Since Nick Szabo is in the spotlight again, here’s some my highlights from many years ago, of his 1996 “Smart Contracts” article.
So it starts of INCREDIBLY well,
Correctly listing out many critical properties that a legitimate generalized smart contract platform of the future absolutely must fulfill,
— Properties which later scams like Ethereum OBVIOUSLY AND HORRIBLY VIOLATE, and remember this was 1996, so Ethereum’s BS was well recognized decades before Ethereum even existed.
But then, deeper into the article, he starts to slip:
“A third category, (c) sophisticated vandalism (where the vandals can and are willing to sacrifice substantial resources), for example a military attack by third parties, is of a special and difficult kind that doesn't often arise in typical contracting, so that we can place it in a separate category and ignore it here”
— NO. This was a common cop-out of the reputation-system focused approaches of the late 90s and early 2000s, to just ignore threat of attacks from rich countries, so can see why he would also use this cop-out, but no. Critical thing about Bitcoin its making cost to kill so incredibly expensive that soon not even the richest nations could kill it, a state that Bitcoin is finally arriving at and surpassing today.
And then futher down, starting in the “Cryptographic Building Blocks” section, he swirves wildly off-track, describing the horribly wrong identity-based and reputation-based approaches that were a popular path of exploration at the time, a completely different path than the one Bitcoin ultimately took.
So,
First half clearly shows that Szabo, like some others at the time, had exactly the right intuitions for what properties a legit system should have,
Latter half goes horribly off-track in the wrong direction
— Question is:
In the 10 years after this paper, did Szabo abandon the failed approach of the 2nd half of the paper,
and switch back to something actually fulfilling the properties he outlined in the 1st half,
= creating Bitcoin?
Unclear, by this alone.
Tbf, other mega-celebrities in the field around the same time in the 90s, e.g. Bruce Schneier, had also been screaming the importance of the cost-of-attack based approach instead of the identity & reputation-based approach.
So Szabo’s first half of the article here is quite well thought-out, and quite against the dominant grain of much of the field at the time — but actually not so original and totally matching some of the other loudest celebrities at the time.
Unclear, as far as evidence of Szabo being Satoshi.
That said, remains a good outline of why Ethereum was a horrible scam, to this day.
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So it starts of INCREDIBLY well,
Correctly listing out many critical properties that a legitimate generalized smart contract platform of the future absolutely must fulfill,
— Properties which later scams like Ethereum OBVIOUSLY AND HORRIBLY VIOLATE, and remember this was 1996, so Ethereum’s BS was well recognized decades before Ethereum even existed.
But then, deeper into the article, he starts to slip:
“A third category, (c) sophisticated vandalism (where the vandals can and are willing to sacrifice substantial resources), for example a military attack by third parties, is of a special and difficult kind that doesn't often arise in typical contracting, so that we can place it in a separate category and ignore it here”
— NO. This was a common cop-out of the reputation-system focused approaches of the late 90s and early 2000s, to just ignore threat of attacks from rich countries, so can see why he would also use this cop-out, but no. Critical thing about Bitcoin its making cost to kill so incredibly expensive that soon not even the richest nations could kill it, a state that Bitcoin is finally arriving at and surpassing today.
And then futher down, starting in the “Cryptographic Building Blocks” section, he swirves wildly off-track, describing the horribly wrong identity-based and reputation-based approaches that were a popular path of exploration at the time, a completely different path than the one Bitcoin ultimately took.
So,
First half clearly shows that Szabo, like some others at the time, had exactly the right intuitions for what properties a legit system should have,
Latter half goes horribly off-track in the wrong direction
— Question is:
In the 10 years after this paper, did Szabo abandon the failed approach of the 2nd half of the paper,
and switch back to something actually fulfilling the properties he outlined in the 1st half,
= creating Bitcoin?
Unclear, by this alone.
Tbf, other mega-celebrities in the field around the same time in the 90s, e.g. Bruce Schneier, had also been screaming the importance of the cost-of-attack based approach instead of the identity & reputation-based approach.
So Szabo’s first half of the article here is quite well thought-out, and quite against the dominant grain of much of the field at the time — but actually not so original and totally matching some of the other loudest celebrities at the time.
Unclear, as far as evidence of Szabo being Satoshi.
That said, remains a good outline of why Ethereum was a horrible scam, to this day.
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Interesting.
