I spent quite a bit of time with Peter Todd in the very early Bitcoin days. I really enjoyed our conversations back then, I have no idea what he is up to now. My gut feeling is that he is probably not Satoshi Nakamoto. Adam Back is a far more likely suspect, particularly for his British english, which Satoshi wrote in.
+1 to Adam Back. Who is more likely to build ontop of some obscure code base called "Hash Cash"? Some random people that trolled the same forums or the original creator of it?
Imo this "secret" is known by many people as I have seen so many censorship and misdirection campaigns throughout the years if people mention Adam being the one.
Him being Satoshi also makes bitcoin core seem more legitimate. He can guide his creation without being formally known as satoshi.
It is obvious. Especially if you have ever been a solo dev for an extended period of time (like adam was)
There is a ton more evidence but seems like no one really wants to dig into Adam.
Adam literally stopped updating hash cash and a year later Bitcoin is released... check his website on archive.org.
Its ok. I like that there is still conversation as to who it is. It gives protection to him since there likely wont be anything concrete (if hopefully he was slick enough)
Indeed there's really nothing positive to be had from coming out as Satoshi at this point regardless of who it is. Criminals and governments will be falling over each other to try to get their take.
One addendum here: If I was personally Satoshi, I would come back and try to convince everyone to switch to proof of stake instead of proof of work and then subsequently disappear again. If you need a non-politicized reason why (something other than climate change), just go with my joke one of solving one of the outcomes of Fermi's Paradox (distant civilizations don't send signals because all energy is used to mine cryptocurrencies).
Proof of stake doesn't solve the problem bitcoin set out to solve.
A proof of stake system is essentially just a rehash on the earlier centralized digital cash systems where a quorum of key holders engage in a consensus that determines further updates to the system (including the set of keys allowed to authorize further updates).
We didn't need Satoshi to come up with that, that idea was already known.
I don't follow your reasoning. It seems to me that at an abstract level, Satoshi set out to solve the problem of government meddling in currencies by creating a distributed digital currency not managed by a governmental agency with a predictable and well documented amount of money supply growth. Whether it uses a PoW or PoS approach seems irrelevant to that goal? PoS can lead to centralization if larger stakeholders have more influence over the network, but the same problem applies to PoW as well, and the large miners' substantial influence on Bitcoin development politics feels more like corporatism than distributed consensus. I haven't really been following things lately, but Ethereum seems to be transitioning to PoS as a distributed system just fine?
Neither approach seems perfect, the important difference to me is that one approach, sans some technological advance like fusion energy, presents a major ecological problem that has existential risks for humanity.
(1) It's not Peter Todd. Anyone who knows Peter Todd and/or was around in the early days, can clearly tell Satoshi and Peter are not the same person.
(2) No good comes from speculation over the identity of Satoshi. When someone living is named, their life becomes absolute hell and the security risk imposed on them is very real. When someone dead is proposed, that hellish experience is passed to their family and heirs.
It's incredibly dangerous of these "journalists". Putting targets on people's back as well as possibly being slander.
Any bitcoin oldheads know it's not Peter Todd based on tons of behavioral, timestamped, and logistical evidence. The actual leading candidate is Len Sassaman if you look objectively at the evidence.
> It's incredibly dangerous of these "journalists". Putting targets on people's back [...] The actual leading candidate is [named other individual/family target]
Am I misunderstanding something, or do you want to edit that?
It's definitely Hal Finney. The fact that Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto lived a few minutes away from him, and Hal was a marathon runner who could have easily seen his mailbox, and also that Satoshi disappeared when Hal's ALS became overwhelming, is all the evidence you need.
That quote actually comes from an early technical conversation I was having about proof-of-sacrifice. Specifically, a conversation lamenting the fact that we kept on inventing neat tricks faster than we could actually use them - by "world's leading expert" I was making fun of the fact that I was technically the world's leading expert in something relatively simple and obvious to Bitcoin experts... yet even I hadn't actually put the technique into practice in a production application.
