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 ...
16
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 ...
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 ...
9
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/
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 ...
9
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 ...
8
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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/
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 ...
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 ...
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.
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
5
votes
How did Nakamoto untraceably pay for registering bitcoin.org?
How did Nakamoto untraceably pay for registering bitcoin.org?
Nobody knows for certain apart from Nakamoto and the businesses involved.
Nakamoto was (and remains) notably secretive and their true ...
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 ...
5
votes
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 ...
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....
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 ...
5
votes
Accepted
What Satoshi Nakomoto quotes are there in relation to forks and altcoins?
I think thats too much of an open ended and broad set of multiple questions to be answerable here but you can find the complete public writings of Satoshi Nakamoto using a search engine. I think ...
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 ...
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:...
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, ...
4
votes
Where did Satoshi Nakamoto state that bitcoin is gold or digital gold?
Where did Staoshi Nakamoto stated that bitcoin is gold or digital gold?
He didn't.
Not in any of his public writings.
an argument that Bitcoin is a store of value and not a meant of payment.
In his ...
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