The Good Tech Companies - Cypherpunks Write Code: Peter Todd, Bitcoin Core, and Satoshi

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/cypherpunks-write-code-peter-todd-bitcoin-core-and-satoshi. HBO launched a whole documentary signaling the cypherpunk Peter Todd as the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. That’s very debatable, though. Check more stories related to tech-stories at: https://hackernoon.com/c/tech-stories. You can also check exclusive content about #peter-todd, #who-is-satoshi-nakamoto, #bitcoin, #cypherpunks-write-code, #cypherpunks-and-blockchain, #zcash, #obyte, #good-company, and more. This story was written by: @obyte. Learn more about this writer by checking @obyte's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com.

This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. Cypherpunks Rightcode, Peter Todd, Bitcoin Core, and Satoshi, by Obite. As a group of activists fighting for online privacy, most cypherpunks goonnoticed by most people, and they often don't become popular in mainstream media. That was also the case of Peter Todd, a prominent developer in the Bitcoin community but also a nebulous figure outside of it. At least until October 2024, when HBO launched a whole documentary signaling him as the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. That's very debatable, though. There aren't a lot of things we know about Todd beyond his technical proposals or his public

tweets, but we can mention a few. For starters, he's a self-taught Canadian programmer of around 39 years old. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree and dropped out of a physics program. It was around 2010 when he first learned about Bitcoin. Indeed, he registered on BitcoinTalk, the first ever Bitcoin forum, in December 2010, but he wasn't very active on it until much later. By that time, Todd was employed as an analog electronics designer at a geophysics startup, while also attending college for physics. So, in his own words, he didn't have a lot of free time and didn't pay enough attention to the Bitcoin beginnings. He started to work on it almost full-time in 2013 because he believed he

could contribute something more meaningful. Greater than, there's no way I could have ever contributed anything meaningful to analog greater than electronics, I'm not smart enough, and analog electronics is far too old greater than holding a field for that to happen. Whereas in Bitcoin there are multiple greater than terms we use where I'm actually the guy who came up with the name for the greater than term. He wasn't on the original cypherpunk mailing list, that we know, but he's considered a Cypherpunk nonetheless, thanks to his code contributions to privacy-enhancing tools. Besides, as we're about to see, he has some deep connections with other Cypherpunks as well. On Bitcoin Core, Todd has been a prominent figure in Bitcoin Core, the main Bitcoin implementation, contributing to several key features and improvements. One of his notable achievements is replaced by FeeRBF,

a method that allows users to replace unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions with new ones that include a higher fee. This mechanism helps speed up transaction confirmations when the network is congested. This system is formalized in the bitcoin improvement proposal bip 125 giving users the flexibility to adjust fees while ensuring recipients can wait for confirmed payments before considering a transaction final https colon slash slash youtube com watch v equals u9rx1qv2msm and embeddable equals true in addition to RBF. Todd proposed stealth addresses to enhance privacy in Bitcoin, although this work has been considered for other networks. Thesis addresses make it harder for third parties to trace transactions by using

Goni time-use addresses for each transaction. This ensures that users' identities are a better protected on a public blockchain, even when they reuse the same wallet. By leveraging elliptic curve cryptography, stealth addresses would allow only the intended recipient to detect and access their payments, adding a critical layer of privacy. Todd also contributed to several other BIPs. For example, BIP9 improved how protocol upgrades are signaled, BIP-65 introduced a new way to lock transactions until certain conditions are met, check lock time verify, and BIP-111 enhances Bitcoin's peer-to-peer protocol by allowing nodes to advertise whether they support bloom filters, which help reduce the amount of transaction data sent to lightweight, SPV, clients.

On Zcash, Bitcoin isn't the only cryptocurrency in which Todd has been involved. In 2016, he played a crucial role in Zcash's initiation ceremony, which involved creating cryptographic keys that were essential to its security. Todd, as one of the participants, took extreme measures to ensure that his part in generating these keys remained secure. He ran computations from a laptop that was shielded inside a foil-lined box while traveling across Canada, and afterward, he destroyed the laptop with a propane torch to ensure no traces remained. It was my goal to outdo every other station in Canadian cypherpunk glory, he declared about it. His enthusiasm wouldn't last, though. https://com.peterktodd.status.1.519.428.920.622.592.

