Satoshi – Sirius emails 2009-2011

https://mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/

by lawrenceyan • 2 years ago

449 449 2 years ago

mmalmi.github.io

baerrie• 2 years ago

Next step, feed this text into into some nlp/llm and search the web for a match to find who Satoshi is

xtiansimon• 2 years ago

Alexander Hamilton

codetrotter• 2 years ago

Len Sassaman

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

vintermann2• 2 years ago

There's already far more text written by him (as well as code), and there have been run comparisons of it against all the seriously proposed candidates.

cryptonector• 2 years ago

A good writer can probably change his/her demeanor and style in writing when changing personas. I'm sure it's hard work, but I'm also sure that practice makes it possible -- at least for some gifted people. It's also possible that Satoshi isn't a single human being, but an organization that can dedicate a lot of effort to this sort of thing.

f321x_• 2 years ago

Really interesting

neom2• 2 years ago

For those curious about the court case it's referencing, here is the context: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/02/07/craig... (https://archive.is/7YyMl)

semiquaver• 2 years ago

If you prefer an (outdated but entertaining) podcast:

https://www.alabseries.com/episodes/episode-3-faketoshi-the-...

imperialdrive• 2 years ago

I found several interesting exchanges, such as around/after email #212.

sema4hacker• 2 years ago

Are all of the digital fingerprints created by Satoshi (emails and posted code) completely untraceable, with no archives of domains, IP addresses, access logs, etc., still in existence that might identify where he was logging in from?

dogman14413• 2 years ago

Last I read the domain registration for Bitcoin.org (I think) is the main exposure point.

But, what you raised is why I don’t buy they haven’t been ID’d. Digital fingerprints across multiple forums, and platforms, the logs to find a way in are there somewhere.

I figure it is Len Sassaman.

layer84• 2 years ago

Meredith Patterson might know, then.

bottlepalm6• 2 years ago

Len was a Linux guy, Satoshi was not. There's even an email here that says just that, "technically much more linux capable than me."

https://mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/#email-241

WhereIsTheTruth• 2 years ago

Just trace its usecases, it leads to both EU/FED exploring a digital fiat and a digital passport, must be someone who has worked with the government

My theory: the CIA/NSA

greyface-2• 2 years ago

There is some evidence pointing to a Covad IP address in Los Angeles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29728339

Hamuko3• 2 years ago

Timezone-wise it'd make the most sense if he was somewhere in the US, since he almost never posted between 05:00 and 11:00 GMT. That'd be between 00:00 and 06:00 New York time.

tambourine_man• 2 years ago

There is a great book and/or movie just waiting to be made about Satoshi. Such a great story.

cachvico2• 2 years ago

Broaden "Satoshi" to the creation story of Bitcoin, and there already are; Banking on Bitcoin is a good one.

dogman14413• 2 years ago

Banking on Bitcoin is such a useful explainer of the space and its implications. Not a lot of that content around anymore.

noman-land2• 2 years ago

No one has a good ending!

thinkmassive• 2 years ago

Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency

by Finn Brunton

wslh• 2 years ago

The top Satoshi archeologist is Sergio Lerner: https://bitslog.com/

Official security auditor of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

jesperwe• 2 years ago

Maybe HE is Satoshi!

idiotsecant• 2 years ago

Big brain move, be the leading authority on not identifying yourself.

noman-land2• 2 years ago

Satoshi double spaces after periods.

chrisoconnell• 2 years ago

The real analysis is here.

dboreham3• 2 years ago

Must be American then.

raid20003• 2 years ago

Or just above the age of 35 or so?

BlackjackCF• 2 years ago

I thought the double spacing was a typewriter thing. Is it uniquely American?

seanhunter2• 2 years ago

I must also be American in that case. (Hint: I'm not).

Mistletoe• 2 years ago

Exactly how we learned to do in keyboarding class. It’s still with me after all these years.

RajT883• 2 years ago

My wife double spaces after periods, and although she is a US citizen, she is not a product of the American education system.

My wife is Satoshi Nakamoto.

jinwoo68• 2 years ago

It might be just that he uses Emacs for writing emails. Emacs uses double space after periods by default.

stavros5• 2 years ago

I heard that Satoshi was Hal Finney (from a good friend of Hal's). Looking at his personal site, guess how many spaces there are after a period:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140403012916/http://www.finney...

jablongo• 2 years ago

On this website there are single spaces following periods.

dontupvoteme2• 2 years ago

I think it's a fair bet that Satoshi is either dead, insane, or the government. Finney checks the most likely one.

geraldwhen• 2 years ago

The writing style matches the emails as well.

joshumax• 2 years ago

Yeah, I've always been surprised[1] when people come out claiming to be Satoshi but ignore this very blatant writing style in their own texts. I haven't really interacted that much with them online and both the double spaces and the British spellings struck out to me and a few others years ago.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15917598#15919288

alicelebi• 2 years ago

Blast from the past.

raid20003• 2 years ago

The VPS has 320MB RAM, 50MB of which is currently free. There's also 500MB swap space.

