Validating Satoshi (Or Not)

https://dankaminsky.com/2016/05/02/validating-satoshi-or-not/

by chermanowicz • 10 years ago

116 81 10 years ago

blowski20• 10 years ago

Seems to me like there are two possible scenarios here:

1. Craig Wright is telling the truth, but has released a bad proof to misdirect everyone into believing he is not Satoshi. Maybe he's just having a laugh.

2. Craig Wright is lying.

Even if he's not Satoshi, he seems smart enough to know he wouldn't get away with releasing shoddy proofs. Perhaps he thought the mainstream media would say "Craig Wright invented Bitcoin" and anyone that disagreed would be called a conspiracy nut.

Perhaps this was a kind of pump-and-dump where he expected the price to change significantly and make a killing out of doing it. He doesn't care what people think of him if he's just made $20 million. Could it have anything to do with his ongoing legal troubles with the tax authorities in Australia?

At this stage, I'm seeing plenty of people saying "Here's why Craig Wright isn't Satoshi" and that's interesting and useful. But I haven't seen anyone establish why Craig Wright would be lying.

Also, it's interesting that "The Real Satoshi" has not posted something saying he's not Craig Wright, as we have seen with previous "exposés".

acqq6• 10 years ago

I haven't seen anyone establish why Craig Wright would be lying.

If you don't understand, I'm actually in possession of 400 million dollars bound to a trust, not available to me until 2020, but if you send me your bank details and help me in current affairs I promise I'll compensate you with the 10 percent of the whole sum.

I'm also famous, maybe they'll even get me a Nobel prize, I'm playing I'm hard to get, anyway, and you can be too if you confirm that I proved to you too I'm the one who I claim to be. Think about it, there will be even a Hollywood movie about us. For the start, see I've already agreed for more exclusives.

And oh, I can help your case for introducing bigger blocks to Bitcoin. There's going to be this nice conference in NY where you can present your argument exactly on the first day of my "big announcement."

blowski20• 10 years ago

Yeah I get the generalities of "so he can be rich". What can he do with the reputation of "the guy who claimed to be Satoshi"? He's smart enough to know people wouldn't have believed him with the proof he's released.

throwaway7767• 10 years ago

Also, it's interesting that "The Real Satoshi" has not posted something saying he's not Craig Wright, as we have seen with previous "exposés".

AFAIK that's only happened once, in the Dorian case. In that case, the media and papparazzos were hounding a frail old man who was clearly very uncomfortable with the whole thing.

Craig Wright seems to just love being in the spotlight. So there's no reason to deny the claims for empathic reasons. It would suck for the real Satoshi to create an expectation that he'll have to individually refute all these claims, I imagine he has other things to do.

blowski20• 10 years ago

This is the post I was referring to:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/10/bitcoin-c...

Again, no proof that the real Satoshi posted this (as mentioned in the article) so I realise we're dealing with many layers of hypotheticals.

4ad• 10 years ago

Also, it's interesting that "The Real Satoshi" has not posted something saying he's not Craig Wright, as we have seen with previous "exposés".

Perhaps Wright is gambling that Satoshi is dead (for whatever reason, foul play or not). The purpose of his previous (original) Satoshi scam was to ascertain that nobody has access to Satoshi's private keys.

Wright can't get Satoshi's bitcoins, but presumably if people think he is Satoshi, this would help him with his other tax evasion scams he seems to be involved in. Perhaps it doesn't even matter if the tech community immediately realised that he is lying, all he needs is some reasonable belief in the other laypeople he is scamming.

Gavin might have been bought, or Gavin knows that Satoshi is dead, and Wright threatened Gavin, pretending he was the one who killed Satoshi.

blowski20• 10 years ago

That's an interesting take, and I guess with the kind of money at stake here, it's not unrealistic.

celticninja• 10 years ago

The other satoshi was outed against his will and had to prove a negative ie that he was not SN. The real SN helped out. This claim was of being the real SN which can be proved so the real SN did not need to get involved.

jolux2• 10 years ago

what exactly is the evidence for number 1? occam's razor seems to suggest it's false. it doesn't make any sense why he would double cross us. he clearly doesn't care that we know he's satoshi if 1 is true.

blowski20• 10 years ago

For me at least, it doesn't make any sense that Satoshi wouldn't reveal his own identity in the first place. Almost nothing about this story makes sense, and we have to deal with a lot of conjecture and misinformation. For someone as dumb as me when it comes to Bitcoin and blockchain technology, it's hard to tell fact from unfounded assertion in just about every post I read.

ebbv• 10 years ago

There's a third possibility not many seem to want to consider; he's telling the truth and it turns out the real Satoshi isn't the benevolent genius everyone imagined him to be. He's a fuck up con man.

blowski20• 10 years ago

I totally agree with you. The community doesn't want to believe there's even the possibility that Bitcoin was invented by a scammer, because by implication, it would mean we were scammed. It could just be this is the tech community's version of crop circles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_circle) or tree fairies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies). Very smart people fell for those hoaxes at the time, and put a lot of effort into explaining why it wasn't a hoax - even when the original hoaxers revealed themselves.

Perhaps Wright paid somebody to develop the Blockchain technology. Perhaps he developed it himself and then lost the original key, assuming the project was worth nothing. Perhaps he was one of a group of people, and that group has now decided to nominate him as the frontman for the technology, perceiving that the whole Satoshi thing is holding back its development.

bambax• 10 years ago

Yes. From the article:

3. He probably would have gotten away with it if the signature itself wasn’t googlable by Redditors.

Did he think this wouldn't happen? He got the hash in some way, did he think nobody else would be able to find it?

