Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Birth of Bitcoin

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/business/decoding-the-enigma-of-satoshi-nakamoto-and-the-birth-of-bitcoin.html

by mdelias • 11 years ago

185 149 11 years ago

oskarth• 11 years ago

Oh dear, here we go again.

exo762• 11 years ago

This article should result in huge court settlements payed by NYTimes to Mr. Szabo. They are literally putting his life and life of his family in danger.

I hope will sue their asses.

spellboots• 11 years ago

Why wouldn't this be protected speech under the first amendment? As long as the newspaper believes it to be true, why wouldn't they be allowed to publish it?

piker• 11 years ago

I don't think this is nearly the case here, but to answer your question publication of false information with "reckless disregard" for it's truth or falsity is also actionable under New York Times v. Sullivan. NYT does not have to believe it to be false to have First Amendment protections stripped.

s73v3r5• 11 years ago

He didn't say a damn thing about this being a free speech issue.

Aqueous3• 11 years ago

Nick Szabo has been ID'd repeatedly as the most likely author of BitCoin by various attempts to discover Satoshi's identity, and this article does not do anything more than that. Yet he remains stubbornly alive!

Amezarak3• 11 years ago

They are literally putting his life and life of his family in danger.

The world is filled with millionaires and billionaires who are publicly known and yet perfectly safe, even though the vast majority of them don't have security guards or anything like that.

Why do you think things would be different for the creator of Bitcoin? The reality is that very few criminals are of the take-hostages-and-murder type in the first place and murdering or stealing from a semi-famous rich person is a surefire way to get caught, especially when Bitcoins are traceable in a way that cash is not. You might as well break in and steal a Picasso painting from some other millionaire.

There are lots of people who want to remain private and unknown; the best (though not guaranteed) way is to not do anything worthy of the public notice. If you do, you should expect some scrutiny. So while I sympathize with Szabo, I don't feel very sorry for him. He pursued his dream of working on cryptocurrency (whether or not he is Satoshi) and this is a perfectly reasonable and predictable consequence of that dream.

zdkl2• 11 years ago

even though the vast majority of them don't have security guards

as if.

zaphar• 11 years ago

Those millionaires and billionaires by and large do not have large piles of untraceable money sitting around. Killing them wouldn't enrich the killer appreciably. Satoshi, whoever he is, does have a large pile of what may be untraceable money though. There is a world of difference between him and the others.

ArekDymalski• 11 years ago

Why would anyone want to kill the author of a software project that has been already released as an open source?

lotsofmangos5• 11 years ago

Satoshi has lots of bitcoin. People are worrying about Nick getting threatened for money, not killed for the creation of the software.

lotsofmangos5• 11 years ago

The papers publish lists of the world's richest regularly, most of them are still walking around.

People on those lists do sue the papers sometimes, but not usually for having their wealth overestimated - http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/07/us-britain-saudi-b...

zby4• 11 years ago

Anything new in this one?

mod2• 11 years ago

Yes.

I'm not to the details yet, but they're profiling a new man, Nick Szabo.

zby4• 11 years ago

That was sarcasm or not?

Aqueous3• 11 years ago

Yes. I don't think it's been reported that Nick Szabo has been involved in any BitCoin startup, let alone an exchange called "Vaurum" / "Mirror." Credit to the guy: in the world of the Internet where perfect privacy is nearly impossible, not so much as a picture of him has surfaced. Or, well, until recently; if you do a Google Search of his name one of the photos seems similar (sans beard) to the physical description of him in this article.

Despite this, he has to this day remained an extraordinarily secretive individual, while being widely suspected to be the creator of BTC. Looks like all that practice (http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1993/10/msg00759.html) paid off.

pags• 11 years ago

I also found it interesting that doing a Google image search on his name yielded nothing matching the description of the man given in this article.

ikeboy8• 11 years ago

Could you link to the picture you're talking about?

chrisdbaldwin• 11 years ago

We should not reveal the creator. Stop it.

amyjess2• 11 years ago

Please stop trying to censor journalists. We have a free press for a reason.

100timesthis6• 11 years ago

we should also have freedom of speech then.

zdkl2• 11 years ago

we also have a right to privacy which the entity behind Satoshi chose to excercise, shouldn't that entitle him to some discretion?

6d0debc071• 11 years ago

A normative statement isn't necessarily an attempt to censor someone. You can be for someone having a class of freedoms, which includes the freedom to do things you don't approve of, while disapproving of the manner in which they choose to exercise that freedom.

s73v3r5• 11 years ago

This is a completely irrelevant statement.

RedNifre• 11 years ago

Maybe, one day, we'll find a PGP signed "I am Satoshi Nakamoto" in someone's last will.

If he/she/they won't do this or if PGP is broken by then we will never know for sure.

drcode7• 11 years ago

or if PGP is broken by then we will never know for sure.

