Topic: Tor - Incentive Mechanisms !?! HAR 2009 (Read 3930 times)

Yes. There is obviously a history to 'e-cash' its self and to all related computer history for that matter. History closer to the first release of bitcoin is more interesting though.

This post is maybe closer to the truth: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.790088 as well as the following post.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.790094

"We may never know who Satoshi is (and do we really want to know?), but I think it's starting to be clear where Bitcoin was invented: University of Dublin Trinity College"

EDIT: Nope. 

Bitcoins initial bootstrapping via Tor is almost for certain though. I'm going from my own Prio (http://prnwatch.com/prio.html) TCP/IP logs from when the bitcoin network had very very few connections.

I think that 'Satoshi' is unlikely to be Roger as a single individual. However, the Tor developers have spent many years attending hacker conventions and giving talks on a wide variety of subjects in relation to Tor and cryptography all around the world.

It is very likely that Roger was inspired by 'Satoshi' and vice versa in relation to the Tor project. So, I have started to look at where Roger gave some of those talks and who might of attended. This is becoming a bit like wiki leaks... ?

wow.

Interesting, but I highly doubt it. Nobody makes such an invention, without having a very deep thought process about the need of the system (in terms of the economics). I can't believe that someone could up with a new form of money without at least some background in finance. Remember the first client was coded in Windows.

SN on money


...


There is a timeline of ideas and at some point you can't really say how the information flows from one to the next. So I think this https://github.com/ppcoin/ppcoin/wiki/History-of-cryptocurrency is quite accurate.

Timeline of Pre-Cryptocurrency Events

Name        Year    Creator          Innovations
---------------------------------------------------------------
rsa         1977    Ron Rivest       public key cryptography
ecash       1993    David Chaum      anonymous Internet payment
e-gold      1996    Douglas Jackson  digital gold payment
hashcash    1997    Adam Back        anti-spam proof-of-work
napster     1999    Shawn Fanning    peer-to-peer file sharing
tor         2002    Roger Dingledine anonymity network
second life 2003    Philip Rosedale  virtual economy & currency
rpow        2004    Hal Finney       proof-of-work token money
(failure of e-gold) 2007 (my addition)

Consider this article by Chaum from 1985


In a way that sound like Bitcoin.

I guess satoshi nakamoto sounded a little cooler than roger dingledine.

I've been toying with this idea for some time, and I've changed my signature to "Satoshi Nakamoto is Roger Dingledine" for a month or so. Great video find, to hear what could be the author of Bitcoin talking about "coins" in 2009 is surprising to say the least. Here it is again straight from the horses's mouth in Jan 2009 (arma=Roger):

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/two-incentive-designs-tor


There's also an early paper (2003) Roger coauthored called, suprise, surprise... "On the economics of
anonymity" which talks about the issue of incentives in a mixminion type environment.

Roger or someone in the Tor team (Nick Mathewson, Jacob Applebaum, the Tor collective as a whole) certainly match most of Satoshi's known characteristics. Both on the the technical and the ideological sides. I've compiled a list of circumstantial evidence which I've been rotating in my signature:

• Roger is the leader of the Tor project, a privacy buff and a cypherpunk
  
• Tor and Bitcoin are distributed applications written in C++, employ OpenSSL and BSD-type licenses
• Distributed algorithms for solving the byzantine problem, pseudonymty, etc. are essential for both Tor and Bitcoin; many of Roger's papers are published in financial cryptography publications, it's his life work
• Satoshi was a native English speaker who worked on US hours
• "We can win a major battle [...] Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own." - Satoshi
• Roger is highly respected in the security/cryptography community and has little prestige to gain from coming out as Bitcoin's author (he's one of the precious few in this position)
• Conversely, associating himself with the currency of SilkRoad could spell trouble for the Tor project, partially founded by grants from the US government

I could add at least 10 other similar points, all circumstantial. There is of course no smoking gun, and with someone like the authors of Tor, there never will be.

This is a circumstantial evidence in itself: the fact that Satoshi managed to lead a world class project for more than a year without leaking information about his real identity is proof in itself that he was an anonymity mastermind. For example, one of the techniques employed by Satoshi to hide his location in his emails, namely resetting his timezone to UTC, is exactly what the recently released TorBirdy email privacy plugin does:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/torbirdy-our-first-beta-release
(ioerror = Jacob)

+1

If I hadn't bought drugs with the few bitcoins I had once, I'd donate to you. Phenomenal post.

I do forget stuff, although maybe I remembered something interesting...

Is it possible that bitcoin was in fact originally conceived as an incentive model for Tor relay operators ? Perhaps a decision was taken to 'fork' such an incentive model outside of the Tor project, so not to further congest an already 'slow' Tor network with additional P2P traffic ?

In this forum thread https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/satoshis-fortune-lower-bound-is-100m-usddebate-going-on-do-not-tweet-175996 a fellow early adopter asks if 'Satoshi' was using Tor. The answer is yes, I had several discussions in the forum and via PM with 'Satoshi' on the subject of Tor. There were a lot of Tor users!

This thread post https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1843408 perhaps correctly identifies the likely usage of a single machine, running individual threads on multiple cores.

If you wanted to bootstrap or test a new anonymous crypto-currency, where better to launch it, than from a single computer connected to (inside) an anonymity network, whilst running each thread on an individual core, with each instance connected via its own Tor circuit. It is possible when using Tor to select your Entry and Exit node (ensuring that each circuit was never the same), in fact in 2009 you could even choose the Tor Middle node!

This would make 'Satoshi' untraceable, whilst ensuring almost complete protection over most know 'attacks'. It also ensured that any 'external internet' users who downloaded the client at random had multiple nodes to connect to. It would also of been possible to test the network by automatically connecting each individual instance to the other (or not) and to the wider internet, whilst all running from the same machine through Tor. In fact, this is the perfect chaos engine, there was no better way to do this really, it is almost as genius as Bitcoin itself.

This probably explains why the block generation looks the way it does: https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/

So was 'Satoshi' running the 0.1 client ? Probably not, they would require the same protocol with advanced 'command and control', sensible right. Think bitcoin style Mixminion ?

To support the above I will share a 'rare' youtube video from HAR 2009 (Hacking at Random - https://har2009.org/) where Roger D (ex. main Tor dev.) gives a talk on 'why Tor is Slow' (at the time of posting this video has just 79 views)...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJD1hDKDqlo

Pay attention from 4.57 "Incentive Mechanisms"... micro payment approaches... "bittorrent users into the network" (when Tor was still P2P 'friendly')... "micro payments, digital cash"... "the idea is all the people who run a relay are given coins, e-cash"... "if you run a relay, then they pay you a coin to run a fast circuit"... "and that means its just like an economy, it will work great"... "collect money" ... "pay money"...

This is the most accurate description of bitcoin I know of in 2009. Did Roger just read the 'Satoshi' white paper in 2008 / 2009 and like the idea for the Tor Project. Do great minds just think alike ? Was he only referring to expanding Torbank or was it something new and already in 'testing' / beta ? Was 'Satoshi' in the audience - lol ?

To be honest I don't really care and neither should anyone reading this, 'Satoshi' remains 'anonymous'. If those wallets still exist, maybe it is a planned 'safety' reverse 'demurrage', against a central authority!    

This is also a great post: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.459194

http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement.html

Thank you for that. In short - "We are all 'Satoshi'..." and I still do love (to hate) bitcoin !