Hal Finney Was Not Satoshi Nakamoto

https://blog.lopp.net/hal-finney-was-not-satoshi-nakamoto/

by greyface- • 3 years ago

113 172 3 years ago

blog.lopp.net

tempmac• 3 years ago

what happens if wallet from satoshi is stolen and poured into the market for quick bucks?

what happens if "satoshi" gets desperate for quick cash?

idk this seems to be a major financial risk for bitcoiners, not altruism...

maipen2• 3 years ago

It's been more than 10 years since there was activity. The market would crash but eventualy recover. There's really nothing dramatic about it.

monsieurbanana• 3 years ago

Even if you were right on both of your points it still would be dramatic. Behind every marker crash there's people's lives changing forever.

sschueller• 3 years ago

Yes, all those known wallets should be burned if anyone really cared about the stability of bitcoin. Others aka "shit coins" do not have this massive amount of cash that could all of a sudden be spent causing a huge crash.

Although very unlikely that anyone will ever crack those keys it is possible that the keys are found by someone or Satoshi himself spends it.

The bitcoin core maximalists should focus on fixing their block including moving to PoS instead of pissing on all other coins constantly.

toenail11• 3 years ago

fixing their block including moving to PoS

POW fixed a problem POS does not solve, it is an entirely decentralized, trustless system. It is not possible to move to POS, the only coins who can do that are coins that are not decentralized and trustless to begin with.

Cthulhu_• 3 years ago

If it's "poured" into the market, the value will crash so whoever's trying to sell them won't make as much money. That said, at this point, any activity in that wallet will cause a huge stir in the community.

That said, there's probably a nontrivial amount of processing power currently being used to crack that wallet / find the secret key.

A theory is that Satoshi themselves lost access to their own wallet, so if there is activity, it may mean someone got the private key.

Anyway yeah, it is a huge risk, and it's proven by the billions scammed from people when new coins were created and the creators themselves held onto a lot of the coins themselves to sell when the hype cycle is trending upwards.

yieldcrv4• 3 years ago

lots of bitcoin from large old blocks have moved before, it is news within the crypto space and pretty fun drama. bitcoin from blocks from when satoshi was mining have moved before, and people start rumors that this exact thing is occurring and turned out not to be a satoshi block.

price dips have happened over these movements. the rumor mill is pretty cyclical. the price dips have had less and less magnitude over the years, as there are so many computing bullish and bearish forces in bitcoin now. headlines today that move bitcoin up 1% would have crashed bitcoin 35% a decade ago.

bitcoin has a lot more liquidity now, or in some periods of time has a lot more liquidity than now. a large sell can be absorbed. people's confidence in the bitcoin concept doesn't really shake just because someone selling ... runs out of things to sell.

many large bitcoin holders don't want govbucks, or state currency. they can do so much with their bitcoin, mostly earning yield by depositing it into something yield producing in the crypto economy, investing in other projects, supporting causes they believe in. it isn't important to them if a team or merchants gets govbucks somewhere down the line or immediately.

toenail11• 3 years ago

https://evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c8...

api2• 3 years ago

It’s obviously someone or a small group in this circle. Continuing to keep a low profile makes a lot of sense given all the negativity surrounding Bitcoin and the criminal figures that might come looking for Satoshi’s keys.

What if Len forgot, when he took his own life, that he was the only one with the private key to the Satoshi wallet? Even if he wasn’t the only or even primary author that could explain that wallet being dead.

bloopernova• 3 years ago

What a fascinating and in-depth article, thank you for linking to it.

mersenne• 3 years ago

To me, Len Sassaman is the best Satoshi Nakamoto that we know of.

tromp3• 3 years ago

Who, we ask, is so altruistic as to create a new monetary system but not use it to enrich themselves?

Bitcoin's supply schedule, in which half of all Bitcoin is mined in the first four years, guaranteed a Bitcoin wealth concentration on the early miners, especially considering how few there were. At long intervals, Satoshi would be the only one, mining on his laptop.

