79 votes
Accepted

If someone wanted to pretend to be Satoshi by posting a fake signature to defraud people how could they?

Unfortunately, given the public's limited of understanding of cryptography this is apparently an easy fraud to pull off. The key trick is that non-technical people are prone to believe things that ...
G. Maxwell's user avatar
  • 7,696
14 votes
Accepted

How did peer discovery work in Bitcoin v0.1?

The first seed mechanism was IRC-based. There was a hardcoded IRC server and IRC channel (#bitcoin on Freenode), and the Bitcoin client would connect to the server, and join the channel with a ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
13 votes
Accepted

Why is there a 5 days gap between genesis and block 1?

While the Genesis block is timestamped 3rd of January, the hash of the Genesis block is astonishingly low. It has been theorized that Satoshi set himself a more challenging target for the Genesis ...
Murch's user avatar
  • 72.6k
9 votes

Who added the 21 million limit to Bitcoin?

This is the announcement of Bitcoin: http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/014994.html Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins. It'll be distributed to network nodes ...
Nick ODell's user avatar
  • 29.3k
8 votes

Where can I access the original, Satoshi written Bitcoin code?

This page contains files for the first three available Bitcoin codebases written by Satoshi Nakamoto. http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/code/
Minto Tsai's user avatar
8 votes
Accepted

Is bitcoin script necessary?

was it necessary to have another language for these operations? isn't it possible to write the whole runtime in one language? To be clear: the goal of the scripting language isn't for defining the ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
7 votes
Accepted

Can old coins be banned by a soft fork?

Yes, since blacklisting a set of UTXOs would be done by adding more rules and thus restricting the set of allowed transactions, technically such a change could be introduced as a soft fork by the ...
Murch's user avatar
  • 72.6k
7 votes
Accepted

Why was the maximum target set to 0xffff0000000...?

I admit that I don't know for sure, but I have a guess. Since Satoshi was mining by himself for the first blocks, he probably set the initial target to whatever would take approximately 10 minutes to ...
Jestin's user avatar
  • 8,822
7 votes
Accepted

Why does Satoshi's public key have the uid "BuZz Spacedout"

This is what I see for a search on pgp.mit.eud, which points to this key: That is a surprising result. If we download the key purported to be Nakamoto's from Bitcoin.org, we get the following ...
David A. Harding's user avatar
7 votes

Do サトシ (Satoshi) or ナカモト (Nakamoto) mean anything in Japanese?

Without knowing the intended kanji, it's unclear exactly what meaning "Satoshi" and "Nakamoto" have, because there are sometimes many homophones in Japanese (including homophonous names). The Japanese ...
Soron's user avatar
  • 171
6 votes

Satoshi's final statement

Ultimate necro, but it was Mike Hearn. You can find multiple emails between Satoshi Nakamoto and himself from back then at his site here: http://plan99.net/%7Emike/ The specific quote you've found is ...
satoshi kazuko's user avatar
6 votes

Where can I access the original, Satoshi written Bitcoin code?

Here is the first version uploaded to sourceforge: https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/code/1/tree//trunk/
Stakedex.io's user avatar
6 votes
Accepted

When was the paper of bitcoin announced?

According to the mailing list archives, the mailing list received Satoshi's email at Fri Oct 31 14:10:00 EDT 2008. However the mailing list is moderated so perhaps the email was not received by ...
Andrew Chow's user avatar
  • 68.5k
6 votes
Accepted

What actually caps Bitcoin's supply at 21 million?

What actually caps Bitcoin's supply at 21 million? Consensus rules The supply is capped by the so-called consensus rules that every Bitcoin node enforces. New coins are minted as block rewards by ...
RedGrittyBrick's user avatar
6 votes
Accepted

Where can I find the technical discussion between Satoshi and other contributors in the sourceforge website?

Try https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org I believe this group has attempted to consolidate all known messages written by Satoshi Nakamoto on their site.
pinhead's user avatar
  • 4,992
6 votes
Accepted

Where was the term "coinbase" first coined, who first used it?

