet? If so, why not
do that for one satoshi worth from one of the earliest blocks and include
metadata proving the claim? Unless the private key for the earliest mined
blocks are irretrievably lost (or deliberately destroyed), what's with all the
weak hand-waving proofs?

------
ianpurton
As I see it there are 2 main competing philosophies for Bitcoin.

 _1\. Digital Gold. Pseudo anonymous value storage that can 't be tampered
with by third parties._

 _2\. A payment network with transaction levels that match Visa._

It appears the 2 are not compatible.

For 1 we need more nodes, and node counts from my understanding are on the way
down.

For 2 we need to increase the blocksize, but this might decrease the number of
people willing to run nodes.

I think we have to look at the way we use Bitcoin today, after all the
experiment has been running for a few years now. I don't know anyone who is
using Bitcoin for day to day spending. But I do know people who are using it
as an investment or for value storage.

So in my view the market has decided.

The miners have also decided. They were offered a solution with increased
blocksize and they voted no.

That's consensus.

------
chx
What do you think Craig Wright gets out of this? I can't imagine him trying to
draw investor money five years after letting bitcoin go; everyone knows in
startup world ideas matter less than execution and the first bitcoin software
was not stellar, by far. Really, what people think his motivation could be.

------
michaelcampbell
> The use of a factorial to count the number of binary strings should
> immediately trigger alarm bells in anyone with a rudimentary undergraduate-
> level understanding of discrete mathematics.

Is it possible the use of "!" was used in an English sense, indicating an
exclamation and not factorial?

------
Rmilb
More discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11612673](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11612673)

~~~
0x006A
That's a link to "Judge Grants Search Warrant Forcing Woman to Unlock iPhone
with Touch ID (macrumors.com)"

~~~
yeahyeah
We are all Satoshi

~~~
leblancfg
His name was Satoshi Natamoto.

~~~
xigency
This whole thing feels subtly racist.

~~~
cyphar
It's from Fight Club. "His name was Robert Paulson".

~~~
leblancfg
Yup.

------
zeeshanm
The fact he is using Windows is alarming.

~~~
tlrobinson
The first version of Bitcoin was for Windows...

