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http://edgecase.net/articles/bitcoin_transaction_test_set_2

This article contains 16 Bitcoin transactions, with 1-3 inputs and 1-3 outputs.

All transactions are onchain - and thereby confirmed to be completely valid (there is no higher level of validation). You can take each txid and look it up in a block explorer.

Private keys are included. All addresses are Pay-To-Public-Key-Hash (P2PKH).

I published it on 2020-12-19.

A Bitcoin transaction is a complicated object. Getting one of its aspects wrong can produce a transaction that looks plausible but is invalid, or worse, valid in a way the developer did not intend.

The value of a test set like this is that it gives a developer something fixed and confirmed-true to compare against. You can run your code against known cases and check whether it produces the expected transaction IDs, signatures, serialized bytes, or decoded fields.

Friday, August 22, 2008 4:38 PM
1) Satoshi Nakamoto to Wei Dai

"I was very interested to read your b-money page. I'm getting ready to release a paper that expands on your ideas into a complete working system."

2013-04-18
2) Adam Back posted to the BitcoinTalk forums a self-introduction mentioning that

"I believe it was me who got Wei Dai's b-money reference added to Satoshi's bitcoin paper when he emailed me about hashcash back in 2008"

"the actual bitcoin mining is basically my hashcash invention..."

3) bitcoin.org was registered on 2008-08-18.

4) b-money:
http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt

5) b-money was announced on the cypherpunks mailing list in 1998.
https://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1998/11/msg00941.html

6) Adam Back's commentary on b-money:
https://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1998/12/msg00203.html

Source:
Wei Dai/Satoshi Nakamoto 2009 Bitcoin emails
https://gwern.net/doc/bitcoin/2008-nakamoto

The religious faith in Bitcoin is falling apart.

There has been a loss of belief amongst the faithful.

The once disciplined and morally-strong proponents of Bitcoin have fallen away.

What remains are the Schillers and the false prophets.

The lesson:

Bitcoin was never a religion, it was tool. The original users tried to create a false religion based on decentralised transmission of value.

They tried to say they were morally superior. What will actually happen now is that those who are stronger, more disciplined, and in reality morally superior will replace them. They will harness Bitcoin not as a religion but as a tool.

Bitcoin is a tool and will be used as a means to an end.

As an example:

https://youtu.be/oyDkDNaxBzM?is=k_Ls7bdLCG2mGcWv

Provision is a bitcoin wallet based on three concepts:
- all secure operations performed on an air-gapped machine
- all products transported by USB drive to an online machine
- guaranteed to have no entropy re-use

An air-gapped machine, or a machine that has never been connected to the internet, reduces the attack surface of the environment used to operate safely with bitcoin.

No secrets are ever placed on the USB drive, leaving everything secure on the offline machine.

Creating your own entropy, e.g. via rolling a die, is the most secure guarantee for cryptographic operations available.

Provision also enables secure message encryption and signing using the same underlying software as Bitcoin.

Written in pure Python with no third-party dependencies.

Code available upon request.

https://github.com/corporation-dev/readme

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.