A truly altruistic system would not confer such a huge advantage on early miners, for example by fixing the block reward. Then each generation would be able to mine the same amount of bitcoin, instead of each next generation getting 32x less than the current one. Such a steady supply would also make Bitcoin much less the vehicle for speculation that it has turned into.

Of course, then the supply wouldn't have a finite cap, it would be limited by time only. Still, that would already make it very different from fiat, with the yearly supply inflation rate going down steadily toward 0 (known as being dis-inflationary). Eventually, the supply rate would more or less balance the inevitable coin loss rate [1].

[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...

toenail11• 3 years ago

A truly altruistic system would not confer such a huge advantage on early miners

Bitcoin never claimed to be and is not altruistic. And the same can be said about almost all investments, you need information early, you need to judge the information correctly, and you need to move in. Same with bitcoin.

aniforprez• 3 years ago

GP said nothing about bitcoin claiming to be anything. They're directly quoting the article

gonehome2• 3 years ago

Plus rewarding early miners creative the incentive structure more likely to drive adoption.

infecto3• 3 years ago

Is bitcoin a currency or investment? I would say neither but interesting to see it getting lumped in with investments.

kranke155• 3 years ago

What about kids who weren’t able or had any capital to invest at the time Bitcoin was doing high returns ? They will just be born poor and die poor I suppose ?

Beijinger2• 3 years ago

Who, we ask, is so altruistic as to create a new monetary system but not use it to enrich themselves?

And take the fame. He also, as I mentioned before, may have been a candidate for the Noble prize in economics. https://www.newsbtc.com/news/bitcoin/bitcoin-creator-satoshi....

I take it as a given, he is dead. He would be a candidate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Kleiman

Geee• 3 years ago

Bitcoin needed maximum 'memeability' i.e. the idea had to spread as fast and wide as possible. That is why the 4 year halfing cycle and absolute scarcity was chosen. The 21 million cap is easy to understand and tell your friends about. The possibility of getting rich is the strongest meme.

You really need to get someone rich in order for the meme to spread. This is the only way. People have a natural tendency to not be interested in currencies. Thinking about currencies makes their head ache. It needs to be really rewarding. On the other hand, there was no precedent and it was really risky. Most people were throwing away bitcoin at the start, and they just wanted it to spread.

In Bitcoin the security depends on the price of the currency. If the price doesn't pick up, the network won't be secure enough. It has to be rewarding, it has to spread as an idea, it has to be secure. The more secure it is, the more plausible it is to succeed, and so forth.

Most people don't really understand the disinflationary model as you explained, although I agree that in theory it is better and more elegant way to distribute coins. However, I think that if Bitcoin had chosen this model, it wouldn't have taken off. This model has too high inflation for too long, and the meme and security would have died off.

If the inflation is too high for too long, the meme won't spread, and the price will stay very low or nearly zero. Then a single miner will mine all coins and no one buys them, or only a single rich dude buys them. So in the end the coins won't get distributed as widely / fairly and the project will fail.

I think that Bitcoin succeeded in it's distribution as fairly as possible. I don't think that this can be replicated. It's impossible to create a new cryptocurrency where someone won't scoop them all off cheaply in the start, and that's why the creators typically own most of the coins, which will eventually doom the project. The infinite disinflationary model might be the only way to succeed in distributing a completely new currency, because no one wants to invest in it. But it has to have some other properties in order to spread widely.

fsmv• 3 years ago

I know it sounds bad to shill a coin but someone has made a small modification to the Bitcoin monetary policy to make the block reward proportional to difficulty and created a balanced system where the supply matches the demand to avoid deflation. Maybe you'd like to come chat with us about it on telegram! The website is https://ergon.moe

Hopefully it's not as bad since there's no early adopter advantage and I don't expect to profit at all. I just want peer to peer electronic cash!

latchkey• 3 years ago

@tromp created Grincoin, which was mined and dumped from the start, eventually going to zero.

https://www.reddit.com/r/grincoin/comments/kgsetd/grin_monet...

