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Ray Dillinger's full 2018 interview for the Bitcoin whitepaper's 10th anniversary: his 2008 code review, the floating-point discovery, and his views on deflation and mining centralization.
Ray Dillinger on his November 2008 review of Bitcoin's block chain code with Hal Finney, why its lack of any Trusted role convinced him Satoshi wasn't scamming, and the ICO scams that followed.
The apology Craig Wright posted on May 5, 2016 in place of his site, three days after claiming to be Satoshi and before any promised proof appeared.
Craig Wright's May 3, 2016 blog post, the day after his public claim to be Satoshi, promising a series of posts and a transfer of bitcoin from an early block as proof.
Craig Wright's May 2, 2016 blog post, published the day he publicly claimed to be Satoshi, walking through an OpenSSL verification of a signature he presented as proof.
Gavin Andresen's blog post of May 2, 2016, stating that he believed Craig Wright was Satoshi after a private signing session in London, with the note he added in February 2023.
Gwern lists where he looked for the draft Satoshi linked in August 2008: the file host, the Internet Archive, Google, BitcoinTalk, SVN. Dai, Back and Maxwell had no copy; Finney never replied.
Asked by author Dominic Frisby, Dai says he never coded b-money: the design was incomplete, he had grown disillusioned with cryptoanarchy, and he did not foresee such a system drawing wide use.
Dai judges that Bitcoin failed on monetary policy and adds that it may partly be his fault: when Satoshi asked for comments on his draft paper, he never got back to him.
Szabo on why Bitcoin took so long: the "why" was the biggest stumbling block, bit gold dated to 1998 on the same private list as b-money, and Nakamoto fixed a security shortcoming in his design.
Asked to change Bitcoin's rules, Dai explains that he did not create Bitcoin, that Satoshi reinvented the idea without reading his article, and that he has started mining with a Radeon 5870.
The bitcoin.org FAQ: Bitcoin's peer-to-peer design, coin generation, why mining margins shrink as value rises, and wallet and transaction basics. Drafted by Malmi, maintained by both him and Satoshi.
Two months after his ALS diagnosis, Finney writes that over 90% of ALS patients choose to die rather than go on a ventilator, and that when the time comes he hopes to choose life.
Satoshi's standalone bitcoin.org explanation of the Byzantine Generals problem, using a proof-of-work chain to make the generals agree on a plan.
Finney's RPOW FAQ: how RPOW differs from hashcash and ecash, why the central server is a crucial element rather than a bottleneck, and why the IBM 4758 was the only possible platform.
Finney's rpow.net home page: RPOW lets hashcash tokens be reused in sequence, runs on an IBM 4758 whose attestation lets anyone verify the code, and could serve as a form of Nick Szabo's bit gold.
Asked why bit gold needs puzzles at all, Szabo suggests the issuing algorithm could be run by many parties in parallel by Byzantine agreement, and weighs its pull toward inflation.
Szabo corrects a slip in his call for help: it should have read "no more wasteful than gold mining," since bit gold rests on an unforgeable, timestamped auditing log anyone can check.
Asked whether bit gold pools could hide fakes as mortgages did, Szabo answers that bit gold minimizes trust through strong security, and its public title registry means supply cannot be hidden.
In a comment on his Unenumerated blog replying to a reader's criticism of bit gold's tranching design, Nick Szabo asks for help building a demo. No one responds publicly.
The first comment under "Bit gold" had nothing to do with bit gold: a tax blogger said she had cited one of Szabo's papers. Szabo thanked her and pointed to his article on value measurement and taxes.
Szabo lays out bit gold: unforgeably costly bits made from proof of work, securely timestamped, chained so each piece sets the next challenge, and owned by position in a distributed title registry.
Doligez on breaking Hal Finney's 1995 SSL challenge: second to find the key, about two hours after David Byers and Eric Young working with Adam Back; the second challenge fell in under 32 hours.
Back's page for his RSA program in Perl, small enough for an e-mail signature, which a U.S. Commerce Department statement ruled must not be exported, and which went onto T-shirts and tattoos.
Back lists the shrinking versions of his RSA-in-Perl program, smallest first, back to the five-line original of March 9, 1995, which Hal Finney explained on the Cypherpunks list soon after.
May dates his thinking on crypto and the state to late 1987, when public-key crypto, anonymous digital cash and information markets struck him as the end of governments as we know them.
May explains the list's slogan "Cypherpunks write code" as a clarifying statement rather than an imperative, and estimates how few members actually wrote code.
May notes that he devised the "Big Brother Inside" slogan against the Clipper chip himself, at a Clipper meeting.
May tells newcomers that the list has no debate about the Clipper chip because it was thoroughly trashed within hours and days of its April 16, 1993 announcement.
May's outline of the group's start: talks with Eric Hughes, a first meeting in the week PGP 2.0 came out, the afternoon "Crypto Game," and John Gilmore's offer of a list site and office space.
May recalls how Jude Milhon's quip at the earliest meetings, "You guys are just a bunch of cypherpunks," became the group's name, and why the link to cyberpunk fiction felt natural.
May recalls three days of talk with Eric Hughes in May 1992 about how slowly academic cryptography became working code, and the aim to get actual running code for digital cash and mixes.
May explains the group's attachment to PGP: its first meeting in September 1992 fell within days of PGP 2.0's release, and PGP was a practical tool hobbyists could actually use.
May notes that PGP 2.0 arrived the same week as the Cypherpunks' first meeting in Oakland in September 1992, and just six months before the Clipper announcement.