Every MB counts!

layer84• 2 years ago

It's kind of fun to read about the state of "VPS hosting" from those days. Lots of downtime. Unexpected reboots.

Absolutely not my experience from those days, VPSs were rock-solid for me.

raid20003• 2 years ago

Maybe they were trying to save money. There's another quote where Satoshi suggests being frugal:

It might be a long time before we get another donation like that, we should save a lot of it.

wolrah• 2 years ago

Absolutely not my experience from those days, VPSs were rock-solid for me.

Likewise, my personal toy VPS actually dates back to 2009 and the only unplanned downtime it's ever had were when Linode was one of the targets of one of those big DDoS waves a few years back. Even then it was online and working fine internally, just limited in its ability to reach the outside world.

The VPS itself has been rock solid and in 15 years the only times it's not been at least trying to serve whatever I have on it have been when I've rebooted it for updates.

swozey4• 2 years ago

I found those specs really curious as I worked in webhosting (even rax which is in the thread) and we didn't have anything near that low for a vps, but reading further I guess they're using some random fly-by-night webhost that doesn't even have a cPanel or Plesk license or anything for the user to self-service, they base all of their pricing on linode and you have to call/ticket in to manage your site.

I don't know the background of satoshi, etc (of course) but that's a $10 vps and they're complaining about running out of memory, etc in the thread.. Why so cheap? Dedicated xeon servers back then were 80-250 and vps filled every other price range.

And if they just need to compile a python widget on linux with a desktop WM... we had the technology to do that locally in 2009..

ajross2• 2 years ago

Why so cheap?

It was an amateur open source project hosting a simple site for project collaboration, in an era before the FAANG bubble in engineer salaries. I think $10/month for a hobby thing is about right.

Also recognize that this was still in the "OMG how did computers get so fast" era. Our intuition about the time was still colored by the 486's on which we'd all installed Linux for the first time (or the Sparcstations we used at school, same deal). Even today a 100+ MHz device still "feels fast" to me, and recognize that I write audio firmware on 400-800 MHz DSP cores.

fenalphthalein2• 2 years ago

Honest inquiry here - What I don't understand is how people think the identification of Satoshi is "bound to happen". What did the person do wrong, exactly?

Based on how I understand it, if the person did nothing wrong by inventing Bitcoin, no investigation will occur and no judge will sign off on a search warrant to get the ID data. No private investigator will be able to obtain the data either, as ISPs wouldn't just dish out private info like that without a warrant.

Did the inventor of Bitcoin do something wrong to allow for a judge to violate their privacy in a court case? That's the only way I see the info getting out, but is there a crime to allow that situation to arise?

What other (legal or illegal) path is there to identify a person who posted something online?

keiferski2• 2 years ago

The USG seems pretty intent on implementing KYC across the entirety of the financial system, so it wouldn't really surprise me if they aimed to identify wallets holding large (say, $100 million USD or more) amounts of Bitcoin.

dannyw• 2 years ago

Realistically the threshold will be something like $100.

le-mark• 2 years ago

Would this not be self reported by wallet owners? Because if each transaction uses a unique wallet address, funds are very difficult to connect to an owner. Until they’re connected to a sale to fiat at least?

phone8675309• 2 years ago

Governments are going to argue that the creation of BitCoin and lack of KYC to use it is a major contributor to money laundering.

ekabod• 2 years ago

Maybe one country jurisdiction thinks he may owe taxes, so they may investigate.

falserum3• 2 years ago

s/thinks/decides/

dogman14413• 2 years ago

The space has moved past this risk for a lot of reasons, to start. And it’s hard to understand I think in light of modern (relative to pre-2018/19) widespread mainstream adoption.

But, a long term protection for BTC when it was smaller and tbh anyone’s guess how it would turn out (still is IMO), was: who are you going to haul into senate hearings, court, cryptography export control violations, whatever over BTC?

This happened ample times in the recent past before BTC with digital money attempts and cryptography projects. It’s happening now with mixers on btc and ethereum. It was a real risk to BTC in its own way.

With BTC then and now, there was no real leader though. There were important core devs and industry leads, but no one held true sway like, say, Vitalik did with eth early days.

So it wasn’t so much a firm “did something wrong” risk for BTC’s founder, but more of a concern that the US govt had taken very heavyhanded measures against many similar projects to BTC. As there was no one to target in BTC’s case, this protection played a large role in its early push into staying power.

Also going to color this with CIA had the lead dev at the time visit them to discuss it in 2011. So there was certainly some real sustained attention to it from the start.

fenalphthalein2• 2 years ago

Sounds like this person was really smart to begin with. High-level societal awareness caused them to choose the private route, and focus on releasing something for the greater good.

I wouldn't be surprised if this person never even took a single bitcoin for themselves, other than the ones used for code testing purposes. That would create another avenue for people to come after them if it became public that they hoarded some of the Bitcoin for themselves.

BlueTemplar3• 2 years ago

When in 2011 ? You seem to mean that it was unknown by then, but it wasn't : 2011 was pretty much the year when it blew up into the public consciousness, spreading from the likes of Slashdot and Ars Technica into more generalist publications (also causing its first - or was that 2nd? - bubble popping) :

"The Crypto-Currency" - The New Yorker (2011)

https://archive.is/wsbcQ

(I love how I picked it randomly, and the first two subtitles are "Bitcoin and its mysterious inventor." and "It’s not clear if bitcoin is legal, but there is no company in control and no one to arrest.")

IncreasePosts4• 2 years ago

It only takes one person at an ISP to steal and leak the data. I mean, an IRS employee leaked the president's tax returns and is currently in federal prison for it. I imagine the stakes are much lower for just stealing some IP address assignment data from an ISP archive(if such an archive exists).

reactordev5• 2 years ago

It only takes one VPN to hide it.

paulpauper3• 2 years ago

probably used TOR

mortallywounded10• 2 years ago

I don't think it's a legal issue. People want to know who it was and credit where it's due.

Satoshi didn't do anything wrong but distributed consensus was finally solved (or so it seems) and that's a big deal.

reactordev5• 2 years ago

Idolization of Satoshi is strong. For that reason alone, if I were him/her, I would disappear. The work is self-evident and the idea a dime a dozen. The execution of it and the fact that it was accepted is what we should be idolizing. Which is exactly what happened. BTC became a thing and was no longer an idea. I reject anyone claiming to be Satoshi because Satoshi would never claim to be Satoshi. ;)

hansvm3• 2 years ago

as ISPs wouldn't just dish out private info like that without a warrant

ISPs regularly sell private data to the highest bidder. Similarly with payroll providers and whatnot (a non-trivial fraction of my paystubs -- not just salary, but withholding, exempt tax status, ... -- are available to anyone with a few dollars; historically, it _seems_ like the only buyers have been employers trying to see if their salary offers aligned with my expectations).

fckgw• 2 years ago

They'll sell anonymized data in aggregate but no, you can't just go to an ISP and buy the user behind an IP without a court order.

usrusr• 2 years ago

Dark sarcasm take: there's a large volume of early bitcoin that may or may not be lost forever. The risk of addresses that have gone dark a long time ago lighting up again must have a big influence of any bitcoin evaluation that is at least in part based on reason. Fossilized coins could hugely change the supply/demand dynamic. The documented death of a person believed to be Satoshi would significantly shift that risk assessment. Nobody would know wether the person took meaningful keys to their grave or not, but the risk equation would contain one scenario less than before in the category of old coin flood.

gopher_space• 2 years ago

You think it’s a killswitch?

thefatboy• 2 years ago

Why do you think they want his identity because he did something WRONG?

aillia• 2 years ago

I hear your point and it's a valid one. Consider the recent case of Tornado Cash and the Open Source Is Not A Crime movement. Two individuals were arrested for developing open-source code on GitHub. Just last week, GoFundMe shut down the Tornado Cash legal defense crowdfunding. This suggests that the state is more interested in protecting itself from individuals rather than defending their rights. This could potentially set a precedent where inventors or developers of decentralized technologies could be targeted, even if they've done nothing inherently wrong. If interested you can learn more here: https://wewantjusticedao.org/

thisgoesnowhere• 2 years ago

Well either that or what they were doing is just obviously illegal and they should be at fault for it.

hef19898• 2 years ago

Tornado Cash was what, money laundering and circumvention of sanctions? Pretty illegal.

cududa3• 2 years ago

Oh this is bullshit and you know it. Another example of "we didn't call it a security so it's not a security"

They weren't arrested for the code. They were arrested for actively participating and profiting off money laundering with North Korea being a customer.

Zero-knowledge proofs are different from public ledgers. That's where the issue comes in to play. The Treasury Department has already given guidance that cryptocurrency mixers fall under Know Your Customer laws and the Bank Secrecy Act, and are required to know who exactly is using their services and how.

It's not "Criminalizing Open Source". You live in a society with laws. Obfuscating classic financial products with tech jargon worked for the first half of the decade.

Y'all are just mad it doesn't work anymore and claim "You just don't understand the technology. You haven't issued guidance on specifics of crypto currency. You can't use hundred year old laws"

Yes, you can use 100 year old laws. At the end of the day, the financial shenanigans of most crypto, exchanges, and tokens are fundamentally the same things that have already been regulated. You just have new words.

avgDev• 2 years ago

Tornado cash was doing something illegal.

GoFundMe is a business, which may do whatever it wants. Tornado Cash has no rights to obtain funds though GoFundMe.

treffer• 2 years ago

These court orders might also happen if someone _claims_ that crimes have happened.

The legal system has to come to that conclusion, which requires an investigation.

Yeah it must be an important claim. That's of course completely unacceptable and illegal. But it is one way such warrants could happen.

tim333• 2 years ago

I think people who follow / read up on the thing have a pretty good idea who it is but as you say he didn't really do anything wrong. Reasons for anonymity include not having criminals try to extort you and maybe some government having a go over money laundering or people suing for this of that so I think people with a good idea stay quiet to respect Satoshi's desires.

I've got a theory he may come out and donate to a charitable foundation when he's old and near the end.

tsimionescu2• 2 years ago

ISPs wouldn't just dish out private info like that without a warrant.

ISPs routinely sell such information for money en masse. Police departments are a major buyer, but also ad agencies and others. Plus, bribing a low level employee for access to such records, or directly infiltrating the ISP to get access yourself, is child's play to any determined group.

It is extraordinarily naive, especially in a post-Snowden world, to think that any and all information available to a private company is not also available to, at least, spy agencies of the parent state.

falserum3• 2 years ago

Did the inventor of Bitcoin do something wrong to allow for a judge to violate their privacy in a court case? That's the only way I see the info getting out, but is there a crime to allow that situation to arise?

This feels like wrong framework/approach. Fundamentaly question here: “is it worth it for somebody?” Economists path to an answer: If for somebody[3], profit[1] of identifying satoshi outweighs the cost[2], it will be done.

[1] profit in very abstract sense. E.g. elimination of (perceived?) threat, aquisition of credible threat to other enemies, political points, money, making an example for others, showing off skills.

[2] “cost” is also used in very abstract sense. E.g. Favor from a known(or compromised) judge, man hours dedicated by FBI/MI6, money, negative press budget after “bending” some rules, risk of getting caught by supriors/underlinglins/press/constituents.

[3] “somebody” - to no surprise - can be anybody/anything. E.g. A corporation, a government, maybe single branch or department, maybe sole individual able to use his government position for personal gain, an employee of ISP, a blockchain historian, most likely Satoshi’s ex.

Important to note: both individuals and governments do break the law when they think it is necessary.

I find at least two credible incentives to find satoshi:

- bitcoin can be used to lounder money, circumvent financial sanctions, so governments want to stop that and make example of it.

- Satoshi, has 1 000 000 bitcoins. That’s a lot of money. a) banal roberies are done for far less. b) CIA or similar might want to know who wields this much resource, friend or foe (especially if its value would grow even more)

How Satoshi can be uncovered I have no idea, but the story of Silkroad owner shows, that minor slipups can be revealed after number of years.

sparkie• 2 years ago

See: Liberty Dollar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_dollar_(private_curren...

creer• 2 years ago

It's idle curiosity and research.

Much effort in literature and history is to try to figure out who actually wrote X or who was Y. No accusations.

someonehere• 2 years ago

My understanding is conspiracy people want to know if it was an alphabet agency that developed bitcoin to push a new world order of cashless currency. Or a new way to move money around anonymously and make it easier for governments and their agencies to stay anonymous.

mortallywounded10• 2 years ago

If you want a detailed look at all of the Satoshi evidence (circumstantial and others), check out this paper:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.10257v14.pdf

If you want the TLDR; the meat is the "Candidates" section about Len Sassaman and the original Bitcoin paper's references (in particular, how Len was the only person with the right skill set, in the right place, at the right time to even get a copy of the referenced work).... among a mountain of other circumstantial evidence.

warner253• 2 years ago

Oh, I'm excited to read this! Once or twice a year I take a trip down the rabbit hole on Satoshi, and my personal conclusion after the last couple of trips has been Len Sassaman.

The one thing that bugs me is that the original bitcoin paper, while amazing, doesn't seem like it was written by a PhD candidate. It cites just eight related works, and the W. Dai citation was famously added only after someone else suggested it, because Satoshi reportedly didn't know about it. A typical paper by a PhD candidate will cite dozens of related works, and Len Sassman would certainly have knowledge of dozens of related works off the top of his head.

mortallywounded10• 2 years ago

^ I think you'll enjoy the paper's deep dive. It goes into the references deeply!

UniverseHacker2• 2 years ago

Academics are overly verbose with citations, because they are afraid of offending a colleague or reviewer by omitting their work. One of the worst things you can possibly do is forget to cite the work of your anonymous reviewers... and there is no way to guess who that might be ahead of time, so you cite everyone.

An anonymous whitepaper has no such constraints, so you can just cite what is actually necessary to explain your point, and nothing more.

intotheabyss• 2 years ago

Small blockers in shambles

2024throwaway2• 2 years ago

Anyone have a TLDR summary of what is interesting in this very long page?

m3kw9• 2 years ago

Just chitchat during the development of bitcoin. You can understand a lot about how bitcoin design choices came to be from Satoshi own reasonings. The white paper doesn’t spell these out in detail

2024throwaway2• 2 years ago

I guess specifically I'm curious how this would be relevant/useful in the court case mentioned.

ludamn• 2 years ago

Sorry if it's a bit unrelated to the article, but does anyone have any recommended material for getting someone with 0 knowledge to know more about blockchains?

My goal is to learn both how the tech works and what key issues are people trying to solve with crypto/blockchains

chrsw2• 2 years ago

I just assumed "Satoshi Nakamoto" was an alias for a small group of people all working on the same code base/idea.

TheBlight• 2 years ago

That seems unlikely. The original code base was fairly small and very much reads like one person was responsible for writing it. Also, the more people who know a secret the less likely it is to be kept.

chrsw2• 2 years ago

This is true, but having multiple people involved makes it every difficult to pinpoint one true source. Plus, when I say multiple people I mean 2-3 or 3-4. Not like a big operation. And if these small number are so paranoid about privacy and identity that they invented Bitcoin, I would expect them to be able to keep a secret.

I just find it hard to believe there isn't a single soul walking on this planet right now that has any idea who Satoshi Nakamoto is/was.

elwell• 2 years ago

Satoshi seems to have delved in the dark art technique of print output debugging: https://github.com/Maguines/Bitcoin-v0.1/blob/2c7a4c9bbb793c...

ak_1117• 2 years ago

Satoshi having the foresight and discipline to take careful measures that would enable him to keep his identity secret, and succeeding to do so up to this point is almost more impressive achievement of his technical skills than bitcoin.

Even back in 2009, it was difficult (impossible?) to operate online without leaving tons of digital footprint, and we can guess that for sure state-backed actors tried to identify him and probably failed. Unless of course he was a state-backed actor(s).

medo-bear• 2 years ago

Unless of course he was a state-backed actor(s)

I'd be even more impressed if some state had the foresight to come up with Satoshi

ak_1117• 2 years ago

Well, one of the theories I fancy is that we know that Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto worked on a classified defence project, now it is almost impossible that he was the creator of btc, however there is a chance that a group of security service hackers who interacted with him while he worked there were inspired by this eccentric persona and thus decided to adopt his name as a joke when they were thinking of made-up moniker.

acjohnson55• 2 years ago

Why do you assume state-backed actors failed to identify him?

I would guess he is probably known with a high degree of certainty to at least one nation's intelligence but that publicizing that knowledge and the documentation of it is not in anyone's interest.

bugglebeetle• 2 years ago

I would assume that his entire identity is a little more than a cutout for a U.S. state intelligence agency.

nodesocket3• 2 years ago

Honestly somebody should put a bounty to be paid of course in BTC for definitively identifying Satoshi. With enough incentive I’m sure can be figured out. Recent AI improvements should be able to be used to scan all his/their writings and code.

krick2• 2 years ago

probably failed

That's silly. The fact that you don't know who somebody is says nothing about what some "state-backed actor" knows. If anything, I'm fairly confident that some people in NSA/CIA know who he is for a decade at least, and "probably" have it written in some documents that will long outlive you. Of course, this is as proofless statement as you saying that they "probably failed" to figure it out, but what you are saying basically amounts to "it is so unlikely for this to happen, so it's such a miracle it probably happened!" A more reasonable thing to say would be "it is so unlikely for this to happen, so it probably didn't happen".

biorach• 2 years ago

That's silly.

That's unnecessary and a bit childish and devalues the rest of your reply

deepsun• 2 years ago

There are limits on secrets lifetime that's highly dependent on number of people in it. Someone even tried to calculate a formula

In democratic societies it's very hard to keep a thing secret that involved 10+ people for 20+ years.

wwtdtgotiatl• 2 years ago

It took ten years to find Osama Bin Laden, which we can fairly assume had a lot more resources directed at it.

You seem to falling into this common trap of intel agency omnipotence when we have plenty of examples to the contrary.

asmr• 2 years ago

If you dig a lot you will find a footprint. There is evidence that there was a small core team and that satoshi may not be a single person, if it is, he is most likely to be Wei Dai. The other likely alternative is of course the hypothetical state-backed actor.

dist-epoch3• 2 years ago

Wei Dei is one of my suspects too, mostly because of Crypto++, but not only.

Why do you suspect is Wei Dei, was there any reveals regarding this in the lasts few years?

idontwantthis• 2 years ago

What is the rationale behind a state creating BTC?

tremarley2• 2 years ago

On 21/08/2008 Satoshi claims he was not aware of Wei Dei’s “B-Money” paper.

Alupis2• 2 years ago

There is evidence that there was a small core team and that satoshi may not be a single person

"Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead." - Benjamin Franklin

It seems highly improbable that a team of any size would have been successful at keeping this a secret for this long, let alone not wrestle for control of vast BTC wealth.

dist-epoch3• 2 years ago

State backed actors in the West don't go on a hunt without orders. Who would be so interested to order his identity discovered? And for what purpose?

They found Bin Laden who didn't allow anyone of his associates to come within 50 km of him with an electronic device.

We will only find out what FBI/CIA is capable of when the Justice Department orders the identity of Satoshi to be discovered.

k12sosse• 2 years ago

We got him, look at the map! See the 50' no-radio circle in the middle of that city? He's there.

Sometimes a lack of signal is a signal itself.

wordpad25• 2 years ago

Ughh, it's somewhat important to national security who's behind a multi-trillion dollar shadow market larger than most national economies

nostrademons3• 2 years ago

He's probably dead. My two top picks for who Satoshi might be are Len Sassaman (died 2011) and Hal Finney (died 2014)

There's little point in unmasking somebody who's already dead - their ability to influence future events is gone. So even if state intelligence surveys knew who it was, there'd be no benefit to unmasking it.

api2• 2 years ago

This would also neatly explain why the Satoshi coins have not moved.

andirk2• 2 years ago

Hal's final words to his family lead me to believe that he was not the creator of bitcoin.

kristianp• 2 years ago

Szabo is also a contender, apparently.

1. https://bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/nick-szabo 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37794025

lettergram• 2 years ago

Unless of course, the NSA or other government agency created bitcoin.

dgfitz• 2 years ago

Bitcoin didn’t succeed, define “succeed” however you want, but because of how it was marketed. Bitcoin is the OG shitcoin.

If there is one thing we can all agree on: NSA isn’t good at marketing. This whole thread is evidence of that.

nodesocket3• 2 years ago

I can’t believe we haven't figured it out yet.

- What about the email at gmx.com? Can an insider get into it?

- Access logs with browser agents and ips?

- White paper writing style and code analysis and heuristics.

qingcharles2• 2 years ago

Didn't he also register bitcoin.org?

hwbunny• 2 years ago

Well, Craig Wright tries very hard to unmask the creator(s), by pretending to be Satoshi.

gloosx2• 2 years ago

I won't agree... I think it was much easier in 2009 to operate online completely anonymous. The video surveillance was not prevalent – just pick some crowded places with free wifi randomly, don't use a cell phone, wear some sunglasses and a surgical mask, use a clean generic browser agent, use a usb-stick linux distro which will not be able to save anything on the hard drive and have some hacked proxies in another parts of the world ready to entangle your traffic routes - state actors back then would be scratching their heads forever trying to solve such a case.

munksbeer• 2 years ago

How do you pay for domain names?

bilater• 2 years ago

It's super obvious from his writing his first language is English. Most likely Hal Finney.

xvedejas• 2 years ago

I used to think so too, but the case for Len Sassaman is similarly strong.

ak_1117• 2 years ago

What is the strongest evidence AGAINST Sassaman?

ak_1117• 2 years ago

Genuine question, if you are satoshi and not insanely media shy, what would be a real concern for not divulging your identity in 2024?

You are rich enough to manage any security, tax or legal hits that you need to manage.

Furthermore due to BTC being completely mainstreamed, the credit you will get for inventing btc would be epic.

The least of it would be noble prize in economics. You will literally be a living cult leader like no other in history. Think of all those BTC fanatics finally meeting their leader. See the way Elon fanatics follow Musk and multiply that by 100.

CryptoBanker2• 2 years ago

I would imagine security is one argument. There are plenty of people and groups out there who have lost large amounts of BTC and who would like to believe that satoshi has the power to restore them or otherwise manipulate the currency.

ak_1117• 2 years ago

I don't think he will need to worry more about security than say Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Annoying, but certainly doable with the money he has.

But I can imagine that can factor in for lots of people who are risk averse and don't like the burden of having 24/7 tight security around them.

nabakin3• 2 years ago

Not wanting the lifestyle that would certainly come with it like harassment, being recognized constantly in public, drawn into lawsuits, controversy, the market hanging on his every word, swatting, etc.

mortallywounded10• 2 years ago

I believe Satoshi was a cypherpunk and a remailer dev. Cypherpunks had a history of doing things anonymously on the mailing list and even trying to out one another (a sort of game).

Furthermore, as a remailer dev Satoshi was all too familiar with what happened with the penent remailer[1]. He knew such services will become a legal target by the powers that be. This is why Satoshi even said we "kicked the hornets nest" when Wikileaks/Silkroad began accepting Bitcoin.

He knew the powers would be coming.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer

andriamanitra• 2 years ago

Most people don't want to be cult leaders. Unless they are an attention hungry person (which we can safely rule out at this point) they have nothing to gain from making their identity known. And I assume the tax authorities might be somewhat interested in their bitcoin stash...

FrontierProject• 2 years ago

You will literally be a living cult leader like no other in history. Think of all those BTC fanatics finally meeting their leader. See the way Elon fanatics follow Musk and multiply that by 100.

Didn't you just answer your own question? What sane person wants that?

tdudhhu2• 2 years ago

It is almost strange to read that they are handling the project as something very big and important. At that time it was absolutely not obvious that it would become big and mainstream.

yieldcrv2• 2 years ago

There was a lot of resentment towards bailouts at the time and making an alternative system

Many people would have been passionate about their quests towards a solution. Many people still make redundant things without knowing the hurdles involved and are just as passionate. I have a client thinking they are going to “bank the unbanked” with a mobile app not using crypto at all, in 2024

One reason why Satoshi would have been extremely passionate is because they had solved one of the unsolved problems of computer science up until 2008 which was the Double Spend Problem, and 2009 was his first production implementation of it called Bitcoin

so you have a person that was seeing everything that the field of computer science had touched over the last half century, and knowing a solution for a unsolved aspect that prevented it from touching other industries and seeing how expansive that would be

nly• 2 years ago

The Double Spend Problem was not unsolved in 2008.

The likes of Wei Dai, David Chaum, and Stephan Brands had working anonymous "digital cash" cryptosystems solving the double spending problem within a federated banking model in the late 80s and early 90s

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

bitcoin_anon2• 2 years ago

To think about what a really huge transaction load would look like, I look at the existing credit card network. I found some more estimates about how many transactions are online purchases. It's about 15 million tx per day for the entire e-commerce load of the Internet worldwide. At 1KB per transaction, that would be 15GB of bandwidth for each block generating node per day, or about two DVD movies worth. Seems do-able even with today's technology.

So Satoshi would have increased the block size by now.

whiterknight5• 2 years ago

Based. Small blockers forced themselves into bad positions to keep control.

swah• 2 years ago

"I've been at full-time work lately, and will be until the end of June, so I haven't had that much time to work with Bitcoin or my exchange service. I have a working beta of my service though, and a few weeks ago made my first transaction: sold 10,000 btc for 20 euros via EU bank transfer. Maybe I can make it public soon."

293984j29384• 2 years ago

I'm sure it's a dead end but you'd think this would be an interesting avenue of investigation. Wouldn't think transaction be pretty obvious in the blockchain? Did the owner of those 10,000 btc ever spend them? If so, it'd be interesting to see if any of the wallets in the spend chain are something public, like someone asking for donations or something.

Stagnant• 2 years ago

That message was from Martti Malmi to Satoshi.

encoderer2• 2 years ago

I love this mystery and I’m so grateful for it.

Growing up we had DB Cooper and Deepthroat - interesting and compelling stories but those guys are famous only for being anonymous. They didn’t really do anything special.

But satoshi…

bsparker• 2 years ago

and banksy!

superjan• 2 years ago

That’s no secret anymore, is it?

joering22• 2 years ago

Sorry but what is "Deepthroat" - I only found p0rn underneath, what is the "Deepthroat" story you been growing up with? Obviously aware of DB C.

pingswept• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Felt

encoderer2• 2 years ago

https://www.history.com/news/watergate-deep-throat-fbi-infor...

welder2• 2 years ago

I'm pretty sure Satoshi is German.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6562461

ak_1117• 2 years ago

So Satoshi used: Japanese pseudonym. German email domain. British English and a US Timezone.

His ability to generate entropy in his identity is significantly underrated.

dang• 2 years ago

Recent and related:

Bitcoin Inventor Satoshi Nakamoto Emails Revealed in Court - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39474691 - Feb 2024 (2 comments)

greyface-2• 2 years ago

Satoshi Nakamoto <satoshin@gmx.com> wrote:

  > There are donors I can tap if we come up with something that needs 
  > funding, but they want to be anonymous, which makes it hard to actually 
  > do anything with it.

I wonder who these donors were.

freeAgent6• 2 years ago

Le Roux is my guess, and Satoshi was referring to himself.

1970-01-01• 2 years ago

Is there a website listing people that Satoshi definitely could not be? That it seems would be more useful to our evergreen "Who is Satoshi" discussions.

aqfamnzc2• 2 years ago

How would we really rule anyone out?

esquivalience• 2 years ago

in the case of Craig Wright - Bring a multimillion dollar court case to prove it.

bcrosby952• 2 years ago

Add me to the list of "definitely not Satoshi".

Just a few billion more to go.

qingcharles2• 2 years ago

Nice try, Satoshi.

schappim• 2 years ago

Interesting Satoshi's spelling of the word "favour" instead of "favor" in "I've been putting it off in favour".

The use of "favour" instead of "favor" is a clear marker of British English or other Commonwealth varieties such as Australian or Canadian English. This spelling is not used in US English.

nabakin3• 2 years ago

Also uses "optimising" which is British.

jascination• 2 years ago

Australian too, fwiw. One general way to distinguish UK from Aussie online is we (Aus) use metric for everything, (kg, KMs, cms) and UK don't (stone (?), miles, feet)

At a glance the emails felt very Australian to me before I checked these comments, but I didn't do a thorough read.

globular-toast• 2 years ago

I thought use of British English was already a known thing. As is double spacing after a full stop.

trts• 2 years ago

have never seen anyone point out this incredibly obvious (or obviating?) point

unbelonger• 2 years ago

Autocorrect has been a thing since the early 90s.