If you freeze-frame the film at the right point and actually read the full conversation, this is obvious. I don't have it handy. But some people posted screenshots on Twitter (which HBO may have taken down via DMCA... they were getting video clips taken down too).
>In a statement to CNN, Todd denied that the post was supposed to be written by Satoshi, calling it “a coincidence.”
>“I was simply pointing out a minor correction to what Satoshi wrote,” Todd told CNN in a statement. “Note that the bitcointalk forum has the ability to edit posts, so it doesn’t even make that much sense that Satoshi would follow up with another message rather than just editing the original to correct the mistake.”
Ah, I wasn't sure where the quote was from (it's not in the OP article?), so assumed it's from that Bitcointalk post. Apparently it's from some chat log:
>Hoback's theory relies on a chat log message written by Todd in which he claims to be the "world's leading expert on how to sacrifice your bitcoins ... I've done one such sacrifice and I did it by hand," Todd wrote.
>...
>"It's ludicrous," Todd told Hoback, also denying he's John Dillon. "This is going to be very funny when you put this into the documentary and a bunch of bitcoiners watch it."
> No good comes from speculation over the identity of Satoshi. When someone living is named, their life becomes absolute hell and the security risk imposed on them is very real. When someone dead is proposed, that hellish experience is passed to their family and heirs.
Indeed.
Cullen should know better: his previous project was a documentary on the QAnon conspiracies, which have managed to get people hurt due to crazies looking for these conspiracies. Cullen's evidence is hopelessly coincidence based... exactly the kind of shoddy evidence that fuels conspiracies like QAnon.
Personally I suspect he made the accusation against me simply to create media interest. In particular, by making an accusation against someone who wasn't a leading contender, myself. I haven't seen the film yet myself. But friends of mine have, and said that other than the Satoshi nonsense it was a reasonable documentary about Bitcoin. Problem is, it's hard to build interest in that.
Anyway, hopefully this just blows over. But we'll see. I already took some precautions re: security just in case...
The massive amount of additional logic and thought about Satoshi from OG'ers (e.g. |}ruid etc) that have come out in response to this terrible effort, IMO is partly the purpose of the doco.
> No good comes from speculation over the identity of Satoshi.
As Bitcoin gains market value the issue of Satoshi’s coins is becoming more and more serious.
It’s not wildly understood yet but Bitcoin will go fully dark in the future, how to do this, especially with help of L2 systems, is well known in the deep technical circles.
I think all libertarian capitalists believe money should be private. However Satoshi will eventually be the wealthiest human to ever exist and if that wealth is 100% dark it raises some tricky issues.
> No good comes from speculation over the identity of Satoshi. When someone living is named, their life becomes absolute hell and the security risk imposed on them is very real. When someone dead is proposed, that hellish experience is passed to their family and heirs.
Not a good reason. The person who developed bitcoin is responsible for billions (maybe trillions) of dollars of fraud and crime. They are responsible for a ludicrous amount of waste and carbon output. They should be held to account by the public.
By this measure, one would be compelled to start with the banks. Which is not to say I’m opposed in theory, just that I hope such sentiments are applied equally.
It stands out to the producers because: 1) Peter makes it just after joining the form, so he is unlikely to have detailed knowledge of bitcoin. 2) He seems to be finishing Satoshi's thought, as though he returned to an earlier post forgetting which account he was signed into. 3) The post happens just before Satoshi disappears and Peter leaves for a few years.
The doc also features many scenes with Peter and Adam Back where their eyes kind of shift around and they laugh awkwardly when asked about certain things. Since the doc it seems that Peter has taken to twitter to say he was mislead about the purpose of the interviews.
I've always kind of thought that Satoshi was probably one person who built it all in isolation, and I never played much attention to theories that Satoshi was actually multiple people. After watching the doc it does seem like Adam and Peter know a good deal more than they are letting on, even if it wasn't them specifically, it seems likely that they have some idea who it was.
