The Last Days of Satoshi: What Happened When Bitcoin’s Creator Disappeared

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/what-happened-when-bitcoin-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-disappeared

by syck • 5 years ago

18 6 5 years ago

soared• 5 years ago

This is a very long read but incredibly interesting. I'm only mildly in to crypo, but I had no idea there were old forums I could read through.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=823.0

In that thread they identify an integer overflow attack, and satoshi troubleshoots it, writes a fix, and releases it. They talk about how to get miners onto the right chain and affects it will have on difficulty and missing BTC. August 2010!

leoh• 5 years ago

Wild -- the forum must have his IP address, no?

esdf• 5 years ago

I’m more interested in the original registrar (and ICANN?) of bitcoin.org having a name and payment that likely links directly to Satoshi. I would be amazed if nobody / nogovernment has looked at that information.

ChainOfFools• 5 years ago

as would his original email provider, GMX. and a few other entities, like his ISP. it's not as if he was posting from within TOR or something.

but efforts to inquire about this information have been harshly discouraged (or more often, just sent to dev/null) by anyone close to such sources.

plus years of time elapsed between bitcoin-the-obscure-niche-project and bitcoin-the-global-progressive-lotto-jackpot, and logs etc may have been flushed before anyone recognized the significance of what they would reveal.

20 years from now, digital archeologists trying to piece together the real origin story of bitcoin will have their work cut out for them.

theshadowknows• 5 years ago

Bitcoin and other crypto/alt currencies are so interesting to me. Partly because I do not understand them:

If I mow your lawn and you pay me in the locally accepted fiat then I can use that fiat to buy hotdogs and fuel for my lawn mower because the gas station itself will accept that fiat.

The gas station will accept that fiat because its vendors, creditors, and employees also accept it. And the chain goes on.

If however I mow your lawn and you pay me in bitcoin I'll need to find a gas station that accepts it. Many likely exist. But, how many of their vendors, creditors, and employees also accept it? Some, no doubt, but I'd wager not all would.

So, even though these currencies no doubt represent massive potential they're still somewhat limited in terms of adoption. Obviously this is becoming less true over time which I think is a good thing - competition isn't something fiat currencies tend to have to deal with, but they sure could use it.

My real misunderstanding is 'why' people accept these currencies in the first place. In other words - people accept a United States dollar because it is worth one United States dollar. However, it seems that most people accept bitcoin (or bitcoin fragments) not because they are worth some percentage of bitcoin but exactly because they are worth some amount of United States dollars. Is that true? Is the primary reason that bitcoin has become more popular that an investor can spend 10,000 fiat on it - wait a year - and then extract 15,000 fiat from it?

morelikeborelax• 5 years ago

When I got into Bitcoin in 2012 seeing "the light" for me was no fee international transfers and a non-traceable way to pay for whatever. There wasn't any wealth investing. Everyone was agreeing it had value and I liked that concept.

I had felt let down by banks and financial institutions after 2008 and this was a new way to do business with people outside that.

It became something else after the end of the 2013 spike to $1k, and then I guess I was aware its use was mostly for illicit activities, but it still has plenty of use cases beyond just increasing in value.

The Last Days of Satoshi: What Happened When Bitcoin’s Creator Disappeared

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