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/grin/

api2• 3 years ago

The tabs vs spaces thing is pretty conclusive. Really.

fzzzy• 3 years ago

The fact that you say that means that it is a perfect tool for someone with knowledge of operational security and a desire to cover their tracks.

chx• 3 years ago

Remind me why we dropped Paul Le Roux as Satoshi. I thought it fit rather well: he had the motivation, the knowledge and the disappearance of Satoshi also fit.

automatic6131• 3 years ago

Well, if any of Satoshi's wallets move after Paul Le Roux is released in 2045 or so, we'll have a smoking gun ;)

mirzap• 3 years ago

He was arrested in 2012 and sentenced in 2020. If time spent in jail counts, he'll get out much earlier than 2045.

rurban2• 3 years ago

We didn't drop him, we just will not know for a some more decades

sireat• 3 years ago

I asked this question about a year ago. Paul Le Roux had the motivation, the knowledge, the multitude of projects, the ability/drive to take on different persona. Plus Le Roux coded crypto projects in C++ on Windows unlike most of his peers.

The timelines also fit with Le Roux going into custody when Satoshi dissappeared.

Also with 100Ms in USD sitting in laundry baskets around his apartment, Le Roux would not have needed to worry about BTC until it was too late.

I had someone reply that Satoshi and Le Roux coding styles were too different: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33127079

kjkjadksj9• 3 years ago

If you are anonymously building on something like this, then I think you for sure would obfuscate both your code style and your writing style. Code style I’d guess takes less work to obfuscate. E.g. if you typically use tabs instead of spaces, thats a single line of sed to remove that identifier from the entire codebase.

RyanAdamas2• 3 years ago

Sure, but Occam’s Razor applies. Why go to such lengths to sow disinformation in a private communication? It would have been far simpler for Hal to have just responded at a different time rather than leaving this proverbial needle in the haystack that would have never been revealed had Hearn not published the emails.

Occam's Razor, as the author enjoyed using, would suggest that someone knowingly creating a rival to a hegemonic currency system would need plausible deniability as to who they are and what they are doing. Having a partner in crime would not be inconceivable and they wouldn't need to be Satoshi.

"Hal used tabs while Satoshi used spaces (this is a massive never-ending debate between developers)

Hal preferred his debug statements not to be indented while Satoshi’s maintained indentation with surrounding code

Hal made comments with block style multi-line markers while Satoshi preferred to create many single-line comments with double slashes

Hal used snake_case for his function names while Satoshi used camelCase

There are probably far more differences that are more subtle, but these jumped out from just a few minutes of eyeballing the codebases."

These are irrelevant. Someone of Hal's intelligence and skill who was a decades long cypherpunk would understand the importance of obfuscating ones own styles. Lastly, I find it interesting that the Silicon Valley elite did the ice bucket challenge 2 weeks before Hal died.

Beijinger2• 3 years ago

"Lastly, I find it interesting that the Silicon Valley elite did the ice bucket challenge 2 weeks before Hal died."

Sorry, I don't get this. Please elaborate.

RyanAdamas2• 3 years ago

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg did their Ice Bucket Challenges on August 14th 2014 and Hal died August 28th 2014 of ALS.

orra2• 3 years ago

The thing I don't understand: if Satoshi is still alive, surely they'd have spent some of that money. They're filthy rich, so why not enjoy it?

I get that you can't cash out 5% of any market in one go, without tanking prices. But you can do it gradually.

lisper• 3 years ago

If Satoshi cashed out even a single satoshi the market would crash because now the odds of him cashing out the rest will have just risen dramatically.

orra2• 3 years ago

Plausible, but I would have thought if it's gradual, there would be a recovery.

But maybe Satoshi has substantial other Bitcoin, not associated with the pseudonym, so they don't want to take any chances?

drawkbox13• 3 years ago

Eventually with quantum computing or other advancements, someone will break the encryption and potentially swipe the part of Satoshi's coin.

Bitcoin, and other crypto in general even more with higher concentration of early owners, will always be precarious because of this concentration. Whoever has control of the early issued coins, holds a leverage that is dangerous and has extortion properties.