> Peter makes it just after joining the form, so he is unlikely to have detailed knowledge of bitcoin.
The fact that the inputs, outputs, and fee of a transaction must add up isn't exactly "detailed knowledge" :) I don't think it took me all that long to figure that out when I first tried understanding how Bitcoin worked.
And frankly, the core of Bitcoin really isn't all that complex! You can have a very good understanding of all the parts after just a few days carefully studying it. Which is exactly what I did: I sat down with the Bitcoin Core codebase and figured out what all the code did. Especially at the time, it really wasn't that big of a codebase.
> After watching the doc it does seem like Adam and Peter know a good deal more than they are letting on, even if it wasn't them specifically, it seems likely that they have some idea who it was.
I can't speak for Adam. But I have no idea who Satoshi is. If anything, I think it could be literally hundreds or even thousands of potential people. Bitcoin is something so simple that you didn't need to be a super-genius to come up with it. You just needed to understand some relatively high-level, basic, cryptography and have a brilliant flash of inspiration. Satoshi was a very competent C++ programmer (it's a myth that his code was bad). But there's lots and lots of very competent C++ programmers out there.
So basically you're saying that the 3 day gap between your first post and your demonstrated understanding is actually reasonable, assuming you spent those 3 days immersed in understanding the code & design at play.
It seems unlikely to me that it could be thousands of people, given the correspondence had with various people it seems likely to me that a few people have information that could lead in the correct direction. But I guess we'll never know.
I think you misunderstood the context of 'thousands' - - "If anything, I think it could be literally hundreds or even thousands of potential people." - - meaning that, literally, thousands of DIFFERENT people, could be considered, as a potential possibility, of being a possible candidate, of being, Satoshi. Simply put :-P Not that 'thousands' of people are Satoshi, like you misunderstood. - anywho -
Even if he always used TOR/anonymous IPs, when accessing his @gmx.com account, with the number of sign-in's he had, it must be an absolute certainty, that he want through rogue exit nodes or some other de-anonymization methods we are not aware of, but deployed by gov. agencies.
I find it interesting you have a curious prior interest in that IP leak and your spin on it.
If you are Satoshi then you should think carefully if you have any other OPSEC slip ups and then if you think there might be more … It’s better to confess and handle the issue of your coins.
Your safety should be priority number one.
It’s not bad for Bitcoin or you if it is you. Whomever Satoshi is they gifted the world with something incredible and it’s bigger than them now. The problem is the coins and the uncertainty around the intentions of them.
Destroying the evidence, I’m guessing smashed and/or magnets on drives, that one is Satoshi probably seemed like the best idea at the time. Perhaps burning the coins wasn’t given enough consideration. It means there is a dilemma. What in the game is the best move next?
Investigators who work in the real world have intuitive skills and will find the connections if they exist. Those of us who live in computers and data and math can sometimes underestimate the human pattern finding capabilities. They might be able to see and prove clearly who is Satoshi even if Satoshi thinks well all the data is gone, wiped, they “can’t” prove it, but that doesn’t mean that’s how the rest of society sees “proof” they might be able to “tell”.
Now it is starting to look to me almost like you and Peter Todd are panicking and making huge slip ups.
Let me explain.
I see that you are now also arguing the IP leak is questionable and that others were running Bitcoin or could have been. Now combine this with the absurd idea that “retep” could have just been abandoned and it means nothing, even peter backwards, there are a million Peters whatever.
This is crazy you guys are basically accidentally admitting to technical somewhat knowledgable people like myself that retep is Satoshi because the excuses don’t pass the smell test. We know Peter was an actual wiz kid, it’s clear, Hal was emailing him in 2000, all using the email address that included … wait for it … “retep”, his IRC, his website, his freenode. It’s now obvious that he likely changed to his real name because the “cat was out of the bag” among the insiders. Hal would have immediately known Satoshi was Peter.