Nick Szabo’s 2005 announcement for BitGold
& Satoshi’s 2009 announcement of Bitcoin
…are so incredibly identical,
that it’s 100% clear that the Bitcoin’s introduction was clearly written as a play on BitGold’s introduction
BitGold: “The problem, in a nutshell, is that our money currently depends on trust in a third party for its value”
Bitcoin: “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work”
…and, countless other quotes through out both of them are basically perfectly-aligned paraphrasings.
So Szabo is Satoshi?
Not so fast.
Already been long and well-established that Satoshi was well aware of Bitgold.
And TBF, whenever a legit, generalized successor to Bitcoin finally arrives,
— Almost definitely the author will also introduce it in the same style,
= Root problem with today’s servies is all the trust that's required to make them work.
Fascinating, though totally inconclusive, on its own, as evidence for Szabo being Satoshi.
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Nick Szabo’s 2005 announcement for BitGold
& Satoshi’s 2009 announcement of Bitcoin
…are so incredibly identical,
that it’s 100% clear that the Bitcoin’s introduction was clearly written as a play on BitGold’s introduction
BitGold: “The problem, in a nutshell, is that our money currently depends on trust in a third party for its value”
Bitcoin: “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work”
…and, countless other quotes through out both of them are basically perfectly-aligned paraphrasings.
So Szabo is Satoshi?
Not so fast.
Already been long and well-established that Satoshi was well aware of Bitgold.
And TBF, whenever a legit, generalized successor to Bitcoin finally arrives,
— Almost definitely the author will also introduce it in the same style,
= Root problem with today’s servies is all the trust that's required to make them work.
Fascinating, though totally inconclusive, on its own, as evidence for Szabo being Satoshi.
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Further into Szabo’s 2005 BitGold announcement, we see the origin of one of the popular Satoshi announcements
— Finney had previously implemented a modified enhancement of Szabo’s Bitgold, with Szabo refusing to ever turn any of his ideas into actual code
— So natural to conclude that Finney may have simply done the exact same thing again some years later, making another implementation of that fixed critical problems of the previous versions
= Bitcoin
And then this time around, the fixes actually worked to make something useful, and it took off from there.
Supposedly, one theory is that, in light of the Liberty Reserve disaster that was fresh on everyone’s mind at the time, Finney may have decided to launch this new iteration anonymously, to avoid the same fate.
(This is NOT to say that Bitcoin was a collaboration among multiple people. Doesn’t seem to meet the threshold. Seeing someone else’s critically-flawed work and then redesigning it to fix the critical problems would not generally be considered collaborative work, as long as the fixed parts are substantially different, or as long as the previous guy got some core properties confidently and horribly wrong, and the fix went in the opposite direction.)
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— Finney had previously implemented a modified enhancement of Szabo’s Bitgold, with Szabo refusing to ever turn any of his ideas into actual code
— So natural to conclude that Finney may have simply done the exact same thing again some years later, making another implementation of that fixed critical problems of the previous versions
= Bitcoin
And then this time around, the fixes actually worked to make something useful, and it took off from there.
Supposedly, one theory is that, in light of the Liberty Reserve disaster that was fresh on everyone’s mind at the time, Finney may have decided to launch this new iteration anonymously, to avoid the same fate.
(This is NOT to say that Bitcoin was a collaboration among multiple people. Doesn’t seem to meet the threshold. Seeing someone else’s critically-flawed work and then redesigning it to fix the critical problems would not generally be considered collaborative work, as long as the fixed parts are substantially different, or as long as the previous guy got some core properties confidently and horribly wrong, and the fix went in the opposite direction.)
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And to be clear,
Szabo got some things horribly wrong, at the most fundamental level, with Bitgold,
Much like he swirved horribly in the wrong direction in the second half of his “Smart Contracts” article.
Quite weird that he’d says what properties a legit system should have, and then immediately presents a system whose properties are clearly not fulfilling those.
Costliness of “creation” was never a key property, neither sufficient nor even neccessary, and this was not even the property he’d outlined in the 1996 article.
Bizzare.
But yeah, BigGold got some things horribly wrong.
Did Szabo himself later fix those backward desiderata and create Bitcoin?
Or was Szabo so stubbornly wrong with those backward desiderata, that someone else had to come along and do it right, to create Bitcoin?
But yeah, Szabo did have some very central things horribly wrong, at least at the time of BitGold.
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Szabo got some things horribly wrong, at the most fundamental level, with Bitgold,
Much like he swirved horribly in the wrong direction in the second half of his “Smart Contracts” article.