Satoshi owns 5% of bitcoin. Other crypto coins are more concentrated and more problematic. This isn't like a large institutional investor in a public stock, this is a large percentage of all currency.

The rug pull was set from the beginning.

chollida1• 3 years ago

This gets thrown around alot but I disagree.

Mark Zuckerberg sells Meta shares, Bezoes sells Amazon shares, Gates sold a large portion of Microsoft.

The BTC market is big enough to support satoshi selling his coins.

Hell the ETF market alone could absorb all his coins.

I have yet to see anyone show how satoshi selling a single coin would crash the market. He has about 2 days worth of liquidity in a relatively mature market. That's not much volume at all.

jandrese2• 3 years ago

This is silly. It is like saying nobody would invest in Amazon if Jeff Bezos sold even one share of his stock. Nonsense.

ssd532• 3 years ago

Satoshi has not moved any BTC is one of the reasons it is considered as commodity. There is no owner of this thing. If he/she moves the BTC it means the creator has every intent to spend it and thus owns a large portion of it.

olalonde2• 3 years ago

That's why many people he is either dead, in prison, or has lost his private keys.

ProllyInfamous4• 3 years ago

Lost in a boating accident, such a shame...

ProllyInfamous4• 3 years ago

The Satoshi-mining entity (from early days) has approximately one million bitcoin, verifiable on blockchain explorers of all kinds.

There are multiple monitors (human and programmed) awaiting even a single Satoshi transaction from these addresses [1 "satoshi" == 1E-8 BTC]

tim3332• 3 years ago

Maybe he has spent some of the money. There are a bunch of bitcoin considered Satoshi's that have never moved but who's to say he didn't mine some more on the side under another account? He seems a smart guy after all and that would be kind of an obvious thing to do.

I'm wondering if as the guy gets old if he'll set up a charitable foundation with the main lot.

Timja6• 3 years ago

I think there is some systematic reason why people like Satoshi, Buckethead, Banksy, etc are not uncovered.

In each case, I doubt that it really is hard to figure out who they are.

Maybe it is the way the press and social media work. You get as many clicks for a wild theory as you get for a properly researched opinion.

As for Satoshi Nakamoto: The most obvious candidate seems to be Adam Back. His invention of proof of work, his biography, character, writing style and role as the CEO of the company behind the main wallet software all point to him. Also, his current communication "Bitcoin looks like something that was discovered rather than invented". That's something a creator typically says about a particularly great piece of work they did. Are there any arguments why he might not be the inventor of Bitcoin?

Hamuko2• 3 years ago

Is there another Buckethead that I'm not aware of, because the one that I'm thinking of has a pretty well-established identity.

Timja6• 3 years ago

Oh, interesting. So he only keeps his face secret, not his identity?

I remember reading an interview with Ozzy Osbourne who said he refused to work with Buckethead because it spooked him that BH always kept a mask on, even when they talked in private.

IshKebab2• 3 years ago

I don't know about the others, but Banksy has been uncovered. It's Robin Gunningham. People still like to say it's "unconfirmed" and "a rumour" but if you look at the evidence there is no real doubt.

So I guess part of the reason is that people love the mystery so much, as long as the suspect doesn't come out and say "yes it's me" then they'll just hang on to the mystery. To be honest even if Gunningham said "I am Banksy" I suspect people would still say "but is he really? Nobody knows!"

Timja6• 3 years ago

Wikipedia says "Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based street artist, political activist and film director whose real name and identity remain unconfirmed and the subject of speculation."

gumby2• 3 years ago

Isn’t it mean to uncover someone who wishes to remain anonymous and is doing no harm?

Uncovering their identity is just vandalism.

antoniuschan99• 3 years ago

There’s a court case banksy is fighting with some store owner and thats also confirmed his name.

lawn5• 3 years ago

As for Satoshi Nakamoto: The most obvious candidate seems to be Adam Back. His invention of proof of work, his biography, character, writing style and role as the CEO of the company behind the main wallet software all point to him.

Adam Back is obviously not Satoshi.