OMG guys get your act together fast. You need a plan B, no pun intended, because real investigators will tease it out, the top people doing that, have almost supernatural human intuition.
Regarding IP leak. Come on. Obviously it’s his IP. Was there a conference or vacation he was on maybe?
I’m just a dumb ass Bitcoiner from OG days and I can see though this charade so easily. I’m concerned.
Bitcoin is a gift to humanity from Satoshi (perhaps not retep!) and if the keys aren’t destroyed already and Satoshi is alive and has them then perhaps he should consider publicly burning the 1M coins or at least most of them. The nebulous case of supposedly the keys are destroyed is not a good situation tbh.
To answer your question. Yes I can definitely figure out where I was on January 10th, 2009. I know where I lived and worked then. I know if I took any vacations.
I’m hoping Peter Todd has a good alibi if he isn’t Satoshi. If he is … well time to confess and handle it in a way that doesn’t hurt the amazing invention.
EDIT: I wish I didn’t open this can of worms on HN. But I can’t delete it now …
You obviously haven't done much research on the topic. There are far, far more likely candidates, like Len Sassaman. Anyone that knew a bit about Bitcoin at the time could have made that BitcoinTalk post, it's not a "slip up".
Also, Satoshi almost certainly lived in the Benelux region when he released Bitcoin. See this paper for some actual evidence-based research: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.10257
Your tone makes it sound like you're about to break out gematria next. :) You're deep into confirmation bias.
Try considering an alternative hypothesis: This is a new absurd allegation which has only just shown up. Petertodd only learned the documentary would run with this claim hours before it came out as a result of journalists who saw a screener asking him questions. I am not petertodd.
At some point surprising late I realized that the retep account on the forum was petertodd, so it sounded like a fine reason to me that this would be surprising. But it turns out that when you reason backwards from having information after the fact there were already a number of links. Okay so what?
Consider how your logic would work if Todd was maliciously trying to falsely convince people he was a reluctant satoshi-- by e.g. using ineffectual arguments that he wasn't? or failing to to provide "proof".
You would be totally taken by him. Good reasoning doesn't have that vulnerability.
It's not even a speculative attack, this is part of what Wright did to him that enabled him to defraud so many. The kind of reasoning you're using is so vulnerable that it's being accidentally exploited by someone who isn't even trying to do so.
> Regarding IP leak. Come on. Obviously it’s his IP. Was there a conference or vacation he was on maybe?
simply reiterating a position isn't an argument.
> Yes I can definitely figure out where I was on January 10th, 2009. I know where I lived and worked then. I know if I took any vacations.
Where's the proof? That's what you demanded above.
The obvious answer is Satoshi Nakamoto is functionally dead.
His wallet would be worth around $70 billion dollars today and he hasn't touched it in over a decade.
Either he is A) dead, B) lost the wallet and wishes he were dead, or C) has achieved such spiritual enlightenment that has no interest in the personal or societal impact that $70 billion dollars could have.
He is not coming back folks, and even if we figure out who he was, that $70 billion is gone.
The $70 billion is not gone. He would need to sell his Bitcoin to others to amass $70 billion. Whatever impact $70B dollars could have is already happening: the difference is that it’s not his impact.
Much like Elon Musk couldn't liquidate his stocks and wind up a billionaire, my bitcoin is nowhere nearly worth $70B. I won't tell you my estimate, but I will say that it's quite modest by comparison.
Do you think the world really has $70B in cash to blow on bitcoin right now? Big players mine the stuff, they don't buy it.
To my reading, the bitcointalk reply only makes sense as a snarky comment (ie Todd isn't Satoshi). and the fact it was 1.5 hours after the Satoshi post also suggests it wasn't the same person making a quick correction.
Also, at the time petertodd's account was named 'retep' and didn't have any immediately obvious connection to his identity. If there had been a slipup he could have just abandoned the account and certainly not later had it renamed to his legal name!
In my mind all anyone has to do to prove they aren’t Satoshi is prove what they were doing on 2009-01-10 and had no possibility of using an IP from somewhere around Van Nuys California.
Hal Finney and others interacted with Peter Todd as “retep” for more than a decade before the bitcointalk account and post. They would have immediately recognized him.
It stands out to the producers because:
1) Peter makes it just after joining the form, so he is unlikely to have detailed knowledge of bitcoin.
2) He seems to be finishing Satoshi's thought, as though he returned to an earlier post forgetting which account he was signed into.
3) The post happens just before Satoshi disappears and Peter leaves for a few years.
The doc also features many scenes with Peter and Adam Back where their eyes kind of shift around and they laugh awkwardly when asked about certain things. Since the doc it seems that Peter has taken to twitter to say he was mislead about the purpose of the interviews.
I've always kind of thought that Satoshi was probably one person who built it all in isolation, and I never played much attention to theories that Satoshi was actually multiple people. After watching the doc it does seem like Adam and Peter know a good deal more than they are letting on, even if they aren't behind it all, it seems likely that they have some idea who it was.
I'm sure you've heard the adage, "It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it."
But online when you're silent you're not thought of as a fool-- you just don't even exist at all. Many of us whose contribution to world is primarily our knowledge and insight often prefer to self-educate to an advanced level on a subject before commenting on it at all.
My first bitcoin-dev post wasn't actually my first public comments on Bitcoin, but I'd read the entire bitcoin code base before ever saying anything about it...
It's not surprising to see Bitcoin developer people emerge from nowhere somewhat well informed, even back then (though to be fair fairly few people really understood txn internals).
I've known Peter and Adam for a very long time. Both have resting smirkface. Petertodd grins like he ate the canary any time he says something even the slightest bit clever. Adam too, now that I say it, though the clever threshold is a bit higher. That combined with talented editing can probably make either of them look guilty of whatever you want, or at least anything that they enjoy talking about.
Last time I talked to Peter was in 2019 and he was making fun of me for spending Bitcoins continuously since 2011, and said Bitcoins are supposed to be hoarded like gold or something, not used as money. Definitely not the attitude of someone who supposedly burned the million Satoshi coins (which was a claim from the movie, I guess some leaked IRC transcript or something). I wouldn't be surprised if the leaked transcript came from Peter himself. He seems to get off on weird deception plays like that.
The bitcoin IRC logs are public, the segment in the documentary is from the bitcoin-wizards channel (e.g. https://gnusha.org/bitcoin-wizards/). There are a number of public interfaces to them, I didn't catch which one the documentary was using.
It doesn't say anything that support's the documentary's thesis, Petertood is talking about provably destroying coins in order to mint identities and similar. This couldn't apply to the coins alleged by some to belong to Satoshi, as they haven't moved.
Almost all of Bitcoin's history is completely public, but sadly the wealth of information seems to just enable conspiracy theorists to allege that there is more hidden.
> I'm definitely still team Dave.
I'm so tired of dealing with the victims of Wright's nonsense. It's gross. Posts like this are like a IV drug user showing off their radical track marks.
For whatever reason the documentary presented those logs as coming from another site which never has had logs for that channel prior to 2015. I have no clue why but it probably made it much harder for for many people to find.
It's hard not to be a little coy when you helped build something that usually takes an empire to build with some bad code and a few hundred loosely affiliated weirdos on the internet. I still don't think most laypeople (or honestly most people in the "crypto" space) really understand the significance of what was invented with Bitcoin.
Who is more likely to build ontop of some obscure code base called "Hash Cash"? Some random people that trolled the same forums or the original creator of it?
Imo this "secret" is known by many people as I have seen so many censorship and misdirection campaigns throughout the years if people mention Adam being the one.
Him being Satoshi also makes bitcoin core seem more legitimate. He can guide his creation without being formally known as satoshi.
It is obvious. Especially if you have ever been a solo dev for an extended period of time (like adam was)
There is a ton more evidence but seems like no one really wants to dig into Adam.
