Topic: My jaw is still on the floor. - page 7. (Read 35667 times)

http://www.tanyapretorius.co.za/content/computers/extropians/extropians.html

We're in Romana's new ranch-style rental home, which is tucked away in a Sunnyvale cul de sac. Romana, her companion Geoff Dale, and Dave Krieger--Silicon Valley's Extropian celebs, hotly sought of late by magazine and newspaper reporters--have just moved in together. They call their digs the "Exclave," but its furnishings are downright suburban-normal--no hat box-size ice chests or exotic computer gear cluttering up the Macy's living room set. Previously, Romana ran an "Extropian boarding house" in Cupertino (not to be confused with a commune, a concept that free-market libertarian Extropians consider anathema).

Max More proposes instead a virtual New World, in cyberspace, as a more realistic escape from the bureaucratic hassles of "The Man." In such a Cybertopia, "we'll have things like digital money, which the government can't trace or tax," he gleefully prophesies.

http://www.ipaloalto.com/pdf/Daily_071508_council_approves.pdf
2008 Palo Alto
Geoff Dale, vice president of engineering at Neapolitan Networks, one of the city's dark fiber customers

http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2011/10/04/page-mill-road-development-hits-another-snag
2011 Palo Alto
Geoff Dale, who lives in the area, praised the building's design and said the development would "bring jobs and economic activity when we need it most here in Palo Alto."

I forgot to include this earlier.....

Szabo talking BitGold and Asic type chips for mining in 1999......

http://szabo.best.vwh.net/intrapoly.html

"Another is that, unless the opponent has a very low budget and is thus limited to standard personal computers, it does not make sense to analyze the security or cost of these schemes without reference to machine architecture. For example, spammers may be able to defeat compute-cost postage by using (((custom chips optimized for computing the particular puzzle function)))."

Looks like this one is the only one with the right ties...the Cupertino, CA connection and all the aka's.(u are right Nick Szabo is everywhere, except nowhere in person around any of his work)

https://m.radaris.com/~Andrew-Szabo/178052517

Back in the day Szabo was supposed to live with Dale Geoff and Romana Machado in Cupertino, Ca. That's the Cypherpunks email answers to the mystery about Szabo being a real person.

Note: if Szabo is a pseudonym(it's been questioned since 1993)...... who's the true name?  T.C. May?  E. Hughes?  J. Nash?

so many flippin nick szabos
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/Nick/Szabo

Well, at least they are real people. Both are Israeli cryptographers

I like how he used the tentacle accusation (from over ten years earlier?) as an endorsement in his profile 

I'm not sure what I'm saying anymore, all I know is that this is a very fun rabbit hole.

Allow me to tackle this post from another angle.

http://www.harderfuneralhome.com/obituary/Paul-Frank-Szabo/Brookfield-WI/956225




http://www.gmtoday.com/obits/freeman/obits/2012/September/04/01.htm

First tweets about BitCoin...

http://bitshare.cm/post/81688966676/some-of-the-very-first-tweets-about-bitcoin

(image on right gleaned from http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/outside-a-building-with-shrapnel-pocked-walls-and-glassless-news-photo/3432588)

You telling me that Szabo loosely translates to free?

EDIT: It does, for I just scrolled to the comments.

I also found this:


If you've seen the news today about NK, and already aware about recent events in Cuba, I'd say it's time to spin a certain Dylan 45 right about now.

I remember that post. A few posts down on that one page thread, this...

"a crucial event in fighting totalitarianism: rebels took control of a radio station from the communist media monopoly and redubbed it "Magyar Szabad Radio" (Hungarian Free Radio)"

@ slaveforanunnak1

I thought we were looking for a "c++" programmer like Zooko, but it seems we are looking for a "c" programer(like Hal) trying to make the protocol work in an unfamiliar code of "c++".

Where does the "usual suspects" fit in here?

https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/cryddit-146383

Quotes from Cryddit (aka Ray Dillinger "Bear" original cypherpunk-mentored by Tim C. May himself)

"Speaking as someone who reviewed some of his code in late 2008, I think I can express a pretty strong opinion that it was probably written by one person."

"Every coder has his or her "fist" -- a set of quirks of indentation, delimiter placement, commenting style and placement, use of/familiarity with libraries, thinking style, and etc...  A lot of companies try to enforce a "standard style" but they never completely eradicate all bits'n'pieces of individual style."  

"The early bitcoin sources had no identifiable influences of any "company style."  

"The author clearly did not trust himself to manage c++'s notoriously finicky memory issues and completely defend against buffer attacks, so he made heavy use of STL and Boost to do that - at times going through contortions specifically to avoid having raw buffers anywhere.  He was very clearly a C programmer before he was a C++ programmer, judging by his iteration style.  And his placement of opening and closing braces around blocks of code and indentation relative to those braces was kind of a minority choice -- not strange enough to be peculiar, but unusual enough that it would be surprising if a project written by multiple people used it completely consistently.   The earliest code also uses no 'tab' characters, which tends to indicate that the files were written in the same editor or with the same editor macros - again not peculiar in itself, but it would be unusual for it to be completely consistent in a project by more than one person."

"As for comments, he rarely used one word where none would do.    His comments were mostly limited to notes to himself to do stuff later or resolve design issues, not explanations. In itself, not unusual, but again, you wouldn't find it completely consistent across a project by multiple people."

"I should clarify this last.  What I mean is that people who are coding as part of a team usually use comments to explain the code they're writing to the other members of the team.  So-called "lone wolf" programmers making something all by themselves usually are in the habit of not needing to explain anything to anyone so they don't."

