Monday, July 24, 2017

Is Craig Wright Satoshi and Does It Matter ?

* This post was written before the fork and needs to be updated. I wrote it because I was worried that many Bitcoin owners who will be getting their BCH tokens have been advised in the main forums to ditch them for BTC as soon as possible in order to tank the price of the new token. I felt that this was wrong. At the very least the public should have been advised to do nothing and wait for events to play out. Acting on the wrong advice will lead to losses.

Does it matter if CSW is Satoshi - NO DEFINITELY NOT . Does it matter if you believe CSW is Satoshi - YES. Under normal circumstances no, but these are not normal circumstances. We are getting a hard fork on 1 August. This means we will all have BCC and BTC in our wallet. You have a choice Sell one or the other or keep both. Where you end up depends on what you believe in. I believe that the BCC fork will survive and in the end will surpass the BTC chain.

1) CSW supports the BCC chain.
He is nChain and they are introducing split chain and new op codes for Turing completeness
2) Replay protection on BCC chain

These people are serious and responsible, plus the system they use makes it fraud proof and opens the way for sharding.

These are enormous improvement to the Bitcoin protocol. Turing completeness was the whole reason for Ethereum's inception.

3) Sharding is the holy grail for Ethereum and they have not succeeded. Basically sharing the processing load on different computers. BCC adopts Bip143 style signature, which solves malleability and makes the system fraud proof, which is necessary for sharding.
All these developments are on BCC and not BTC. Can they not be adopted? Sure they can, but Core have proven so far that they don't look outside their sphere. Plus they absolutely hate the big blockers.

4) What happens after the fork?
The first thing is that BCC has bigger blocks while BTC will have 1MB for at least 3 months. So it will be cheaper to transact on BCC. This I believe is the biggest organic push by users to BCC and the miners and developers must follow the users. Also the people on the BTC side of the chain will always be arguing if the 2mb hard fork will be activated while te people on BCC will get on with business. You win by what you do not what you say.

Will BCC chain survive? What if it has low hash rate behind it? It will survive because the community sees the benefit of having a second option in case the first option fails. Means the big miners will not attack the BCC chain. And there will be a second chain because the people behind it are willing to mine the chain even though it is less profitable to do so.

So it is important on which chain you want to be on. You can sit and do nothing and all will be well but what if you want to spend some BTC? Are you going to spend your BCC or BTC? If you want to take a position, taking the wrong position means you will lose your money. So it is important if you believe CSW is Satoshi or not. Long term (6 months) both chain cannot survive one will wither and become an Alt.

Why I believe CSW is Satoshi
It really does not matter if he is or is not, except to satisfy one's curiosity. But look at it this way. What does it take to be Satoshi? He must have very good grasp of programming, cryptography, game theory, Maths, Economics and Philosophy. Is Satoshi one person or a group. I argue that it is one person and he solve the Byzantine Generals problem, help by small group of people after the release of the software. You will also need to have a connection to these small group of people.

Solving the Byzantine General problem is what scientist call a hard problem. It is not obvious and the solution is worthy of the Nobel prize. So why did he release it anonymously? I think because he knew that if it did not get traction and adoption it will die either from within or without. He was worried about Wikileak using bitcoin before Bitcoin was ready. Attracting attention to it will surely get it stomp on by the authorities, and open himself to criminal prosecutions. Every other person who engaged in digital money up to then have had legal and criminal problems to content with. Can you count how many people dismiss it outright at first glance only to rediscover and adopt it later when it refuses to die.

Lastly, this is a gift to humanity. It takes a special kind of person to do that. One must have "lived". Such a person will be a contradiction. A complex person. One where the Yin and Yang flares up easily.