2009 Database ownership
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Arvind Naranayan, profesor de Ciencias de la Computación en la Universidad de Princeton https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/09/18/private-blockchain-is-just-a-confusing-name-for-a-shared-database/
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Forwarded from 395 361 Wei Dai - BMoney - prebitcoin (@RamonQuesada)
From: Satoshi Nakamoto
Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2009 11:17 AM
To: weidai@weidai.com
Subject: Re: Citation of your b-money page

I wanted to let you know, I just released the full implementation of the paper I sent you a few months ago, Bitcoin v0.1. Details, download and screenshots are at www.bitcoin.org

I think it achieves nearly all the goals you set out to solve in your b-money paper.

The system is entirely decentralized, without any server or trusted parties. The network infrastructure can support a full range of escrow
transactions and contracts, but for now the focus is on the basics of money and transactions.

There was a discussion of the design on the Cryptography mailing list.
Hal Finney gave a good high-level overview:
| One thing I might mention is that in many ways bitcoin is two independent ideas: a way of solving the kinds of problems James lists here, of creating a globally consistent but decentralized database; and then using it for a system similar to Wei Dai's b-money (which is referenced in the paper) but transaction/coin based rather than account based. Solving the global, massively decentralized database problem is arguably the harder part, as James emphasizes. The use of proof-of-work as a tool for this purpose is a novel idea well worth further review IMO.

Satoshi
http://www.gwern.net/docs/bitcoin/2008-nakamoto#section-1
Forwarded from 2009 361 - 21 Millions Coins - Protocol (@RamonQuesada)
Reply by Satoshi Nakamoto on February 18, 2009 at 20:50
It is a global distributed database, with additions to the database by consent of the majority, based on a set of rules they follow:

- Whenever someone finds proof-of-work to generate a block, they get some new coins
- The proof-of-work difficulty is adjusted every two weeks to target an average of 6 blocks per hour (for the whole network)
- The coins given per block is cut in half every 4 years

You could say coins are issued by the majority. They are issued in a limited, predetermined amount.

As an example, if there are 1000 nodes, and 6 get coins each hour, it would likely take a week before you get anything.

To Sepp's question, indeed there is nobody to act as central bank or federal reserve to adjust the money supply as the population of users grows. That would have required a trusted party to determine the value, because I don't know a way for software to know the real world value of things. If there was some clever way, or if we wanted to trust someone to actively manage the money supply to peg it to something, the rules could have been programmed for that.

In this sense, it's more typical of a precious metal. Instead of the supply changing to keep the value the same, the supply is predetermined and the value changes. As the number of users grows, the value per coin increases. It has the potential for a positive feedback loop; as users increase, the value goes up, which could attract more users to take advantage of the increasing value.
http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-source?commentId=2003008%3AComment%3A9493
Forwarded from 401 Dave Kleiman 2013 (@RamonQuesada)
I asked him to explain the distributed ledger in layman’s terms and he went into an algorithmic paroxysm of verbal ingenuity. Ignoring all that, a distributed ledger is a database that is shared between multiple users, with every contributor to the network having their own identical copy of the database. Any and all additions or alterations to the ledger are mirrored in every copy as soon as they’re made. No central authority is in charge of it, but no entry on it can be disputed. Adam Smith’s point about ‘incentive’ is embedded in the way bitcoin works: people do not just buy coins or use them; they ‘mine’ them. Miners use their computers to solve increasingly difficult mathematical problems, the reward for the solving of which can be paid in bitcoin. This keeps the currency honest and, ideally, stops it from being dominated by any single entity.

I had brought rolls of disposable whiteboard and stuck it up around the flat, and, while we were speaking, he would jump up and cover the walls in formulae, along with arrows, arcs and curves. His wife told me she sometimes goes into the shower room and finds him standing there, stark naked, writing on the steamed glass. ‘Was there a primary person doing the maths?’ I asked.

‘Me,’ he said. ‘Dave wasn’t really a mathematician. What he did was make me simplify it.’

‘How did he know how to make you simplify it?’

‘We got to a point in the writing of the Satoshi white paper where it was … People say that it was hard.’

‘He wanted you to bring the language down a little bit?’

‘A lot. It’s very simple. The elliptical curve stuff is not described in the paper at all, it’s just there. The crypto stuff isn’t described either.’ I asked him to show me the trail of ideas that led to their collaboration. ‘So all these things are there,’ he said, pointing to a 337-page thesis on his computer called ‘The Quantification of Information Systems Risk’, which he had recently submitted in partial fulfilment of a philosophy doctorate at Charles Sturt University. ‘Application to audits, how you analyse failures, deriving the mathematics behind it, simplifying the mathematics and there you go … The core of the bitcoin paper is a Poisson model based on binomial distribution. That’s how it got solved.’

In 2008 it was a ‘hodgepodge’, he said. I asked him if he felt the development of bitcoin was, at some level, a response to the financial crisis. ‘It was already in process. I saw [the crisis] coming though. It was a kind of perfect storm. During that year, I spoke to Wei Dai. So between him and Hal Finney there were a lot of really good ideas about making money work … [Finney] was the one who actually took what I said seriously. He received the first bitcoin.’"

The Satoshi Affair.
Andrew O’Hagan in the #LRB:
30 June 2016
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair