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.
It’s curious that nullc is simultaneously arguing that people shouldn’t imply Hal is Satoshi and insinuating your email timestamp alibi for Hal is questionable.
The position of petertodd, Adam Back, and nullc appears to be that investigating the identity of Satoshi is pointless and shouldn’t be encouraged.
If you have the time you might be interested in a discussion I’ve been having with him about identifying Satoshi. Thank you for your time on HN.
They are also arguing debug.log IP leak is questionable, retep was an unknown pseudonym not known handle for peter, they both are bad C++ devs in 2008. As a relative outside to your community, yet technically knowledgeable, it looks all very odd.
Please provide the headers for the message rather than deflecting with personal attacks and shameful false accusations. Also please withdraw the maliciously false accusation regarding midnight, you can't possibly believe that is true (considering that midnight was a pillar of the bitcoin IRC spaces long predating me).
All this drama is completely unnecessary. I made a complete regular and uncontroversial request. You could have just responded in kind.
I'm not gmax, mike, which you definitely knew on IRC when you offered to help me deal with criminal harassment on IRC by handing me +o status in the channels where they were harassing people in your name.
(edit) I'm also not answering gmax; I'm answering you, with concrete specifics and an actual example, to inform you about the utility of DKIM even if Satoshi's email provider didn't use them, which you clearly didn't already know.
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.
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?
7. He denied that he was Satoshi.