Quite weird that he’d says what properties a legit system should have, and then immediately presents a system whose properties are clearly not fulfilling those.
Costliness of “creation” was never a key property, neither sufficient nor even neccessary, and this was not even the property he’d outlined in the 1996 article.
Bizzare.
But yeah, BigGold got some things horribly wrong.
Did Szabo himself later fix those backward desiderata and create Bitcoin?
Or was Szabo so stubbornly wrong with those backward desiderata, that someone else had to come along and do it right, to create Bitcoin?
But yeah, Szabo did have some very central things horribly wrong, at least at the time of BitGold.
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Biggest challenge to identifying Satoshi
…is that even Satoshi horribly screwed up the core of Bitcoin in many ways,
making it kind of amazing the problems all ended up being reparable instead of having to start over from scratch yet again
“The first version of Bitcoin allowed anyone to spend anyone else's coins with a super-easy-to-insert op code, it allowed miners to print themselves billions of bitcoins by taking advantage of a value-overflow issue, it allowed any miner to DoS the network with a relatively simple-to-code transaction flood script, included poker and marketplace stubs of code that were never finished (much less used), and wasn't even properly limited to 21M coins (it included perpetual inflation, with 4 batches of 21M coins being produced every mibillenium). It also was Windows-only. Some of those are pretty serious bugs or oversights.”
^ And this description doesn’t even include some of the hugest screw-ups — Initially, Satoshi made the fork-selection just based on the last block’s difficulty in isolation, instead of cumulative, totally subverting everything. Massive error, right in the core of the PoW. Luckily, this was later fixed.
So yeah, biggest difficulty with identifying Satoshi is that even Satoshi made many critical errors in the fundamental design,
Not to mention that he clearly didn’t even properly understand why it would work at all,
Just pure engineering feels.
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…is that even Satoshi horribly screwed up the core of Bitcoin in many ways,
making it kind of amazing the problems all ended up being reparable instead of having to start over from scratch yet again
“The first version of Bitcoin allowed anyone to spend anyone else's coins with a super-easy-to-insert op code, it allowed miners to print themselves billions of bitcoins by taking advantage of a value-overflow issue, it allowed any miner to DoS the network with a relatively simple-to-code transaction flood script, included poker and marketplace stubs of code that were never finished (much less used), and wasn't even properly limited to 21M coins (it included perpetual inflation, with 4 batches of 21M coins being produced every mibillenium). It also was Windows-only. Some of those are pretty serious bugs or oversights.”
^ And this description doesn’t even include some of the hugest screw-ups — Initially, Satoshi made the fork-selection just based on the last block’s difficulty in isolation, instead of cumulative, totally subverting everything. Massive error, right in the core of the PoW. Luckily, this was later fixed.
So yeah, biggest difficulty with identifying Satoshi is that even Satoshi made many critical errors in the fundamental design,
Not to mention that he clearly didn’t even properly understand why it would work at all,
Just pure engineering feels.
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Was Satoshi one of the established p2p celebrities?
IMO, this is something that laymen have horribly backward,
Because the intuitions here are exact opposite of what you see in other places.
+ (A) CRIMINALITY / SPORTS:
Extremely COMMON that those who were dominating in the past, are the exact same usual suspects who are dominating at whatever new thing
Whoever was in the tiny < 1% who did the most crimes before, is extremely likely to be guilty of doing the latest unsolved new crimes too.
+ (B) PARADIGM-SHIFTING INNOVATION:
Extremely UNCOMMON for the leaders of the previous wave to be the leaders of the next wave, particularly when the wave must undergo a major shift from one approach to some compeletely different approach.
Bitcoin was, very clearly, of type (B) — paradigm-shifting innovation — the core PoW innovation is a completely different approach from the identity and reputation-based approaches of prior file sharing p2p tech and distributed database consensus tech — instead to a completely identity-free approach, that’s clearly wildly different.
Same happened in AI, in the shift from symbolic-based to connectionist based methods.
Same happened in countless fields of innovation, over thousands of years
— exactly as Planck pointed out:
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”
“An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.”
— Max Planck, 1950
Bitcoin was a major shift, taking on a completely different approach.
In these kinds of cases, the new lead innovator has essentially NEVER been one of the established celebrities popularizing the old way.
= Not good intuition to assume that whoever made past ecash attempts using the prior methods is likely Satoshi.
Thousands of years of innovation shows likely the exact opposite likely to be true.
Opposite of things you might be familiar with, like criminality or sports, where almost definitely those who dominated before are the ones who are dominating again now.