Embeddable equals true soon enough. He wouldn't refrain from harshly criticizing Zcash security and its team. Todd has criticized the Zcash team for poor record-keeping, suggesting potential incompetence or even fraud. He recalls sending important data via hard drive, which was reviewed by a journalist hired by Zcash, but later, the team claimed they forgot about it, which he finds absurd. Todd also pointed out that after a critical bug was fixed in 2019, the team avoided admitting they had lost the files. He seems frustrated by the lack of proper auditing of Zcash's ceremony, which he says was never truly verified despite the team's claims.

Additionally, Todd believes his reputation washarmed, alleging that some Zcash members spread false information about him behind his back. Despite acknowledging that Zcash's technology has merit, he warns of risks due to the team's supposed dishonesty and has also criticized the lack of privacy use cases by most holders. Peter Todd and Satoshi Nakamoto, the documentary film, Money Electric, The Bitcoin Mystery, produced and directed by Cullen Hoback, was released on HBO on October 8, 2024. After interviewing several key figures in Bitcoin and crypto, including especially Adam Bach and Peter Todd, Hoback concluded that Peter Todd could be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious Bitcoin creator. He presented some circumstantial evidence for it, https colon slash slash www, youtube, com, watch,

v equals isf0kgs phooey8 and embeddable equals true in chronological order, it's been proved that Todd has been in communication with the cypherpunks Adam Back and Hal Finney, before he passed, since he was around 15 years old. By Todd's own words, he was a young libertarian, actually trying to develop his own version of decentralized money since then, using the hash-cash system created by Back in 1997, and later cited in the Bitcoin white paper. Hoback also pointed to Todd's Canadian accent, his reported lack of professionalism in programming, and the academic schedule shared with Satoshi's posts back then, when Todd was in school. However, the main piece of evidence presented is the second-ever post that Todd wrote on BitcoinTalk. It was in December 2010, when he barely joined, and he was correcting

Satoshi himself about transaction fees. Hoback found the heavy technicality strange for a newcomer. His working theory is that Satoshi himself logged out previously from his official account and logged back in from Todd's account by mistake to continue with his own idea. Mere days after this correction, Satoshi would send his last message on Bitcoin Talk, and Todd's account remained dormant for two whole years. For his part, Todd denied being Satoshi Nakamoto. He insisted that we all arrest Satoshi and said that, in any case, if he was indeed Satoshi, he would have destroyed all the ways he could possibly prove to be Satoshi. Freed digital currency, Satoshi or not, Todd has been a very

dedicated cypherpunk in the crypto industry, and not only for Bitcoin. He's declared that open source is the only way to do software and that the goal in crypto shouldn't be a specific coin but the closest we can get to really decentralized and free money greater than what matters is not bitcoin per se but rather free digital currency that's greater than what matters and if bitcoin's architecture proves to not quite work right greater than well other things can come along later. Bitcoin is as free as it gets in terms greater than of freedom. But if it's something that was technologically better, if that greater than genuinely came around, but currently I don't see anything that is with all greater than things considered. Maybe that something isn't here yet,

or maybe it's still in development. In any case, there actually are more decentralized networks than Bitcoin or Ethereum. In these platforms, there actually are more decentralized networks than Bitcoin or Ethereum. In these platforms, there are still middlemen between sending a transaction and its ultimate approval, be it miners or validators. In the end, your transaction is in their hands, and they could approve it or not, depending on their own interests. Such as a higher fee, like the RBF proposed by Todd himself, which allows for on the other hand, a directed acyclic graph, DAG, network like Obite doesn't suffer from those issues since it eliminates all middlemen in transactions. There are no miners or validators, instead,

users are their own, miners. Every valid transaction sent to the DAG is automatically approved, and only the order of transactions is established with the help of a set of reputable and non-powerful nodes. This way, Obite has proven to be a more decentralized, censorship-resistant, and freer alternative to most blockchains. The cypherpunk goal to have fully free money in the hands of people all around the world may not have materialized yet, but the next step is already here. Read more from Cypher Punk's Right Code series Tim May and Crypto Anarchism. Wei Dai and B Money. Nick Sabo and Smart Contracts. Adam Back and Hashgash. Eric Hughes and Remailer.

Saint Jude and Community Memory. Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Hal Finney and RPOW. John Gilmore and F. Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin. Gregory Maxwell and Bitcoin Core. David Cham and Ecash. Vinay Gupta and Maturiam. Jim Bell and Assassination Politics. N Thank you for listening to this Hackernoon story, read by Artificial Intelligence. Visit hackernoon.com to read, write, learn and publish.