Seriously, this is at TV soap opera level now. And this...
"Whatever is happening is fascinating, it’s a plot worthy of Hollywood."
...is terrible judgment. No, it's not a plot worthy of Hollywood. It's a known fraud continuing to make grandiose claims that people publish and debate for some reason. Now, he's concocted a trail of evidence leading to a person that's paralyzed, hospitalized, and maybe nearly dead. The type of person that can't fight a disinformation campaign effectively. And the crowds go wild! Internet soap opera...
Maybe I need to leak some emails that some other HN people and I created Bitcoin as a prank to see how many people would waste that energy and CPU when they could just use decentralized transactions with real currency. That I was holding onto my Satoshi stash out of regret for how far my prank would go. Then, a third-world bank invests its holdings in the scheme to save their economy from impending hyperinflation. The same country that previously canceled my contracts for locals due to bribes to their corrupt government. So, I go Bond villain and dump all my Satoshi bitcoins at once to drive the value to near zero. The country is begging IMF for a bailout the next day.
Or some other Hollywood-style bullshit that Wright wasn't bright enough to come up with. :)
> Now, he's concocted a trail of evidence leading to a person that's paralyzed, hospitalized, and maybe nearly dead.
Klieman is dead since 2013.
As far as I understand, Wright "concocted a trail of evidence" last year, the "leaked" documents that point to Klieman, referred to by various online media are with great probability from Wright alone.
And he openly proved twice that he's able to construct false proofs (the PGP mails story last year and this "old signature" trick now). And he's quite capable when presenting them: whenever he just shows his "proofs" to only a few people, most people believe him. We have enough articles to confirm that.
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satoshin@gmx.com expired somewhere in 2011~2012 (gmx remove account within one year of inactivity), and someone immediately took it, and then used it to take control of Satoshi's account on p2pfoundation and bitcointalk.
But even without knowing that, Satoshi had no reasons at the time to came back just to say that one particular guy was not him, just on p2pfoundation and without any kind of proof.
Didn't the Satoshi Nakamoto account comment on the Newsweek article claiming Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto was the man?[0] That was in 2014. Since Kleiman died in 2013, then someone else would have had access to the Nakamoto account, right?
Indeed, I wonder why the Nakamoto account haven't made a comment on the Craig Wright claims.
It is clearly obvious that Craig Wright will be accused of identity theft by many if he really provides the crypto proof he announced yesterday.
Too many people prefer to think of Gavin Andresen as a complete idiot easy to fool with some stupid tricks or even a fraud one can buy, rather than to accept Craig Wright as Satoshi Nakamoto. They also think about Craig Wright as a complete idiot who gives false proof easily debunked in a matter of a few hours, when he never ever stated that his discussion of "Key Verification" was a proof of anything.
So if he is who he claims, which is something I don't know, then he has good reasons to try to proof it far beyond a signed message. The signed message, if it appears, won't settle things for him. Many people will just say he had the keys stolen.
It seems to me that there's two Satoshis to talk about here. One is the Satoshi that created Bitcoin. The other is the Satoshi that owns the private key to the genesis block, and also a whole lot of other bitcoins that are worth a lot of money.
Everything I've read about Craig Wright makes it seem pretty unlikely that he's the former. I just don't see enough in his CV to believe he created Bitcoin. This is the Satoshi I'd be more interested in actually learning the identity of.
As for the latter, all he needs to do to prove that is sign a message. That's pretty easy to do relative to the magnitude of the claim. Any proof beyond that isn't proof of identity, it's proof that he obtained that identity legitimately. I kind of don't care about who this Satoshi is unless they are the same person.
I don't think these two Satoshis have to be the same person, I don't think they need to be only one person, and I don't think they need to be alive, but right now I've personally seen nothing that makes me thing Craig is either.
Nobody suggested yet a scifi twist in the story like Satoshi Nakamoto was an AI project using deep learning. The project was dismantled and the keys can't be recovered. The model was trained with papers in cryptography.
Note to downvoters: think that every Satoshi story is hilarious until someone MOVES those F*ing prehistoric bitcoins on a transaction.
The article gives one answer: Satoshi owns lots of bitcoins. The article mentions 1.1M BTC. At the current rate this is about 500M US$. I think lots of people are eager for this amount of money. Finding out who legitimately owns this money could have a large influence on the exchange rate of bitcoin. Also if these BTCs would be "let free" this could even destroy bitcoin - a lot of power.