He looks like a conman, but a clever one; this is very weak so far... except if there is another move in the works that we don't know yet.

twoodfin• 10 years ago

I think it probably serves his interests pretty well to have his name plastered all over the Google results for "Satoshi Nakamoto" and vice versa.

Hell, right now he's the only person in any of the page title results for q=bitcoin.

He presumably doesn't care about scamming the inner circle of Bitcoin, but does care about building up the façade of a reputation in order to scam other people.

blowski20• 10 years ago

except if there is another move in the works that we don't know yet

Exactly. He has promised to release more evidence, and for all we know, by this time next week there will be incontrovertible evidence that he is Satoshi beyond all reasonable doubt.

Maybe he's releasing the evidence in a trickle because he's loving the attention, and he has some PR team advising him this is the best way to get it. Maybe he's doing it because he doesn't give a f* and enjoys reading about how "he's not the real Satoshi" and then he says "here you go, it's me". Of course, maybe he's not the real Satoshi.

ryan-c• 10 years ago

FWIW, it is possible to make the signature ungoogleable. I posted an example on twitter: https://twitter.com/ryancdotorg/status/727302056432672768

I think, however, that this would have given him at most an additional 48 hours before discovery.

gtrubetskoy• 10 years ago

This cannot be proven, but I am inclined to think that "Satoshi" was a team of people, a covert (and now defunct) project of some sort, NSA or whatever. So far the way Satoshi has acted would conform to that.

eternalban• 10 years ago

My money is scenario 3: There never was a Satoshi. BC is a product of a state actor.

tcoppi3• 10 years ago

Not that I think Craig Wright has presented any evidence that he is Satoshi, but if the anonymous creator of Truecrypt can be an international drug lord and weapons dealer, why can't the anonymous creator of a cryptocurrency be a serial fraud and tax evader?

manuelflara• 10 years ago

Well, when people say Craig Wright is a fraud they mean "he's not the real Satoshi". So obviously, he can't be a fraud in this context and also be the creator of Bitcoin. People really aren't caring at all wether he's been evading taxes or not, as that's something for the Australian government to worry about.

tcoppi3• 10 years ago

I meant a fraud more in the sense of the fake doctorates and his specious resume.

splintercell• 10 years ago

In fact having committed fraud and evaded Tax would make you more qualified to be Satoshi.

jjuel• 10 years ago

Turns out a tax evader is a fraud. That is a conman. So it does actually turn out to be relevant here. If he lies about other things (taxes, degrees, etc.) why wouldn't he lie about this? If someone was really blackmailing him to come out because he is the real Satoshi (as he said in the BBC video) then wouldn't they want him to show true undeniable proof?

wcummings• 10 years ago

If anything, being a tax evader makes him more likely to be Satoshi, in my mind.

curun1r• 10 years ago

Yes, especially if he's been accused of being Satoshi previously and doesn't want the world to know that. What better way for the real Satoshi to throw people off his trail than to claim to be Satoshi and offer up proof that you know will eventually be debunked?

If your goal is to eventually start spending the large quantity of initially-mined Bitcoins, it seems like the first step would be to ensure that they're never traced back to you, especially if you don't want to pay taxes on the proceeds. And getting crossed off the list of potential Satoshis is a good first step.

gothenburg• 10 years ago

It's not about that. Paul Le Roux never claimed to be the creator of TrueCrypt, what we have are clues that connect him to working on E4M, then working on SecurStar, porting encryption algorithms from SecurStar to E4M and getting fired due to that. And then a project named TrueCrypt and claiming to be based on E4M started to surface.

I am not expecting Le Roux to be the true creator of TrueCrypt but this seems to be a pretty solid link between Le Roux and TrueCrypt.

Now about Wright, he can't even write a proper blog post with proper working scripts about cryptography...

tcoppi3• 10 years ago

As already stated I don't believe Wright's claims at all, and I find the whole thing pretty silly as we already have quite a few viable candidates/teams for Satoshi in the public record. I simply stated an interesting observation linking two related technologies and circumstances surrounding them :)

r7213• 10 years ago

Can somebody explain to me, what is this?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/03/bitcoin_craig_wright...

Is it satire or real Craig Wright?

spenczar5• 10 years ago

This is satire.

r7213• 10 years ago

I thought so, but there's even author page: http://www.theregister.co.uk/Author/3144 , and no indication anywhere - looks like defamation case then :)

jere• 10 years ago

If the convoluted hilarious title didn't give it away then the 1991 quote (given by Churchill) here attributed to Albert Einstein (who died in 1955) should do it.

r7213• 10 years ago

Yeah, probably I didn't notice subtleties at first (because I'm not a native speaker), but still satire is usually published at designated places. Imagine finding a ridiculous column under your own name on TechCrunch in Security section.

tibbon• 10 years ago

If the person known as Satoshi wanted to verify their identity, couldn't they simply agree to create a transaction on the Blockchain from some BTC directly from the first few blocks (https://blockchain.info/block/000000006a625f06636b8bb6ac7b96...)?

gort• 10 years ago

I'm no crypto guy, but what's all this about different versions of OpenSSL succeeding or failing to validate a signature? That sounds like it should be interesting in its own right...

acqq6• 10 years ago

The bash command line given by Wright had a bug (or an intentional error, e.g. to slow down the verification attempts, or confuse o whatever) (& instead of &&). Kaminsky missed to recognize that.

Validating Satoshi (Or Not)

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