Cryptography Mailing List

I always found it interesting to read the initial announcement and follow up emails on the Cryptography Mailing List by Satoshi in 2009.

Hal Finney responds relatively quickly to Satoshi’s email, whilst the rest of the mailing list is embroiled in a hash algorithm discussion (TLS/MD5/SHA1/SHA256).

Finney goes into some detail suggesting to me that he already knew beforehand what Bitcoin was about and how it could work and change the world. Of course parts of Bitcoin were based on his RPOW paper as well as building on much of the developments in digital cash up to then.

Much of the feedback was negative (without it seems testing it) and based on the concept of digital cash in general and POW. Ironically it was also pointed out by another member that Bitcoin’s proof of work would require a lot of energy and have negative effects on the environment if successful. But most of the discussion and pro-side was promoted by both Finney and Satoshi. It almost seems “sock-puppet-esque”, or at a minimum Finney was already invested in the idea.

https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January.txt

From the same thread (Peter Gutmann, Fri Feb 24 00:42:36 EST 2017):

"After sitting through an endless flood of headless-chicken messages on multiple media about SHA-1 being fatally broken, I thought I'd do a quick writeup about what this actually means. In short:

Reports of SHA-1's demise are considerably exaggerated.

What CWI/Google have done is confirmed what we've known for a long time, that SHA-1 is shaky. Using a nation-state's worth of resources and a year of time (https://security.googleblog.com/2017/02/announcing-first-sha1-collision.html), they've shown that, with a very carefully-crafted document, you can create a collision. Their presentation of the results is detailed and accurate, it's the panicked misinterpretation of those results that are the problem."

Continues here:
http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2017-February/031604.html

[edit: typo]

I remember Peter Gutmann posting about this on the metzdowd cryptography mailing list in March. Fun to see this a few months later.

It starts here: https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2025-February/038625.html

This part is from farther down thread:

"Just as a thought experiment, what's the most gutless device that could perform this "factorisation"? There's an isqrt() implementation that uses three temporaries so you could possibly do the square root part on a ZX81, but with 1k of RAM I don't think you can do the verification of the guess unless you can maybe swap the values out to tape and load new code for the multiply part. A VIC20 with 4k RAM should be able to do it... is there a programmable calculator that does arbitrary-precision maths? A quick google just turns up a lot of apps that do it but not much on physical devices.

Peter."

>This article is terrible honestly. Statements like "tracing a cryptocurrency that once seemed untraceable". Excuse me what? Who thought this? Idiots at three letter agencies? Pedophiles and drug dealers?

There's often a disconnect on HN between what HN users collectively know by virtue of this being their field of trade, and what the average non-tech person is aware of. It's this latter group of people that, by and large, as Bitcoin started to become popular, were under the impression that it was anonymous.

Edit: It doesn't help that, as the article states, Satoshi even said, "Participants can be anonymous," back in 2008[1]. To your point, he did say this as he linked to the white paper you mentioned, but average users are less likely to read the white paper than we are.

[1]https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October/014810.html

NTRU Prime was written by Dan Bernstein, who also had a strong hand in the creation of ed25519 elliptic curve keys, and the chacha20-poly1305 AEAD cipher.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37520065

https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2016-March/028824.html

The first version of NTRU Prime in an SSH server was implemented in TinySSH and later adopted by OpenSSH. Bernstein provided new guidance, and OpenSSH developed an updated algorithm that TinySSH implemented in return.

The NIST approval process was fraught, and Bernstein ended up filing a lawsuit over treatment that he received. I don't know how that has progressed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32360533

While Kyber may have been the winning algorithm, there will be great preference in the community for Bernstein's NTRU Prime.

I’ve been noticing this sort of comment a lot in discussions of cryptocurrencies.

Take for instance the following response to the Ray Dillinger’s email:

Internet also became a disaster.
We're very far from original ideas: Uncensored, decentralized ideals are forgotten.

I remember, in the beginning, governments were really afraid of people's reactions, even to make small regulations. Today, we don't even discuss before accepting any regulation about Internet. Infrastructure is almost completely controlled/owned by governments or cartels. [1]

That is so far beyond reality that it’s hard to believe this person was there “at the beginning”. The Internet, after all, started as a DARPA project...

1. https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2020-December/036515.html