Also the more philosophical argument: At the moment there is a large controversy in the bitcoin community about whether the blocksize should be increased or not. If we found out who Satoshi is and can provide evidence what blocksize is nearer to Satoshi's "original vision" this could change the balance of power in the Bitcoin community.
So, why would discovering the real-life identity impact the exchange rate? What exactly would be different if Satoshi stepped out on an aircraft carrier with a big "Mission Accomplished" banner today?
I find the philosophical argument fascinating. It's like a bunch of Antonin Scalias arguing about the need for a strict constructionist view of the Founder's vision, to then find a foothold for draping it around their own subjective views for legitimacy? I had no idea shit got this real in the Bitcoin world.
> So, why would discovering the real-life identity impact the exchange rate?
If we came to conclusion that Satoshi was a "I mined lots of early blocks who gave a really high block reward. And you all were all parts of this 'Ponzi scheme' which made me rich" kind of person - I can image quite well the consequences for the BTC exchange rate.
If we found out that Bitcoin was an experiment by some CS genius that got a little bit out of control in scope, the trust many have in the Bitcoin protocol (reflected by the exchange rate) would probably decrease, since people could conclude that Bitcoin wasn't as thought-through as many Bitcoin advocates want the world to believe.
On the other hand, if we concluded that Satoshi was some computer scientist whose expertise simply rather lies in cryptography and who secluded himself from Bitcoin simply for the reason that he knows that the next steps will need an expert for scaling of systems for which he will be no help, but he is sure the further development of Bitcoin is in good hand, this would probably increase the trust people have in Bitcoin and thus increase the exchange rate.
I could write down lots of other fictional examples, but I think the idea is clear.
It could be argued that if Satoshi is a person, and that person created Bitcoin on equipment provided by a workplace, during work time... and if those first 1 million bitcoins were mined on equipment owned by a workplace...
Then depending on the legal jurisdiction of that person...
* The employer have a claim on the IP and the initial licence was incorrect
* The employer have a claim on the bitcoins
* The employer could have a claim on any core patent that arises
This is just from a UK patent law based view where it is repeatedly made clear to employees not to work on side projects or other things on work equipment and time.
So there is a potential legal risk, if it's determined that Satoshi was working on this using his employers resources.
Doesn't matter if you did a good job documenting and proving that you didn't use work equipment. I remember a speaker once telling an audience something like don't even use the same brand pens or notebooks purchased by your employer to jot down your ideas and stuff.
I don't think that provides a satisfactory explanation. Plenty of people have a lot of X, and nobody gives a shit.
Who has 6% of the total gold?
Who has 6% of the total rice?
Who has 6% of the total 56K modems?
Maybe this is Bitcoin's version of identifying the 0.01%.
It's somewhat ironic, because I hear and read all this fluff about the anonymity of Bitcoin and how attractive that is, but everyone's just dying to out Satoshi.
If the (or one of the key) developers of the Windows operating system somehow managed to remain anonymous into the early 80s, and then personal computing skyrocketed, many people who were the peers, adversaries or customers of such a person would be genuinely curious who they were.
We had at least 6 articles about bitcoin in the front page in the last 3 days and only 1 of them was about anything technical or factual. So yes, that's propaganda.
That's just tabloid-like excitement. People are eager to be the first to prove whether somebody is or is not the Satoshi. It's the taste of important mystery that gets people going, not propaganda.
"Whatever is happening is fascinating, it’s a plot worthy of Hollywood."
...is terrible judgment. No, it's not a plot worthy of Hollywood. It's a known fraud continuing to make grandiose claims that people publish and debate for some reason. Now, he's concocted a trail of evidence leading to a person that's paralyzed, hospitalized, and maybe nearly dead. The type of person that can't fight a disinformation campaign effectively. And the crowds go wild! Internet soap opera...
Maybe I need to leak some emails that some other HN people and I created Bitcoin as a prank to see how many people would waste that energy and CPU when they could just use decentralized transactions with real currency. That I was holding onto my Satoshi stash out of regret for how far my prank would go. Then, a third-world bank invests its holdings in the scheme to save their economy from impending hyperinflation. The same country that previously canceled my contracts for locals due to bribes to their corrupt government. So, I go Bond villain and dump all my Satoshi bitcoins at once to drive the value to near zero. The country is begging IMF for a bailout the next day.
Or some other Hollywood-style bullshit that Wright wasn't bright enough to come up with. :)