Unless they have already put encrypted messages into the existing blockchain using different algos with such a signed message- Then they could use another signature to prove they signed the message with PGP before PGP was broken.

lordnacho• 11 years ago

How about just using www.proofofexistence.com? Of course you might have expected the real Satoshi to have done this before the site came up.

nly• 11 years ago

No need to do that. Satoshi has bitcoin in the blockchain already that he or she may have secp256k1 keypairs for. Being able to spend these coins would be proof enough.

waterlesscloud• 11 years ago

They probably just have something on file with gwern.

icpmacdo• 11 years ago

Could you expand on what you mean?

wsxcde2• 11 years ago

Nothing really new here, just speculation that Nick Szabo is Satoshi. It mainly appears to be a submarine piece praising bitcoin.

ikeboy8• 11 years ago

What's new is info on Szabo, including that he worked at Vaurum, his age, and where he went to college.

myth_buster• 11 years ago

Also:

  “I’m not Satoshi, and I’m not a college professor. 
  In fact, I never was a college professor.”

It was widely held belief that he is/was professor at George Washington University.

thieving_magpie• 11 years ago

It's nothing like a submarine piece. It has original reporting, no clear endorsement of any company (not even Vaurum). This is original reporting, don't discount it just because it doesn't go so far as to make crazy certainties about the identify of Satoshi.

Nobody writes a submarine piece and goes to bitcoin conferences.

beaner• 11 years ago

What is a submarine piece?

wsxcde2• 11 years ago

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

ebbv4• 11 years ago

Depending on your perspective this profile could seem more or less compelling than the last one, but either way it's nowhere near conclusive. Fortunately unlike the Newsweek article, this one doesn't try to claim it is conclusive.

Personally I do think the creator should be unmasked. This person stands to profit hugely from BitCoin's adoption and continued use. I want to know if they really are doing it for eventual personal financial gain or not. And what kind of person they are, how the massive amount of money they gain will be used. Maybe Satoshi was a secret CIA project all along and the government will use the huge BitCoin stash to fund black ops that we'd rather not have happen. Maybe it was similar but the KGB instead. Maybe it was some lone hacker or group of hackers like Mr. Szabo, and they threw away the keys. Or maybe they didn't throw away the keys but they will just eventually split it up and give the money to their children. There's lots of good and bad possibilities, none of which we know until the identity of Satoshi is revealed.

Personally, I have always been skeptical of BitCoin. There's no reason why it should be the crypto currency. If cryptocurrencies do take off as more than just a toy for libertarians and rich technophiles, then governments will start their own fork and decree that these are the official cryptocurrencies of their nations, and all others are junk. Over night the value of BitCoin will plummet, because the wider population will choose the government backed one.

vbezhenar• 11 years ago

Those who trust their governments already use government-issued money. Nothing will change. Bitcoin made for those who don't think that government should be able to control money.

ebbv4• 11 years ago

I realize that's who made it and initially adopted it and currently uses it. But lots of BitCoin fans talk about it being adopted more universally. Which is what I was referring to being unlikely.

natrius5• 11 years ago

Governments all believe that the supply of money must be managed for the sake of the economy. This might be true, but any currency built on this belief will be valued lower than a fixed-supply currency.

It's hard to create and distribute a new currency, and convince people that it's worth something. Bitcoin has done that, and it will be hard for even governments to convince people that there's a better option.

ebbv4• 11 years ago

It's hard to create and distribute a new currency, and convince people that it's worth something.

I don't buy this premise. Lots of online games have also done this. They do this by finding a target audience and hooking them in, and then saying "If you want more you have to pay."

BitCoin just targeted libertarians. People have made other BitCoin forks for other audiences. Granted none of them took off like BitCoin, but that's because they were all pretty much jokes targeted at a small niche.

jadeddrag• 11 years ago

It is extremely easy for a government to convince people to use their new currency, they already do it just by enforcing tax payments be paid in their local fiat currencies.

DickingAround• 11 years ago

Libertarian junkie here; government don't need a bitcoin clone because if they want to control it then all inventive tech in bitcoin is unnecessary and if they don't want to control it they can just use bitcoin.

hullo• 11 years ago

While the $200 million worth of bitcoin sited in the article is certainly a lot of money, in a world with at least 1,800 billionaires in it, all open enough to be identified by Forbes, it can't really be called a "massive" amount.

zby4• 11 years ago

By the way I recommend the essays by Szabo: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ !

Also his blog: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/

pyabo3• 11 years ago

I would have asked Szabo: if you were Satoshi, would you change your answers?

drcode7• 11 years ago

If I were both Szabo and Satoshi, I would answer "no" to that question, because in that case I would lie on that question.

noobie• 11 years ago

Not following..Can you explain?

pyabo3• 11 years ago

I mean that he would answer exactly the same if he was or not Satoshi.

c0achmcguirk• 11 years ago

Couldn't he return the question to you? I mean would your answers differ if you were or weren't Satoshi?

