[Recommend my two-volume book for more reading]: BIT & COIN: Merging Digitality and Physicality
Roger Ver, and subsequently, many others, argued that Dr. Craig S. Wright could not be Satoshi because he does not even know that a bitcoin address has a checksum.
A checksum in Bitcoin is a small data piece added to addresses to ensure they are correct. It helps detect typos by comparing a stored hash with a recalculated one, preventing accidental transactions to a wrong addresses. This is a standard and crucial feature for Bitcoin’s security.
The context of this had to do with a discussion of burn addresses of bitcoin. (By way of background, a burn address is a special address where coins are sent to be permanently removed from circulation. It typically has no corresponding private key, making the bitcoins irretrievable. This process, known as “burning,” is often used in Proof of Burn mechanisms for other blockchains or to reduce supply. It is less relevant to Bitcoin compared to cryptocurrencies like Ethereum.)
It was an old thread in 2018. Because the original posts have been deleted, the context is rather obscure.
But based on what I can see, this is what happened:
–Someone promoted an idea of “burn address” for bitcoin, with a purported burn address “1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr”).
–CSW argued that it must be a scam, because if they wanted a real burn address, they could create an address that is verifiably invalid.
Therefore, CSW asserted that the purported burn address is not a real burn address but was fraudulently presented as a burn address. (A real burn address would be verifiably permanently unredeemable. An address purported as a burn address but can be redeemed by the people behind it is, by definition, a fraud.)
It seems that CSW assumed that the “X’s” in the above address are placeholders for random characters rather than literal “X‘s”. Whether CSW’s assumption was factually valid or not, his reasoning after the assumption was valid.
Invalid transaction and invalid address
Someone argues that if an address is an invalid address, then it would certainly be a burn address.
But that depends on what one means by “invalid”.
First of all, “invalid transaction” and “invalid address” are not exactly the same.
Mining nodes are responsible for checking the validity of the transaction, including its scripts, but they do not check the validity of the human-readable output address string; that validation is primarily left to wallet software.
“Invalid Address” and “Invalid Transaction” are distinct Concepts.
An “invalid address” typically refers to a problem with the human-readable Bitcoin address string itself. This could mean it contains incorrect characters for its encoding type (Base58Check for legacy addresses like those starting with “1” or “3”, or Bech32/Bech32m for SegWit addresses like those starting with “bc1”), has an incorrect format, or, most commonly, its checksum fails.
An “invalid transaction,” on the other hand, is a transaction that violates the Bitcoin network’s consensus rules. When a transaction is broadcast, nodes (including miners) will reject it if it’s invalid. Reasons for a transaction being invalid include double-spending, incorrect digital signature, incorrect sum of bitcoins in the outputs and inputs, and invalid scripts.
These two are different because, if a wallet somehow allowed a transaction to be created using a invalid address (bypassing a checksum failure, for example), the resulting transaction would be considered “valid” by the network if the ScriptPubKey created from that mistyped data is syntactically well-formed according to script rules, even if it locks funds to an unrecoverable or unintended condition. The transaction isn’t invalid by network rules, but it’s a problem for the user unless that is exactly what the user intends.
Miners Do Not Validate the “Output Address” String; Wallets Do.
The human-readable Bitcoin address string (with its checksum) is not part of the actual transaction data that is broadcast to the network or recorded on the blockchain.
Wallet software is responsible for taking that human-readable address, first validating its format and checksum to protect the user from typos.
If the address string is valid, the wallet then converts it into its corresponding ScriptPubKey (the actual locking script). This ScriptPubKey is what gets included in the transaction output.
Miners and other nodes receive the transaction containing this ScriptPubKey. They validate this script, but they have no knowledge of, and therefore do not validate, the original human-readable address string or its checksum. Their concern is solely with the validity and integrity of the transaction data and scripts as presented to them.
In essence, wallets act as a crucial user-facing layer of protection by validating address strings, while miners and the broader network of full nodes act as the enforcers of the protocol’s integrity by validating the actual transaction data and its embedded scripts.
Unspendable-to and unspendable-from addresses
Uspendable-to address: If an address inherently makes any transactions output to the address invalid according to the mandatory rules of the validity check by the mining nodes, one might claim that address is inherently unspendable-to (note this is different from unspendable-from), because any transaction associated with that address would be rejected by the mining nodes, and you really cannot send coins to that address.
But the problem is, how do you know that an address would inherently have that characteristic, given that mining nodes don’t check for the “existence” of an actual public key associated with the output address when that output is being created?
The answer is that you just don’t.
Unspendable-from address: An address that is inherently unspendable-from, if it exists, would be a genuine burn address. This is the opposite of an unspendable-to address.
Burn address
But a purported burn address can be fake. There are addresses that might seem “invalid,” but are not. If the address passes the sender’s wallet, and the transaction associated with that address passes the validation of the mining nodes, you may not really be so sure the coins sent to the address are indeed unredeemable.
For example, an address that has a wrong checksum can pass the validation by mining nodes, who don’t validate the checksum in an address but leave that to user wallets. A transaction sent to such an address may be stopped by a standard wallet, but one just cannot be so sure that the senders are not using a nonstandard wallet (especially when senders are lured to participate in some kind of scheme, not knowing they’ve been tricked).
An address that is inherently unspendable-from, if it exists, is a genuine burn address.
But again, how does the public, particularly the senders, know for sure that an address is inherently unspendable-from, namely, unredeemable by its owner?
One sure case is a scenario where the owner of an address can provide mathematical proof that he does not have a valid private key for the address. But the question is, how does one provide such mathematical proof?
Well, that’s what CSW has done in his example.
In contrast to the potentially fake burn addresses, the address “1CounterpartyoThisIsAlsoAoBurnoAddr” given by CSW is a very strong valid burn address.
This is because, for that address to be redeemable, its owner would have to compute almost every one of the 35 characters (because they are not random) in the address to find out a valid private key that corresponds to a public key, which, in turn, matches that particular address.
Note that the above example given by CSW is not a practical vanity address. To understand why, realize that computing a vanity address that has 35 targeted nonrandom characters is not three times harder than computing a vanity address that has 12 targeted characters. Using Base58, it is (58)^23 harder, which is so close to infinite that it would be beyond practicality to compute.
In other words, with an address given by CSW, you are practically sure that its owner does not have a valid private key. You only need to trust the math. In contrast, in the purported burn address, you just don’t know. You have to trust the owner.
If Roger Ver used that thread as “evidence” that CSW did not know that Bitcoin had a checksum, then I really agree with @EquityDiamonds’ conclusion that Roger is either a fraud or wasn’t knowledgeable.
There are too many ridiculous examples of accusations against CSW. The checksum event was only one of them. It takes more than a team of psychologists, along with the help of Bitcoin historians and real Bitcoin experts (and must be the honest ones) to explain why and how all this has happened, and continues to happen.
Yes, I do mean “psychologists,” not only because of the subconscious motivation behind the Cult of Satoshi, which has grown to such an idolatrous level that it preemptively and absolutely denies the real person behind Satoshi (or any real human being for being Satoshi for that matter), but also because the whole behavior pattern is deeply driven by greed, and masked by clever schemes.
[Recommend my two-volume book for more reading]: BIT & COIN: Merging Digitality and Physicality
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