In many European countries it is common that the default English wordlist is British spelling.

barcode_feeder• 2 years ago

The usage of British English as an identifying factor seems ridiculous to me. Faking such a thing is extraordinarily low-hanging fruit even for a bumbler. Letting slip some regional red herring is quite literally the easiest misdirection I can think of)

tobyp-2• 2 years ago

He's also fairly inconsistent. He occasionally uses -ize endings, e.g. "realize". He also uses some language that is more prevalent in North American English, e.g. "sucks", "gotten", "chump change" and others.

Someone attempting to use British English to obscure their identity would know to use words like "maths" and "flat", as he did; not as many people however are aware that British English doesn't (typically) feature the word "gotten", which he used on multiple occasions. To me, this lends to the theory the BrE was a misdirection.

(As an aside, he's inconsistent in some other things, like "e-mail" versus "email", "TOR" versus "Tor", and "double click" versus "doubleclick".)

abriosi• 2 years ago

Satoshi regularly took two spaces after a period. He uses vocabulary tied to British

There is a famous British cryptographer called Adam Back, who is also the inventor of the proof of work method laid out on the paper “hashcash”. He also leaves two spaces after a period (or used too)

I don’t think it really matters who created it. If you read the political story of bitcoin things look a lot clearer.

“The Blocksize War: The Battle Over Who Controls Bitcoin's Protocol Rules” is a good entry point

adrianmonk• 2 years ago

Satoshi regularly took two spaces after a period.

So did I, for a long time, because I was taught that way in typing class. And so were millions of other people. It's how it was usually done on typewriters. It supposedly made the text easier to read.

It has fallen out of fashion now. I eventually switched to one space once I realized things were going that direction. I'm not sure if I had switched by 2009.

So I think this just tells you that Satoshi is probably old enough to have been taught the old rule.

hn_throwaway_99• 2 years ago

I will say, I did enjoy reading abriosi's assumption, though. As I get older I get more aware of the things I just "took for granted" that everyone knows (because nearly everyone in my generation does know it) are really just generation-specific.

Like when I learned most kids can't read cursive anymore. Or that, for a long time, my use of "emoji noses", :-), really dated me (and I still think it looks better with a nose than without!) So I admit I had a similar chuckle with the idea that putting two spaces after a period was a unique characteristic! Even well into the PC era, 2 spaces was the norm before proportional fonts became widespread. And I still had a heck of a time moving to a single space because it just looked so weird to me.

asciii• 2 years ago

I think you're spot on.

Plus, the use of "colour" (with u) and reference to something as "rather Neanderthal"

freeAgent6• 2 years ago

Adam Back is far too jealous of Satoshi inventing Bitcoin. He put, “Bitcoin is HashCash extended with inflation control” in his Twitter profile for years after he got into Bitcoin after initially dismissing it when contacted by Satoshi. Back definitely isn’t Satoshi.

rl3• 2 years ago

The perfect ruse. /s

whiterknight5• 2 years ago

And too greedy. Why would he be doing this weird startups and marketing schemes if he already had all the money?

swamp402• 2 years ago

Two spaces after a period just means you learned on a typewriter. I still do it.

swamp402• 2 years ago

Hah, HN shrunk it down to one space.

silisili• 2 years ago

I learned on a PC, and we were taught that way initially also. I still think it makes sentences easier to read, so still do it. Though usually on mobile it's .nn because that's where my thumb always wants to land.

lawn• 2 years ago

Adam Back, who when asked how to scale Bitcoin while waiting for LN answered that we should let a "local technology expert" setup a tab.

Just, no.

bogota• 2 years ago

I love reading this stuff. 2010 is when i found out about bitcoin and wanting to learn about it was what took me from someone who played around on linux to someone who could write software and then ended up finishing a CS degree after.

Reading this reminds me of what I originally loved so much about the tech scene at the time. I haven’t been able to find that spark for a long time now unfortunately. Maybe im just looking in the wrong place but i feel it is hard to find another community like the early bitcoin one.

udev4096• 2 years ago

Totally agree on this. It was the true hacker spirit back then

metachris• 2 years ago

The Ethereum community still is.

mrinfinite3• 2 years ago

Satoshi Nakamoto means "Central Intelligence" but the people here are probably VERY FAMILIAR with CIA trends.

chrismmay• 2 years ago

Bitcoin has no leader.

Biganon2• 2 years ago

The vast majority of gold sits unused in vaults, owned by governments that could care less about its prettiness

No!! Not you, Satoshi!

(emphasis mine)

tobyp-2• 2 years ago

Despite the British English elsewhere, "could care less" is a particularly American error. I think that's noteworthy.

Satoshi – Sirius emails 2009-2011

Related Stories