Adam literally stopped updating hash cash and a year later Bitcoin is released... check his website on archive.org.
Its ok. I like that there is still conversation as to who it is. It gives protection to him since there likely wont be anything concrete (if hopefully he was slick enough)
Clearly not him. He initially dismissed Bitcoin and jumped on the bandwagon when it started making headlines due to its fast rising price. Plus, Adam Back seeks fame, he would happily claim to be Satoshi if it was really him. He was even criticized early on for seeming to take too much credit for Bitcoin[0].
My guess is that it's someone who was not particularly well-known prior to Bitcoin.
If an HBO show suggested that I was the Bitcoin creator, I would be wealthy... from owning HBO, after my team of lawyers (who accepted the suit on contingency) was done with them.
Then there's Google editorializing a headline at the top of search hits:
> Top stories
> Bitcoin creator's identity revealed in new HBO documentary
Yet none of the headlines they show makes that claim:
> POLITICO.eu - Bitcoin creator is Peter Todd, HBO film says
> Bloomberg - HBO Documentary Suggests Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Is Peter Todd
> The New York Times - A New Bitcoin Documentary Reopens the Search for Satoshi Nakamoto
> The Crypto Times - Peter Todd Denies He is Satoshi Nakamoto as claimed by HBO...
> The New Yorker - Has Bitcoin's Elusive Creator Finally Been Unmasked?
In general (not just in this case), there should also soon be some huge lawsuits for robo-slander, robo-libel, robo-defamation, robo-reckless-endangerment, etc.
Government is getting a lot more tech-savvy, and "everything's legal, if you claim an AI/algorithm/computer/dog did it" isn't flying anymore.
Simplified movement of value across international borders, avoiding excessive exchange fees.
Mind you, I don't think in its present form it is worth it (POW is intrinsically power-intensive; a lot of things about the banking system that seem like bugs are actually features; etc).
But I think A) value stored in tokens, and B) decentralized ledgers and nonrepudiation are things that are may want to have as core financial services in the future.
I think the most positive benefits are people using it to protect themselves in countries under authoritarian rule and/or economic collapse. Low-fee remittances are a lesser but still very positive use-case. There are genuine large benefits to people in these situations.
See also: Why I'm less than infinitely hostile to crypto
>CNN sat down with Hoback, prior to Todd’s denial, to discuss why the director is so confident in his theory, whether he’s worried about being sued, and that big dramatic confrontation at the end of the film.
I said to him, ‘What disguise will hide me from the world? What can I find more respectable than bishops and majors?’ He looked at me with his large but indecipherable face. ‘You want a safe disguise, do you? You want a dress which will guarantee you harmless; a dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb?’ I nodded. He suddenly lifted his lion’s voice. ‘Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you fool!’ he roared so that the room shook. ‘Nobody will ever expect you to do anything dangerous then.’ And he turned his broad back on me without another word. I took his advice, and have never regretted it. I preached blood and murder to those women day and night, and—by God!—they would let me wheel their perambulators.”
I was thinking about possible motives for Satoshi to be out of the limelight and now I have a question for those of us who have significant security/signint/encryption experience:
Given the info we have, what are the chances that state actors, such as intelligence agencies, are aware beyond doubt of Satoshi Nakamoto's true identity?
What kind of edge does such intel give? Their work (bitcoin) spawned thousands and thousands of people who have taken the foundational technology and made many improvements to it. It seems like trying to figure out who they are incentivizes hobbyists to figure it out rather than state sponsors.
I'm honestly surprised that all of the alleged satoshis haven't been kid napped by armed gangs trying to get the billions locked up in the first mined blocks.
For a person it doesn't matter. But the context here is gangs, and for organizations it could make a difference. $2B can be split many-ways and still have significant money for everyone.
Would be a pretty amusing black comedy. They kidnap the potential Satoshi, who is actually Satoshi but they’re not sure. [hijinx added here]. Then in the process of torturing him, they accidentally kill him before he reveals the password. And then it’s confirmed he’s who they wanted.