Let people have their privacy.

lotsofmangos5• 11 years ago

My personal bet is that Satoshi Nakamoto is probably the creation of a security agency. Bitcoin has done wonders for illuminating vast swathes of the black market, especially for anyone with a good network overview.

vectorpush8• 11 years ago

Hmm, I'm not so sure. If anything, it seems to me that bitcoin has actually been quite a boon for the viability of darknet markets; certainly the silk road would have never risen to such heights were it not for bitcoin, and as far as I'm aware, bitcoin itself has never actually played a direct role in helping to identify darknet kingpins (who end up tipping their hand in some other fashion). Honestly, I'd say darknet markets are the only place where bitcoin is genuinely useful.

seanwessmith• 11 years ago

Which in turns feeds the security agency. A la private prisons

imglorp• 11 years ago

But it will. The journal contains connections, just like facebook, between every miner, buyer, and seller ever. If you make a new wallet and transfer your coins there, it's recorded. If you buy some on the street for cash from some guy, it's recorded. You don't always know the details, but you always know the connection.

Cash, laundering, shell corps; they have none of these properties.

drjesusphd• 11 years ago

bitcoin itself has never actually played a direct role in helping to identify darknet kingpins (who end up tipping their hand in some other fashion)

See: parallel construction.

Bitcoin or not, if the technology existed to identify "darknet kingpins", the technique wouldn't show up on the open press.

gwern3• 11 years ago

More importantly: if Bitcoin was invented and released for that reason, then it will turn out to be one of the more epic backfires in security agency history, for the simple reason that everyone involved knows that inventing the first successful distributed pseudonymous e-cash is much, much harder than inventing the first successful distributed anonymous e-cash.

As soon as Bitcoin became clearly successful, it also became inevitable that things like Monero or Zerocoin or Coinjoin would be invented. Once the genie of distributed e-cash has been let out of the bottle, it not merely can evolve but will evolve.

So in exchange for a brief period of visibility through Bitcoin, they would have permanently and irrevocably damaged their ability to spy via banks, Western Union, PayPal etc (entities which they pwn lock stock and barrel) as usage diverts to anonymous currencies (Bitcoin with extensions or mixes, or anonymous coins).

bryondowd3• 11 years ago

If we're throwing out evil schemes, maybe they created Bitcoin in order to build a big scary black market that they could point to as a reason they need more funding and less oversight.

Hey, look at all this bad stuff! We need more money to fight it! Also, we can't tell you what we're doing to fight it, because then it wouldn't work, so just trust us, ok?

*Note: I don't actually believe this, and I don't own a tinfoil hat. Just an amusing thought.

ChrisArchitect• 11 years ago

so much William Gibson in the Bitcoin mystery

archenemy• 11 years ago

so... it would be a ploy by an early version of Winterm.. I mean IBM's Watson, who is using bitcoin-laundered money to bootstrap itself into a weird-art-making godlike IA?

vectorpush8• 11 years ago

It seems odd to me that many bitcoin supporters consider Satoshi's pre-mined coins to be a personal security risk (to the tune of $200 million), but simultaneously refuse to hold that fact against bitcoin even though "pre-mined" is a common pejorative used to criticize altcoins.

Buge• 11 years ago

When used as a pejorative, it means coins that were mined before releasing the mining client to the world.

Satoshi only started mining after releasing the client, so those coins are not really pre-mined.

vectorpush8• 11 years ago

That's a fair point, but it doesn't seem like there's much of a practical difference in terms of user apprehension related to the consequences of pre-mining (namely, that the creator controls a gigantic sum of coins at close to zero cost)

gwern3• 11 years ago

Reddit discussion, with some criticism of specific points & replies by the author: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/361niw/decoding_th...

nqureshi• 11 years ago

> "That item, in May 2011, was one of the last posts Mr. Szabo made before he went on a lengthy hiatus to work, he said later, on a new concept he called temporal programming."

Anyone know what 'temporal programming' refers to? Sounds intriguing.

drcode7• 11 years ago

Eerie how the the linked message from his cypherpunk days makes reference to a "Digital Silk Road" http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1993/08/msg00426.html

loma7• 11 years ago

Everyone in the know, knows it was Kaiser Sozay and Kobayashi who started Bitcoin.

bandris• 11 years ago

If you would like to pronounce Szabo, saying 'sawbow' is close enough. (Sz is a letter in Hungarian, pronounced as S in English.) IPA: /ˈsɒboː/

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Szab%C3%B3

stefantalpalaru• 11 years ago

it's more like 'sah-boh'

Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Birth of Bitcoin

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