The term "coinbase" was most likely coined by Satoshi through the IsCoinbase method of the CTransaction class. It was both part of the first publicly distributed version of the source code ...
Antoine Poinsot's user avatar
5 votes

Did Satoshi ever acknowledge that his name was a pseudonym?

This post is the closest to an acknowledgement that is was a pseudonym as can be found: "I am not Dorian Nakamoto." http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/xn/detail/2003008:Comment:52186 http://www.forbes....
Rudolf Harrison's user avatar
5 votes

Can old coins be banned by a soft fork?

This could be implemented theoretically, but this idea will certainly never be implemented. It's because: You don't know which addresses exactly are owned by Satoshi Nakamoto. This idea is against ...
anion's user avatar
  • 747
5 votes

Can old coins be banned by a soft fork?

Others have commented on the technical possibility of this, so I'll address the economics: I don't believe any smart miner would do this. Why? Because it would destroy confidence in the network. If ...
chytrik's user avatar
  • 18k
5 votes
Accepted

What are all the small transactions in Satoshi's address?

Of course, because Bitcoin is (mostly) anonymous, we can't know for sure who has been sending these, let alone their reasons. But some guesses: People donating money to Satoshi, since it's known to ...
Nate Eldredge's user avatar
5 votes
Accepted

Satoshi Nakamoto's Transaction Chain Diagram Hash Value

Can anyone confirm exactly how the Hash value shown is computed By taking the raw data for the transaction (as in the bytes that are sent over the wire for the transaction) and passing it through a ...
Andrew Chow's user avatar
  • 68.5k
5 votes
Accepted

When did Satoshi Nakamoto release Bitcoin v.0.1 to the public? 08 Jan 09 or 09 Jan 09?

It depends on how you define release. Satoshi sent the email to the Cryptography mailing list on Jan 8 2009 UTC. However because the Cryptography mailing list is moderated, that email did not reach ...
Andrew Chow's user avatar
  • 68.5k
5 votes

Can satoshi nakamoto change bitcoin

If I understand correctly, Satoshi Nakamoto You don't
amaclin's user avatar
  • 6,708
5 votes
Accepted

What was Satoshi's approach/sample code for implementation of web apps?

I believe the post they were referring to is this one, posted 24 minutes prior, where they say: The idea is that if you give the username whenever you call getnewaddress, you can get the user's total ...
meshcollider's user avatar
  • 11.8k
5 votes

What was the bug for the Bitcoin value overflow in 2010?

Your first source is wrong. The block in question contained three transactions: the first is a coinbase transaction, the second is the one that did the overflow. The third is unknown, and not relevant....
Andrew Chow's user avatar
  • 68.5k
5 votes

How did peer discovery work in Bitcoin v0.1?

Quoting from the wiki: In addition to learning and sharing its own address, the node learned about other node addresses via an IRC channel. See irc.cpp. After learning its own address, a node encoded ...
Antoine Poinsot's user avatar
4 votes

Why does Wikipedia's Bitcoin entry imply Satoshi's whitepaper is from May 2009?

That is clearly incorrect. His whitepaper was released on October 31st, 2008 via the metzdowd mailing list Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper Satoshi Nakamoto satoshi at vistomail.com Fri Oct 31 14:10:...
holaymolay's user avatar
4 votes

How did Satoshi manage to mine so many bitcoins being the first user of the system?

Transactions are not necessary to mine blocks. In simple terms: mining a block = finding a hash that matches with the previous block's hash + optionally a bunch of unconfirmed transactions. A block ...
RocketNuts's user avatar
  • 1,031
4 votes

Did Satoshi know since its publication all the applications that the blockchain would enable?

Did Satoshi knew since its publication all the applications that the blockchain would enable? I doubt it. Even the phrase 'blockchain' was coined long after the Bitcoin paper was published. However, ...
Nick ODell's user avatar
  • 29.3k
4 votes
Accepted

Why did Satoshi not choose for Segwit?

Satoshi made many design decisions that are now criticized (like signatures in transactions, 2-week difficulty period, halvings, etc..). He also made some maths error in the whitepaper. Satoshi wasn't ...
alcio's user avatar
  • 1,274

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