His level of writing or thinking is not even close to the level of Satoshi.

When asked what people should pay with when fees were high and Lightning Network wasn't complete, he seriously suggested people should just use tabs:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DHc81OL_hk4&feature=youtu.be&t...

This and other brainfarts... No way that he's Satoshi and people need to stop suggesting it.

Timja6• 3 years ago

The question asked on that video does not mention lightning.

But his answer begins by explaining lightning.

Back early on forsaw that lightning is the way forward and not larger blocks. Which is another indication to me, that he is indeed Nakamoto.

It was a great insight very much in line with Nakamoto's thinking. Nakamoto who forsaw so many things early on like the need for a script instead of just transaction data on the chain.

Zambyte• 3 years ago

he seriously suggested people should just use tabs

Why is this a "brainfart"? It does not seem like a horrible recommendation to me, especially for someone who needed a solution "today" in 2017.

olalonde2• 3 years ago

Not to mention that he is a bit of a self-promoter. I am sure he would take credit for Bitcoin if he could.

bobbylarrybobby• 3 years ago

Wouldn't the real Satoshi do everything in their power to throw people off the scent?

rurban2• 3 years ago

All three of them are uncovered, just not officially. But many do know their identities.

dagw• 3 years ago

Even Staoshi? I know that a lot of people know who Banksy and Buckethead are, but I don't know that people know who Satoshi is.

tim3332• 3 years ago

systematic reason why people like Satoshi, Buckethead, Banksy, etc are not uncovered.

With Satoshi and Banksy it's not so hard to figure out but given that they both want anonymity, informed people tend not to say. Meanwhile random idiots post all sorts of stuff, some right, some wrong.

drawkbox13• 3 years ago

The identity probably isn't one person but there are people that stand out.

Nick Szabo has been potentially mentioned as Satoshi for sometime [1] due to him working on decentralized currencies since 1998 with Bit Gold [2]. Elon Musk mentioned Nick Szabo on Lex Fridman's podcast as Szabo was also doing Bit Gold prior and is heavy into crypto and currencies. [3]

"Obviously I don't know who created bitcoin ... it seems as though Nick Szabo is probably more than anyone else responsible for the evolution of those ideas," said Musk, adding, "he claims not to be Nakamoto ... but he seems to be the one more responsible for the ideas behind it than anyone else."
Szabo is best known as the inventor of one of bitcoin’s predecessors, Bit Gold, and digital smart contracts—which eventually evolved to become a key part of the ethereum blockchain. Szabo has previously denied he's Satoshi Nakamoto, telling financial author Dominic Frisby in 2014, "I'm afraid you got it wrong doxing me as Satoshi, but I'm used to it."

Szabo's full name is Nicholas Szabo [4]. Just seems quite a bit like Satoshi Nakamoto. It feels like there is something there potentially.

He uses his initials for his Pseudonyms (N.S)

Nakamoto Satoshi = Bitcoin

Nicholas Saberhagen = Monero

Bit Gold was maybe to test out interest, then when the real one was made it would be more anonymous. If you think about it, bitcoin being anonymous is a feature as it makes it seem less centralized eventhough Satoshi owns a large chunk of it. Today companies or individuals will control a large chunk of other coins/platforms and it feels more centralized or even autocratic. At any time those big fish could wreak havoc. Satoshi seems more hands off. Another potential reason is the money it would generate and the recognition would attract too much attention. The successful decentralized currency like bitcoin might have been foreseen as a threat to the creator after it takes off and gains in value.