At least one of the Satoshi fakes moves around with a big security detail. For them it's presumably just a cost of their faking business and paid for by the people they're defrauding.
But for someone involuntarily accused that's another matter. A security detail is eye wateringly expensive -- particularly one comprehensive enough to stop kidnappers in general.
"Alleged Satoshis" are generally public, almost by definition. We would notice if they disappeared. We would also notice if the well-known Satoshi-associated wallets had any activity, which would be an unavoidable signal if any such kidnapping succeeded in finding the real one. Not everything is a deep mystery.
A lot of old timers in this space have been subject to kidnapping and ransom attacks, some real and some merely threatened, as well as more mundane phone porting and SWAT'ing. These don't make the news.
Then there are the other crypto people who have met grisly ends: Bob Lee and Li Chiming, as well as the suspicious deaths of John Forsyth, Tiantian Kullander, Vyacheslav Taran, and Park Mo. Not candidates for Satoshi, but it goes to show that "outing" potential Satoshis is not a safe thing to do.
I know about them because I'm one of them. (This is a pseudonymous account, but I've been a bitcoin developer since 2010, and subject to multiple personal attacks. Thankfully no kidnapping or ransom... yet.)
The genesis block has a message from a relatively obscure British newspaper in it (The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks). Not something I would expect a frontier Canadian in their 20s to be sourcing from.
That and various other evidence (coding style, british-english spelling) has suggested to me for a long time that it's an older gentleman from the UK, likely with an academic background in economics or related distributed systems. I don't know either way, but it seems borderline libel to suggest without much more substantial evidence that it's Peter Todd.
The Times is not an obscure paper, but if you'd like some fodder: the headline Satoshi used is from the print edition rather than the online edition which was different.
That said, Satoshi was clearly extremely diligent in concealing their identity, and so they may well have purposefully decided to use a headline that they wouldn't have had ordinary access too-- when someone is trying to conceal themselves it creates an environment which is hostile to logical reasoning. Any point which could point one direction might instead point the opposite or in a random direction.
Satoshi connected to IRC from a residential IP address in Los Angeles in 2009. So there was a point in time where all it would have taken was a subpoena to find him. Now those records probably don't exist. Unless that was a Tor exit or one of those socks5 proxy type services. I remember there was an archive of the Tor consensus files going back really far that I can no longer find, so it'd be possible to check if it was.
> Satoshi connected to IRC from a residential IP address in Los Angeles in 2009.
Maybe, that claim is pretty speculative and shouldn't be repeated as established fact.
I agree with the rest of your points, though there were a lot of proxies other than tor. In particular, there were well known forums you could post on to get private proxies -- often used for kinda shady astroturfing and similar. So excluding tor alone isn't sufficient. Tor wouldn't have been as useful for Satoshi's bitcoin usage because he couldn't run a node over it that accepted inbound connections.
Because he wrote everyone he wasn't important and asked everyone to focus on the main objective which was his creation. Seriously: IDK I am all puzzled. Looks like a start of a religion (^^).
1. Satoshi emailed me at the same time Hal was taking part in a marathon. Yes, technically emails can be delayed, but ... why? There was no urgency in those discussions.
2. Hal preferred to write C and was still writing C up until the moment he sadly passed away. Satoshi wrote in modern(ish) C++. Note that the same problem applies for Len Sassaman and basically everyone who has been fingered as a possible Satoshi. The combination of C++, Win32 and cryptography is not very common in the cypherpunk space.
3. Hal was a professional cryptographer who worked on an encrypted messaging product (PGP). Satoshi had some fairly basic misunderstandings about cryptography, like believing that you can't use elliptic curve keys to encrypt messages, and referenced having to do research to understand the cryptography he needed. Why would Hal pretend to be a newbie at cryptography, up to and including not having features Satoshi said he wanted?