= Satoshi was almost definitely not one of the established p2p celebrities,
who did everything in what ultimately turned out to be the old, wrong way.
Innovation progresses one funeral at a time.
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IMO, this is something that laymen have horribly backward,
Because the intuitions here are exact opposite of what you see in other places.
+ (A) CRIMINALITY / SPORTS:
Extremely COMMON that those who were dominating in the past, are the exact same usual suspects who are dominating at whatever new thing
Whoever was in the tiny < 1% who did the most crimes before, is extremely likely to be guilty of doing the latest unsolved new crimes too.
+ (B) PARADIGM-SHIFTING INNOVATION:
Extremely UNCOMMON for the leaders of the previous wave to be the leaders of the next wave, particularly when the wave must undergo a major shift from one approach to some compeletely different approach.
Bitcoin was, very clearly, of type (B) — paradigm-shifting innovation — the core PoW innovation is a completely different approach from the identity and reputation-based approaches of prior file sharing p2p tech and distributed database consensus tech — instead to a completely identity-free approach, that’s clearly wildly different.
Same happened in AI, in the shift from symbolic-based to connectionist based methods.
Same happened in countless fields of innovation, over thousands of years
— exactly as Planck pointed out:
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”
“An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.”
— Max Planck, 1950
Bitcoin was a major shift, taking on a completely different approach.
In these kinds of cases, the new lead innovator has essentially NEVER been one of the established celebrities popularizing the old way.
= Not good intuition to assume that whoever made past ecash attempts using the prior methods is likely Satoshi.
Thousands of years of innovation shows likely the exact opposite likely to be true.
Opposite of things you might be familiar with, like criminality or sports, where almost definitely those who dominated before are the ones who are dominating again now.
= Satoshi was almost definitely not one of the established p2p celebrities,
who did everything in what ultimately turned out to be the old, wrong way.
Innovation progresses one funeral at a time.
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Probablem with the Satoshi is a group theory?
IT’S ALWAYS A LIE EVERYWHERE
You think it’s not a lie.
You’re wrong.
It’s always a lie, literally everywhere.
But the news told you otherwise?
You’re an absolute moron for believing the news.
Mountains of evidence for this, which have shared in the past, and will share in future posts,
But basically once you dig into it, every major innovation is essentially always done by a single person.
Commies will have excuses as to why no innovation is never done by individuals,
why even ever talking to anyone for a minute suddenly means everyone gets credit for whatever is invented,
why making use of any modern technology means every past inventor since the dawn of the stone age should get credit for creation of your invention too
= All absolute commie bs.
Essentially every major invention ever was made by a single person, once you divide up the boundaries properly instead of pathologically.
History full of “group” projects where 1 guy secretly did the entire breakthrough, while 99 others take group credit.
No, talking to others or looking at their failed innovations does not suddenly make it a “group” invention.
No, building upon old tech does not suddenly make something a group project.
Essentially every major breakthrough was an individual breakthrough, to a degree far beyond what you ever imagined.
Will share the evidence later.
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IT’S ALWAYS A LIE EVERYWHERE
You think it’s not a lie.
You’re wrong.
It’s always a lie, literally everywhere.
But the news told you otherwise?
You’re an absolute moron for believing the news.
Mountains of evidence for this, which have shared in the past, and will share in future posts,
But basically once you dig into it, every major innovation is essentially always done by a single person.
Commies will have excuses as to why no innovation is never done by individuals,
why even ever talking to anyone for a minute suddenly means everyone gets credit for whatever is invented,
why making use of any modern technology means every past inventor since the dawn of the stone age should get credit for creation of your invention too
= All absolute commie bs.
Essentially every major invention ever was made by a single person, once you divide up the boundaries properly instead of pathologically.
History full of “group” projects where 1 guy secretly did the entire breakthrough, while 99 others take group credit.
No, talking to others or looking at their failed innovations does not suddenly make it a “group” invention.
No, building upon old tech does not suddenly make something a group project.
Essentially every major breakthrough was an individual breakthrough, to a degree far beyond what you ever imagined.
Will share the evidence later.
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FWIW, finally got around to building my own proper backtesting system last night
Will be testing out some ideas through out the night,
to see if we can confirm or invalidate some strong suspicious as to how predictable these big dumps may be, if you look at the right signals
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Will be testing out some ideas through out the night,
to see if we can confirm or invalidate some strong suspicious as to how predictable these big dumps may be, if you look at the right signals
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