Tela Network

I analyzed the Bitcoin v27.2 codebase and found some general metrics about it. These tools & approaches for finding metrics can be used on other versions of the codebase, and on other repos. https://telablog.com/bitcoin-v27-2-codebase-metrics I wrote the draft as a text file, and (with Cursor) built a few Python scripts to: - construct the article from the draft file + the prefix & suffix files. - extract / deduce the title and the custom excerpt. - push the article to the publishing platform via its API. -- Notes: --- This is idempotent: It doesn't create the article again if it already exists. --- The body is one large pre-built markdown entry. This avoids the need to manually interact with the body in the editor. Of interest: I used AI here to build & iterate on /deterministic/ tools (the Python scripts). I did /not/ try to build a processor that would use AI to indeterministically i.e. unreliably run the publishing action sequence.

" > You have an outline > and proposal for such a design, which is a big step > forward, but the devil is in the little details. I believe I've worked through all those little details over the last year and a half while coding it, and there were a lot of them. The functional details are not covered in the paper, but the sourcecode is coming soon. I sent you the main files. (available by request at the moment, full release soon) " - Satoshi https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014863.html Date: Mon Nov 17 12:24:43 EST 2008 A year and half earlier would be: May 17 2007 So he was inspired to begin working on Bitcoin on or before that date. Often it's said that Satoshi was inspired by the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing bailouts (which he cites in the genesis block), but this claimed start date is much earlier. He was probably inspired by the initial subprime mortgage crisis, which began in February 2007. (The US housing bubble popped in mid-2006.)

"The credential that establishes someone as real is the ability to supply CPU power." - Satoshi https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014860.html He is referring to identity within the Bitcoin mining system. It occurs to me that: In the political world, the credential that establishes someone as real is the ability to supply violence. This violence may be direct or delegated, wide or limited, open or hidden, embraced or disavowed, demanded or inspired, but it must. be. present. In the same way that Bitcoin mining ignores all identities other than those that supply CPU power, politics ignores all identities other than those that supply physical force. On top of Bitcoin mining, we can build addresses, transactions, identities, property rights, immutable publishing, and secure communication. On top of violence, we can build towns, cities, temples, polities, law courts, houses, families, and futures. But: Without a foundation, nothing can stand.

"The proof-of-work is a Hashcash style SHA-256 collision finding. It's a memoryless process where you do millions of hashes a second, with a small chance of finding one each time. The 3 or 4 fastest nodes' dominance would only be proportional to their share of the total CPU power. Anyone's chance of finding a solution at any time is proportional to their CPU power." - Satoshi Nakamoto He also refers to the proof-of-work as a "partial pre-image of zero", which is an interesting way to think about it. https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014858.html "... Political freedom is the resultant of unresolved conflicts among various sections of the élite. The existence of these conflicts is in turn correlated with the interplay of diverse social forces... " - James Burnham, The Machiavellians So: Bitcoin produces a species of political freedom via a cyclic (by which I mean permanent & dynamic) Burnham unresolved conflict between its miners.

" The proof-of-work chain is a solution to the Byzantine Generals' Problem. ... The proof-of-work chain is how all the synchronisation, distributed database and global view problems you've asked about are solved. " - Satoshi https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014849.html Proof-of-work is /the/ honest signal in the electronic network medium. An honest signal is a signal that reliably imposed a cost on the sender. Our societies are struggling at the moment with this unfortunate combination: 1) Our business and social lives are moving onto the Internet, due to the lack of friction of communication, which makes it cheaper than the alternatives. 2) Our ability to send honest signals via the Internet is diminishing due to this lack of friction, and also due to the use of AI to generate fake signals. Ideally, we'd use proof-of-work to handle the problem of "proof-of-human". I.e. a reputation tree system, regularly timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain.

"I actually did this kind of backwards. I had to write all the code before I could convince myself that I could solve every problem, then I wrote the paper. I think I will be able to release the code sooner than I could write a detailed spec." - Satoshi https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014832.html My impression of Satoshi's work is that he felt his way intuitively to the object / pattern / ruleset / system that is Bitcoin "through his hands", by working on the code, molding it like a potter molds clay. This quote from one of his posts confirms my impression. I'd say that this is a point in favor of Aristotle over Plato. Plato emphasized forms, theory, the abstract - Aristotle, his student, believed that what emerged from practice, the concrete, was more reliable... There wasn't a rational path to Bitcoin - it wasn't something that you could reason your way to from earlier theories. This is more like Schrödinger's equation - out from the unconscious.

Borges: What's your opinion, StJohn? StJohn Piano: If quantum computing can crack public keys, that means all modern banking systems have a really bad time. People always do the "quantum computing will be the end of Bitcoin" interpretative dance, but seem incapable of making the mental connection to the existing banking system, which also runs on cryptography. Some version of this story has been published regularly since Bitcoin began. A lot of it is clickbait: combine "quantum" and "Bitcoin" for maximum effect, with a side order of "haha Bitcoin is going to break you guys". There's definitely a scenario where quantum computing becomes a problem for Bitcoin. But focusing on Bitcoin here is remarkably shortsighted, because that scenario would be a nuclear wasteland for the rest of the financial and digital infrastructure as well.

Q: All previous attempts to create independent digital currencies were made illegal. Why is Bitcoin still legal ? A: They didn't fail because they were made illegal. They failed because they could be made illegal. Satoshi's emphasis in the abstract of his paper is perfect. He solved the double spend problem, which was the last piece in the puzzle that neither Wei Dai nor Nick Szabo nor a teenage Peter Todd could figure out. Solving it removed the need to trust a centralised third party. Listen to Peter Todd's interview with Peter McCormack on What Bitcoin Did. Peter Todd thought the fundamental problem was limiting the issuance of new currency. But Satoshi realised the real problem was more broad - how do we make it expensive to update the ledger (which includes but is not limited to issuing new currency). He did this using proof of work as a mechanism to update the blockchain. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/amzrmu/in_1998_wei_dai_came_up_with_his_ingenious_idea

is that digital money requires credible history. Satoshi found that: - the central problem of digital money is the double-spending attack - the central requirement for a solution is a trustworthy source of transaction ordering - a timestamp server From these two aspects flow these points in the Bitcoin whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf - "a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server" - "computational proof of the chronological order of transactions" - "The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes." - "We define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures." - "The only way to confirm the absence of a transaction is to be aware of all transactions." - "To implement a distributed timestamp server on a peer-to-peer basis, we will need to use a proof-of-work system" - "Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote." - "Nodes always consider the longest chain to be the correct one"

I think the primary inspiration for Bitcoin was Adam Back's Hashcash, not Wei Dai's b-money. 1) Satoshi's email to Wei Dai indicates that he had not previously read the b-money post: "I was very interested to read your b-money page. ... Adam Back (hashcash.org) noticed the similarities and pointed me to your site." 2) The Bitcoin whitepaper cites b-money only as support: "transactions must be publicly announced [1]" 3) The Bitcoin whitepaper cites Hashcash by name: "a proof-of-work system similar to Adam Back's Hashcash" 4) The format and style of the Bitcoin whitepaper closely matches the Hashcash paper. In contrast, the b-money post is plaintext. http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf NB: The Hashcash paper cites b-money. 5) Satoshi's first post cites Hashcash by name: "New coins are made from Hashcash style proof-of-work." https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October/014810.html