4. Hal did try to create digital cash already, but tried to build it on trusted computing hardware. He had a long term interest in that approach, as did I, and his last project before his death was one I suggested related to this tech. In fact there are emails between me and Hal in list archives pre-Bitcoin where we swap notes on Intel LaGrande. If Hal had been Satoshi it seems likely that Satoshi would have at least commented on the ways TC could be used at some point, but Satoshi never showed any awareness the tech exists.
6. If you're trying to be anonymous, why would you immediately and pointlessly reveal your identity by messaging yourself?
Hi Mike. Please provide the complete enclosing headers of the email in question, along with their DKIM signature. The header trace will help dispel any allegations that the messages were delayed for technical reasons or were otherwise corrupted.
Most people have no way to more-deeply authenticate those emails because you didn't provide headers. Many people, myself included, would love some way to better-rule-out whether parts of the messages had been elided, for example. A DKIM signature would have been a perfect integrity check of the message. It's just good protocol.
As a result of timestamping emails with their DKIM into Bitcoin, now even rotated, broken, or released keys can be used to partially authenticate e.g. Google messages. You can see this for example in this project here:
Satoshi's email provider didn't use DKIM. Even if they had the keys would have long since been rotated.
That's OK though - you're the only one insinuating that I faked the emails, nobody else ever has. You won't come out and say it directly of course, because if you had to spell out this theory explicitly it would sound obviously idiotic.
This is a standard request. I find your response confusing. Every other party that produced messages from Satoshi produced the headers without being asked or on request. Particularly when people are assigning a lot of significance to the timestamps the headers are quite interesting.
As far as key rotation goes, never to miss an XKCD386 opportunity: It's often pretty easy to go find historic keys and them confirm that they the correct ones by testing against contemporaneous messages received by other parties from the same domains or which got captured in places like public email archives.
Which part of "there are no signatures" did you not understand Gregory? And stop replying to yourself with sock puppets, it's unseemly, we know Midnight Magic and variants is you.
This paper makes a pretty good case that the late Len Sassaman was Satoshi. Its a pretty thorough examination regardless if you think it was Len or not and doesn't come to a definitive conclusion.
I think it is likely the 2014 message was actually Satoshi and there really is no evidence to the contrary. It rules out Len or at least Len as the exclusive creator
My money is on Hal, too. He was in the dorm room next to mine. I've never met an actual genius before or since. Bitcoin is just the thing he would invent.
He was interviewed when he could no longer speak. He was asked if he was Satoshi. He just smiled.
Hey, it would be a kindness to Hal's family to not promote this theory. They've been subject to threats and extortion over it.
To the extent that someone could argue that there is some public interest angle, I think that's only arguable in the case of certainty. Speculation is a dime a dozen. Even if there is a public interest angle in identifying Satoshi, I don't think that extends to idle speculation.
Hal was an amazing guy and I feel privileged for the bit of interaction I had with him, refraining from a fun game of public speculation is a small cost. I'm sure if he's cryonically revived in the far future he'll appreciate the consideration. :)
In general speculation like this risks creating a lot of harm for the targets, especially since brutal cryptocurrency related kidnapping and torture appears to be on the rise.
It's unclear what bitcoin Satoshi might have had access too, but people who aren't Satoshi certainly don't have access to it... and the cost of security against criminal gangs hoping for a billion dollar windfall are unreasonable large even for a wealthy person and are unimaginable for someone of more ordinary means.
Stylometry was known at the time, Hal might have changed his. People have been using computer stylometry for years to rule in or out pretenders to be Shakespeare.
He would've had to mimic someone else in that early crypto-sphere who does match the stylometry much much better.
That person was also familiar with Hal's PoW implementation (where Hal mentions it was an implementation of this guy's concept) 3 years before the Bitcoin paper, but attempted to obfuscate that fact.
It veers quickly into conspiracy theory territory but I have long thought a nation state is a likely candidate for creator. You can kinda pick from several, all equally free from and evidence, and come up with narratives around why they might have done such a thing.