For those not aware, the original 50 coins sent to this address were generated from the genesis block, the first block on the blockchain. However, the transaction is still unconfirmed, so until it is this could be nothing. Market has been scared downwards though.

I don't understand. Either this transaction has a valid signature or it doesn't. If it does, then AFACIT the only possible way that it could not be confirmed sooner or later is if it's a double-spend. What am I missing?

Maybe blockchain.info generates its web pages from a database, and someone inserted a record into the database that doesn't correspond to a transaction with a valid signature? Although if that's the case you would maybe expect them to not mark it as "unconfirmed".

But surely someone would have just checked the signatures on these transactions by now? (I would do it myself but I'm not familiar enough with the bitcoin transaction format.)

They're definitely invalid transactions. The public keys and signatures do not match the address they're trying to spend from. Only blockchain.info failed to detect this minor detail.

"minor"

As in "this plane has no wings" - "that's minor"

The raw tx can be found at https://blockchain.info/rawtx/26d80a02ebdd9886b5a859c69c3470...

https://twitter.com/maraoz/status/628614596618813440 confirms it's a fake.

> For those not aware, the original 50 coins sent to this address were generated from the genesis block

The genesis block is block 0, and the coins in those transactions in question were from block 1 through 5.

Good point! I clearly wasn't thinking like a computer scientist this morning.

How do you determine that is from the genesis block? Also how do you know it is Sataoshi's? Because it is from the Genesis or is there some other method?

> How do you determine that is from the genesis block?

Go to:

https://blockchain.info/en/address/12c6DSiU4Rq3P4ZxziKxzrL5L...

Scroll down to the bottom, where you will see:

https://blockchain.info/tx/0e3e2357e806b6cdb1f70b54c3a3a17b6...

That is the genesis block.

(Well, OK, that's the transaction contained in the genesis block. The Genesis block itself is https://blockchain.info/block-index/14850)

> Also how do you know it is Sataoshi's?

Because he was the only one mining when bitcoin launched.

The genesis block is actually block 0, you're looking at block 1.

Incidentally, the genesis block reward is unspendable. It's not really known if that was intentional or a bug in the initial implementation, but the rule persists.

Oops, you're right. Here's the genesis block:

https://blockchain.info/block/000000000019d6689c085ae165831e...

It only appears to be recorded on blockchain.info. None of the other blockchain explorers seem to see it.

I'd hold off on the news until it's been confirmed.

Edit: Others have checked and can't find any of these transactions in the blockchain. Either a blockchain.info bug or hack at this point. Nothing has moved.

Would it be possible, just by looking at the blockchain.info website, to prove that whatever is going on is signed by someone with the private keys to these coins? If the transaction signatures validates, does it matter whether the they are accepted by the network - it would still prove "he's alive"?

It would; however in this case, the signatures do not validate, they're from a different address.

And the price tanks immediately: https://cryptowat.ch/bitfinex/btcusd/3min

that graph is pretty cool

Thanks! :)

That's not a tank, it's a $2 drop in price caused by ~600 BTC in volume. Just a thin order book (and arguably a good spot to buy in for a short term trade)

"Tanking"?

That didn't even cause the lowest trading price of the past 24 hours.

For a 5 minute window, I'd consider that tanking. It looks like there is an issue with bc.info, so it looks like traders are holding off making more decisions on this news.

At an exchange rate of $284.45 USD/BTC, this comes out to a transaction of a little more than $14,000. However, as creator of the Bitcoin protocol and an early adopter, and that this is one of his oldest wallets, he may be moving unknown quantities of Bitcoin. This could cause a disruption on the open BTC markets if he exchanges a large quantity -- but for what reason? No one knows, since Mr. or Ms. Nakamoto is anonymous.

That's about $15k at today's rate, according to Google. Not much, really.

That would pay off my student loans nicely. $15k is still much to some :)

yeah but he's reportedly worth millions among various wallets. If he spends them all in one go, the market will take a big hit.

If it's just 15k, it's not a biggie, apart from the news that he's alive (or at least, that somebody has control of some of his wallets).

From the discussion in #bitcoin on freenode, this is just an elaborate trolling.

Bitcoin newbie here. How do we know that's him?

We know that the very first bitcoins in the blockchain are "his", and IIRC some other coins have been tracked as "his" based on being in the same wallet or wallets. There are a number of articles on this over the past years.

I say, "his", since we don't know who the creator is, could be a group of people, might not be a man.

