Adam Back recently took to Twitter with controversial comments on many of the industry’s largest crypto projects — including Ethereum (ETH), Cardano (ADA), Ripple (XRP), and Stellar (XML). His tweets placed these projects in the same category as a number of bonafide scams, which he considers to have been orchestrated as “premines”. We interviewed Back in order to clarify his position on the matter, starting with questions of how he feels about Satoshi Nakamoto essentially premining over one million Bitcoin. Back responded that “Bitcoin has no premine”, adding that he considers Patoshi research to be “highly speculative”. However, he agreed …

A recent report by blockchain tracking and analytics provider, Whale Alert, revealed that the miner known as Patoshi mined over $10.9 billion or 1,125,150 BTC during Bitcoin’s infancy in order to protect the network from a 51% attack. Patoshi has been confirmed to be the anonymous Bitcoin creator known as Satoshi and the early blocks mined by Patoshi also include the first BTC transaction to Hall Finney, a well known developer and early Bitcoin contributor. Whale Alert was able to come to this conclusion by reviewing previous research conducted by independent researcher and cryptographer Sergio Lerner. Lerner coined the term …

According to Marshall Hayner, an early Bitcoin (BTC) adopter, Adam Back had a beer with Satoshi Nakamoto in London. “Yeah, I met him once” Metal Pay CEO Marshall Hayner told Cointelegraph a story he heard from Back at a party in Los Gatos some years ago. The party was thrown to celebrate the formation of Blockstream and its successful capital raise. Hayner said that he was invited to the party by Austin Hill, who was Blockstream’s CEO at the time. The community was small and closely knit, with only a select few people in attendance. Allegedly, after a few drinks, …

Tatsuaki Okamoto explains why his “electronic cash” patent might have presented an obstacle to Hal Finney in his ambition to create his own electronic currency. Six key patents Sometime before Dec. 6, 2004, Hal Finney did a search in a patent database on “blind-signature based cash systems”. On his site he posted a list of six such patents: “This might be useful for those considering implementing electronic cash.” Four of the patents are authored by David Chaum, the other two by Okamoto and his colleague at Nippon Telegraph Kazuo Ohta. Ecash patents by Dr. Okamoto & his Nippon Telegraph colleague …

One of the world’s top cryptographers believes that Satoshi Nakamoto chose Bitcoin’s (BTC) elliptic curve either for its efficiency or because it may offer a secret backdoor. Elliptic curve is worth billions A Bitcoin public key is created by applying elliptic-curve cryptography to the private key. One can easily create a public key from the private key, but it is impossible to go in the reverse direction. Unless, of course, Bitcoin’s elliptic curve is compromised. Many crypto experts have noticed that Bitcoin’s choice of secp256k1 elliptic curve was unusual for its time, as it was not yet well researched. Cointelegraph …

Sergio Demian Lerner, a researcher known for his work on the mining patterns of the original Bitcoin (BTC) miner whom he identified as "Patoshi," published a new blog post in which he discusses his new observations. This time, Lerner focused on the Bitcoin block timestamps. Apparently, Satoshi (we’ll be referring to the original miner as Satoshi) barely mined a block in the first five minutes. This cannot be random, as the probability of a miner finding a solution to the hash puzzle in the first five minutes is 0.39. The probability of a dominant miner such as Satoshi trying to …

The deposition of Gavin Andresen in the Kleiman v. Wright case unveils numerous new details about Craig Wright’s efforts to prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto. The deposition included questions about the proof session during which Wright allegedly signed a message with a private key from an early Bitcoin block. The deposition took place on February 26 and 27 2020. Though Kleiman’s attorney, Velvel Freedman, presented Andresen with dozens of questions, Andresen had little to share about his own diligence in authenticating Wright’s claims. We have grouped questions and responses by topic to make them more coherent. Didn’t talk about Satoshi …

The recently released deposition of Gavin Andresen in the case of Kleiman v. Wright sheds new light on the personalities of Craig Wright, Satoshi Nakamoto, and not least of all, Andresen himself. Craig Wright called himself a fraud In an email to Andresen, Wright apparently admitted to being a fraudster: "I am a fraud, but I am a fraud that is free to work on what I need to do." Perhaps this admission (now in public domain) will make further lawsuits more challenging for Wright. Andresen may have had an early hint about BSV In a 2016 email to Andresen, …

Blockstream CSO Samson Mow explored a variety of topics in his latest interview on Cointelegraph’s YouTube channel. Watch the full interview above and be sure to subscribe to the channel for more weekly crypto content! Blockchain in Gaming Mow is not only the chief strategy officer at Blockstream, but also the founder and CEO of game development company Pixelmatic. He created the company after working for two years as a Director of Production for Ubisoft in China. His interest in gaming economies stems from his experience playing Lineage 2. He recalls that he and a friend ran a gold farming …

Recently released depositions suggest that Gavin Andresen now has doubts that Craig Wright is Bitcoin creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. The depositions, which are connected to Wright’s case against the estate of his alleged business partner, David Kleiman, show that Andresen was asked if he still believed that Wright is Satoshi. Andresen said he did initially believe Wright to be the creator of Bitcoin — or at least one-third of a group calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto — but later on felt that he had been, in his words, bamboozled. Andresen said: “There are places in the private proving session where I could …

Former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles insists that the 80,000 Bitcoin (BTC) that Craig Wright lays claim to was stolen from the exchange in March 2011. Cryptocurrency experts side with Karpeles. Bitcoins were stolen Karpeles confirmed to Cointelegraph that the Bitcoin residing at 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF was stolen from Mt. Gox: “I confirm, this was confirmed in 2011 and records are also part of court documents available publicly.” Also, speculating about Wright’s motivation in this turn of events in the Tulip Trust saga, Karpeles opined that nChain’s chief scientist is just trying to put forward some “evidence” of his status: “To be …

Waves Enterprise has created a framework for load testing of blockchain networks under real-life scenarios in order to provide greater transparency for potential clients. Original sin Transactional capacity or lack thereof has been a hotly contested discussion in the industry almost from the beginning. The first known response to Satoshi Nakamoto announcing Bitcoin (BTC) was on exactly this topic: “We very, very much need such a system, but the way I understand your proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size.” A lot has changed since then. Many alternative consensus protocols have been developed, hundreds of public …