"Now that I think of it, we did talk about the floating point format in that discussion.  8-decimal divisibility was the maximum Satoshi would consider, for that reason (although he was a fanatic about doing everything with unsigned integers).   Hal's point about the smallest division being less than a penny, and that being possible even if the whole world's money supply were denominated in Bitcoin, meant no extraordinary measures were necessary."  

"One thing I learned, was that in C, numeric overflow is undefined behavior on signed integers, and some compilers (notably gcc, which Satoshi was using) will even eliminate overflow checks, and then drop any error handlers or commands to output debug messages as dead code.  Which is a reason why Satoshi was such a fanatic about using unsigned integers everywhere."

"Both Hal and Satoshi preferred FORTH because it had the simplest (easiest to verify correct/secure) implementation of any useful scripting language."

"Look, "Satoshi" was a construction made explicitly for the purpose of launching Bitcoin."

"That purpose is fulfilled.  The person who created "Satoshi" has no further need for him.  Thus ends the story."

"He *was* just about ready to post the code.  This was a debate about what value an already-defined constant ought to have.  In fact I've already posted an archive of his code from just a few *days* later in another thread here for historical interest."

"Hal and I were essentially giving it a last-minute looking over to see if we thought there was any way to attack it."

*"I have the impression that Hal communicated with Satoshi a lot more than I did, but he was looking at a  much tougher problem."

"The blockchain structure is essentially a mathematical proof -- very straightforward, you follow it and you can say with reasonable certainty that it's right or not.  But a scripting language is generative.  And generative structures present exponentially more attack surfaces."

"I remember this discussion, actually."

"Finney, Satoshi, and I discussed how divisible a Bitcoin ought to be.  Satoshi had already more or less decided on a 50-coin per block payout with halving every so often to add up to a 21M coin supply.  Finney made the point that people should never need any currency division smaller than a US penny, and then somebody (I forget who) consulted some oracle somewhere like maybe Wikipedia and figured out what the entire world's M1 money supply at that time was."

"We debated for a while about which measure of money Bitcoin most closely approximated; but M2, M3, and so on are all for debt-based currencies, so I agreed with Finney that M1 was probably the best measure."

"21Million, times 10^8 subdivisions, meant that even if the whole word's money supply were replaced by the 21 million bitcoins the smallest unit (we weren't calling them Satoshis yet)  would still be worth a bit less than a penny, so no matter what happened -- even if the entire economy of planet earth were measured in Bitcoin -- it would never inconvenience people by being too large a unit for convenience."


Note: Hal's "RPOW" is used to solve the Byzantine General’s Problem, a problem in ordinary computing that demonstrates through “game theory” how a group of potential co-operators can come to THE BEST CONSENSUS (Nakamoto Consensus) even with the possibility of having malicious operators among them.
http://cryptome.org/rpow.htm

Szabo: "Only Finney (RPOW) and Nakamoto were motivated enough to actually implement such a scheme”.

*Szabo’s relationship with Finney provides a link between Satoshi Nakamoto and Nick Szabo.  Both had a relationship with Hal Finney.  Had Satoshi been someone other than Szabo, it’s very unlikely that they would also have had a trusting relationship with Finney, and even less likely that Finney would be willing to help someone who stole his friend Nick Szabo’s idea.

So we know that Nick Szabo has known Hal Finney since 1993, and we know that “Satoshi Nakamoto” trusted Finney as the recipient of the first ever Bitcoin transaction. We also know that Nick Szabo laid the blueprints for a system identical to bitcoin in 2005, with a name quite similar to bitcoin, and asked someone to help him code it in 2008, 7 months before Bitcoin was announced.

We also know BitCoin was mostly created in the comment sections of the "Nanobarter", "BitGold" & "BitGold-Markets" papers. What happened in private emails and Meet-ups may never be known.

Interesting thread indeed. I'd say all of the above + those still aflame & the countless unnamed.  

~ https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8484376

Anyone that can help find this - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3839053  ?

Anway, lots of really fantasic stuff here for the history books. I also found back tracking from sources such as the Free Haven papers and projects were really interesting in terms of MIT etc.

MIT gets all the good stuff. Second, all the current alumni get bitcoins. First, http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm

Along with...

4. David Chaum, Amos Fiat, and Moni Naor, Untraceable Electronic Cash, Advances in Cryptology CRYPTO '88, Springer-Verlag, pp. 319-327.

What are the odds of David being chums with a guy named Fiat and another named Moni?

One must not assume anything without concrete evidence, this Nick Szabo is a very prominent thinker though and I enjoy reading the things he's posted about.

One thing that runs though my mind from time to time is that possibly whoever created Satoshi, may have also been the creator of NXT. Maybe I am mistaken but didn't the creator of NXT also disappear into the outer reaches as well?

If Satoshi was still around for some time after leaving Bitcoin, I don't think he could keep away and it could be where he's been a part of a few different Cryptocurrencies under anonymous pseudonames.

It is a nice observation and many people have claimed Nick to be Satoshi in past, but it will take more than a word/phrase to come to any concrete conclusion here.

Not that easy. It may just intensify the already-believers.

Being a native Madisonian myself and only a little older than Nick, I've always been amazed at the superficial similarity in idioms and thought structure that goes into Satoshi Nakamotos writing as my own, especially his politics. I know this is anecdotal and I'm not interested in exposing anyone, but it was an amazing place and time to grow up for free thinkers and many came from there, "That 70s Show" notwithstanding.