From the wiki on Nick Szabo, he is more 'reclusive' and not wanting to be known. On his blog he mentioned his intent on creating a live version of the currency as Bit Gold was more of a prototype/demo and was never launched. Even the name Bit Gold and bitcoin are very similar as is the name Nicholas Szabo (N.S.) and Satoshi Nakamoto (S.N.) in a few ways. Satoshi Nakamoto always seems like a purposeful shroud of a name, looking for someone by that name is probably not going to find them:

Nathaniel Popper wrote in The New York Times that "the most convincing evidence pointed to a reclusive American man of Hungarian descent named Nick Szabo." In 2008, prior to the release of bitcoin, Szabo wrote a comment on his blog about the intent of creating a live version of his hypothetical currency. [1]

Hal Finney was the first to receive 10 bitcoins from Satoshi Nakamoto [5][6]. Hal Finney was the next employee after Phil Zimmermann at PGP. So he knew the potential for being pursued by governments for software creations. Hal, who died in 2014 unfortunately, probably knew Satoshi and would have known he was shrouding/anonymous for good reasons as seen in the PGP history just before that and around the same time bit gold was being created.

The very likely people to be Satoshi Nakamoto are Nick Szabo and Hal Finney due to the early interactions and transactions, and potentially Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, but that seems unlikely they would use their real name [7]. Maybe it was all three or someone else entirely, these guys are just around the early days and some of the first transactions. Either that or someone or some group saw the need for decentralized currency from their efforts and then front ran them and made it seem more like them to help shroud themselves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo#Satoshi_Nakamoto_sp...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo#Bit_gold

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/billybambrough/2021/12/28/elon-...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo#Satoshi_Nakamoto_sp...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto#Possible_iden...

Uptrenda• 3 years ago

It wasn't just 'digital currencies' Szabo pioneered either. He did the earliest work on smart contracts too. Smart contracts are multi-disciplinary spanning law, cryptography, economics, programming, accounting, and game theory. It's the kind of insight only a polymath would have. People who only know a little about Bitcoin think it's like a currency. But built inside it is a scripting system that lets you program the conditions for moving around coins. This allows for incredibly elaborate extensions to be made to the system without having to change its core rules.

Satoshi was also interested in smart contracts. In fact, there was early work in the Bitcoin code base where satoshi had designed an entire online market system. I've never seen the code for this myself or what features it had. But to me this is so far ahead of everyone else and solidifies much of what would be built on top of blockchain systems that it's scary. So Satoshi builds the groundwork for practically the next 10 years worth of complex, technical discussions. Satoshi even knew that time-locked transactions would be useful so it was part of Bitcoin too.

mkl• 3 years ago

Bitcoin is better off with Satoshi's identity remaining unknown. A human can be criticized and politically attacked. A myth will withstand the test of time.

There's another reason. Because there's no entity controlling bitcoin, the SEC doesn't consider it a security, unlike all other cryptocurrencies.

“Everything other than bitcoin,” Gensler told me, “you can find a website, you can find a group of entrepreneurs, they might set up their legal entities in a tax haven offshore, they might have a foundation, they might lawyer it up to try to arbitrage and make it hard jurisdictionally or so forth.” In other words, there are people behind these cryptocurrencies using a variety of complex and legally opaque mechanisms, but at the most basic level, they are trying to promote their tokens and entice investors. (Bitcoin, because of its unique history and creation story, is fundamentally different from other crypto projects in this respect.)
“They might drop their tokens overseas at first and contend or pretend that it’s going to take six months before they come back to the U.S.,” he continued. “But at the core,” he argued, “these tokens are securities because there’s a group in the middle and the public is anticipating profits based on that group.”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/gary-gensler-on-meet... (https://archive.ph/EzNmO)

iamgopal• 3 years ago

Is it possible ( novice with respect to blockchain here ) , to crack the wallet , with all the computing power of the bitcoin mining ?

tromp3• 3 years ago

The computing power behind bitcoin mining is just computing gazillions of SHA256 hashes.

Which is useless for recovering Satoshi's private key, as that requires solving the Discrete Logarithm Problem for Elliptic Curves.

But even the amount of energy used in all Bitcoin mining falls short of the energy needed to solve a single instance of DLP using the best-known methods, by a factor greater than a billion billion.

drexlspivey2• 3 years ago

No, otherwise miners would be cracking wallets instead of mining bitcoins

lagniappe• 3 years ago

They are. This is the foundation of the BTC collider project [0]. By the way, wallets do get cracked this way, but less through technical supremacy and more about brute force.

