These questions are pointless if you have a brain and consider the following:
1) If he is Satoshi, he will deny it.
2) If he isn't Satoshi, he will deny it.

What is the point of such article? To waste time? To get agencies to investigate Maxwell?

We haven't even gotten to the fun stuff yet.

...which may include disinformation.

I went back through my notes (i didn't forget the milk), I've been sitting on this material since November then Craig distracted me from this brucey Mosaic (very capitalization of that last word   ). Subsequent to Craig and what I found prior to his emergence, I wrote about Peter Todd, Transit, David Birch, Nullc and a few others. The transit article is likely one of the most important clues as that transit network is very similar to the bitcon network laid out in the white paper (note: you have to buy the article if you don't have access another way, but maybe nullc still has it - or maybe Andreas S or Mssrs. Birch and Chaum have copies to share).  I've written about Zooko concurrently with all of the other folks mentioned above - I keep coming back to him for some reason (he worked with both Chaum and Wei Dai at various points I believe). Ultimately, I'll need to get grave markers for my dead theories one day. Was that another clue?  

There's something really spooky about this for some reason.

There's something really spooky about this for some reason.

>not even sure this puzzle is more than a fancy hunt the Wumpus game.
This would make a great epitaph

rusty
kanzure: oops... yeah, two conversations at once, that got smerged. s/bitcoin/bitlength/. I guess you can still extend if that's valid data, though.
9:23 pm bsm117532
kanzure I thought this was exactly why satoshi used *double* sha256?
9:34 pm zooko
rusty: that's "Merkle-Damgård strengthening" and it's not good enough to prevent length-extension attacks.
9:46 pm rusty
zooko: you mean you can extend after the bitlength, right? I guess you'd need to prepend the length to make this work, and that has other issues.
9:49 pm
bsm117532: I've heard that theory before, but don't understand it. Perhaps there was a concern that some future partial weakness in SHA could deconstruct the hash enough to weaken the PoW?
9:50 pm katu_
i can't readily imagine how. all you can do with le is append, which helps you add data to a commitment (typically secret in hmac-like construct)
9:50 pm
theres nothing of the sorts in bitcoin afaik
9:52 pm Taek
from what I've gathered, Satoshi was not an amazing cryptographer, he may have done that out of paranoia
9:55 pm katu_
well, his prudence did pay off, especially in relation to SAT mining
9:56 pm zooko
Satoshi probably got it from Ferguson and Schneier's book "Practical Cryptography" "Cryptography Engineering".
9:56 pm katu_
(ie simple means to double the number of rounds, without inventing non-standard hash function)
9:56 pm zooko
We also used that construction, which F&S named "SHA256d", in Tahoe-LAFS.