Author: Peter Todd 2015-08-17 19:14:40
Published on: 2015-08-17T19:14:40+00:00
In a bitcoin-dev thread, Gregory Maxwell expressed his disagreement with Oliver Egginger's assumption that there was a specific reason to believe an unauthenticated message was fake. Contrary to other claims, signing the message might have been weak evidence that it was inauthentic because no message from Satoshi was ever signed with that key. The focus on content is especially relevant because one of the core messages in the content is a request to eschew arguments from authority, which presents a challenge: how can the founder of a system ask people to reject that kind of argument without implicitly endorsing it through their own act? The thread also discussed how Satoshi's policy of never making any cryptographically secure signatures to link together his posts fits well with the avoidance of creating a central authority figure. Every single thing Satoshi ever apparently wrote can only be linked together by trusting third parties, and ultimately, we can only take each message individually for the arguments contained within. The biggest achievement by Satoshi in the creation of Bitcoin was to create a system where the identity of the creator is a mere historical footnote, and he took steps to avoid even creating a pseudoanonymous identity.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T19:48:54.830895+00:00