[0] https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/about

ryan-c2• 3 years ago

The computing power used for bitcoin mining is not general purpose, and cannot be used to crack keys.

ProllyInfamous4• 3 years ago

Although inconceivably impossible, there IS always a chance that two different nodes generate the same private key, which cryptographically precludes identical public/private keypairs... generated in earnest... at two separate locales.

But this is MORE LIKELY than you brute-forcing the private key to a known public key.

----

Also, for technical accuracy... it's not just SHA-256 keys that drive bitcoin network. One of the reasons to "never re-use the same receiving address" is that different algos are used for a new-key-never-sent VS re-used-key . You are technically making the process "easier" by re-using the same private key to push a transaction.

----

<3 from your least favorite infamous bitcoin node operator

csomar• 3 years ago

I really wonder how nobody has looked into this deep enough: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/89532/how-did-na...

Or maybe law enforcement already did, and Satoshi is either quite more secretive, them, or dead.

Stagnant• 3 years ago

Assuming Satoshi paid for the domain via cash there might not be much to look into.

serhack_• 3 years ago

An analysis about the first version of source code of Bitcoin https://serhack.me/articles/story-behind-alternative-genesis...

imglorp• 3 years ago

Have state actors playing a longer honeypot sort of game been ruled out?

Because btc is only pseudoanonymous, letting you observe and maybe link transaction sources and recipients, it gives SOME insight into the global movements of funds which were previously totally opaque and untraceable, such as cash, gold, and offshore instruments where there might be NONE.

So for a small investment of a few cryptographic experts' time, a state actor has new insights into political opponents, tax dodges, arms and contraband sales. The amount of insights scales with crypto's adoption and is always greater than the opaque instruments.

almost_usual6• 3 years ago

Bitcoin is more damaging to surveillance than helpful. Cash is being phased every year.

The $10,000 limit in the USA was established in 1970, I guarantee it won’t be adjusted for inflation.

jonahbenton3• 3 years ago

Nah. The blockchain is forever and there are all these breadcrumb producing onramps.

jonahbenton3• 3 years ago

I like this NSA paper

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/mone...

apantel• 3 years ago

Train an LLM on all of Satoshi’s known correspondences, then have it grade the correspondences of each suspected Satoshi candidate to determine who actually writes like him.

h2odragon• 3 years ago

similar things have been done; but we're far beyond the point where evidence will change minds on this question.

ProllyInfamous4• 3 years ago

So... NOT Craig Wright, then.

Got it.

kjkjadksj9• 3 years ago

Thats if the brilliant ephemeral ghost like Satoshi was dumb enough to write and code in a publicly identifiable style though.

anthomtb• 3 years ago

Hal preferred his debug statements not to be indented while Satoshi’s maintained indentation with surrounding code

Silly takeaway from a serious article but...after seeing the code snippets in TFA, this is something I will begin doing. It looks like it makes it much easier to differentiate debug code from "the real thing".

acco102• 3 years ago

Good document:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361456322_Satoshi_N...

Maybe Paul Le Roux is Satoshi.

almost_usual6• 3 years ago

Bitcoin is one of those technologies that I have been skeptical of for over a decade but within the past year it’s finally starting to click for me.

I don’t own any yet but I don’t think it’s ever going away.

noman-land• 3 years ago

What changed?

yieldcrv4• 3 years ago

Maybe it’s price resilience after zero interest rates went away was just too impressive

almost_usual6• 3 years ago

It’s been resilient to boom and bust cycles, it’s stable and safe for those who live in third world countries with hyperinflation, it’s extremely hard to eliminate or control since it’s decentralized.

yieldcrv4• 3 years ago

The actual identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is irrelevant to the security, evolution, and future operation of the Bitcoin network.

I was surprised how hard that was for people to understand, last decade.

We should just have a compilation of ignorant things that important people said about Bitcoin 10 years ago.

Even nocoiners are alot more enlightened in their conversations now. Enlightened as in the goal post moved, but at least it moved.

Hal Finney Was Not Satoshi Nakamoto

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