> We know that the very first bitcoins in the blockchain are "his",

Technically, we do not know that, we can only assume it.

There is no evidence that the person or persons known as Satoshi have ever mined coins on the mainnet.

What's the possibility someone brute forced his private key?

Roughly 0.

Highly unlikely.

Bitcoin private keys are 256bit ECDSA keys. The largest key (publically broken) of this type is ~114bit PS3 hardware key which took 17 months on ~2600 systems.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_cryptography#Ke...

Is this lack of anonymity a feature of Bitcoin?

It's a consequence of the fact that the general ledger (aka the blockchain) is public information. It has to be, otherwise the system would not work; what I mean is that you cannot design a crypto currency whose ledger is not public information.

It depends on what you mean by "cryptocurrency". None of the Chaum-based Digital Cash system designs of the 80s and 90s featured a public ledger, but they weren't decentralized. The public ledger was an innovation of Bitcoin (as far as I know, even Szabo's property title system didn't propose to make the ledger actually public), and many people at the time felt that it was a bad idea, since it gave up anonymity.

It seems plausible that fully homomorphic encryption will eventually enable a practical and fully anonymous cryptocurrency, but nobody has figured out how yet. Also, even without FHE, maybe someone will figure out how to make a Bitcoin-style public-ledger system that somehow uses Chaumian blinded keys instead of ditching anonymity entirely.

Um... I stand corrected. Thanks !

Look at Zerocoin / Zerocash

> It has to be, otherwise the system would not work; what I mean is that you cannot design a crypto currency whose ledger is not public information.

I specifically addressed this misunderstanding in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twynh6xIKUcat 38:48 while explaining this work: https://people.xiph.org/~greg/confidential_values.txt

You can think of it this way: When you sign a message you prove knoweldge of a private key (discrete log of a particular public key). Everyone can verify the signature, and yet they do not learn anything about the private key they didn't know before seeing the signature.

There is no conflict between verifyability and privacy.

Yes, actually. Bitcoin is widely mis-reported as anonymous when the reality is that every bitcoin transaction ever made is publicly and permanently recorded in the distributed ledger. That's how anyone and everyone can verify that the ledger is legit. These transactions are associated with wallet ID numbers, not names. And, anyone can create a fresh, unassociated, empty wallet at any time. But, it's not hard to follow the money and infer who is doing what. Thus, the technical description is that Bitcoin isn't anonymous, it's pseudonymous.

...every bitcoin transaction ever made is publicly and permanently recorded in the distributed ledger...

Does this ledger ever get rolled up? I thought something like that was part of the system. Otherwise you'd have an ever growing transaction log and the system would fail eventually, wouldn't it?

Yes and no.

Since pruning support was added, a full node no longer needs to have the full blockchain. In situations where storage is limited, you simply need enough for verifying new blocks.

Many nodes will still keep the full transaction history, though there is no requirement to for bitcoin to function. As long as there is interest in looking at old transactions, people will hold on to that old data.

Don't you have to download the full blockchain when you bootstap a new node, to verify all the transactions? After you verify that a transaction has been spent, you can prune it from your local copy. But someone still has to keep all the old transactions around for new nodes to download, right?

In theory, in the future the blockchain status can be compressed to just the "UTXO set" (unspent transaction outputs) with a Zero-knowledge proof of correctness. That would be a form of maximal trust free pruning.

What would the value be in USD?

According to Google - $14,281.50

The point isn't that those 50 Bitcoins are worth $14k, it's that he owns up to a million of them, and nobody is sure who he is or whether he still had control of those coins. This seems to prove that he does, unless blockchain.info is wrong.

> it's that he owns up to a million of them

We have no evidence that that is true, however it is widely speculated and believed to be so.

The speculation for that particular number is trivially falsified: It's based on assumption that all unmoved coins in the first year were mined by the system's creator (no justification is provided for this assumption).

And it is false, many other people mined during that time and lost keys (myself included).

i think, it is 50 BTC, roughly 14229 US Dollar

Someone kindly explain what's going on please?!

The anonymous inventor of bitcoin had a 50 bitcoin put into the first address in the blockchain. It's never been moved (because you can see when bitcoins get moved) but today he moved 50 bitcoin out of the account. We're not totally sure if it's him though, it could have been a bug or a malicious transaction.

I'd suggest you delete this post. It's a false alarm.

This is really exciting!

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

What is Google?

What is Atlas Shrugged?

(I know, I just wish I didn't)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com