Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kyledrake 610 days ago
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.
1 comments
nullc 610 days ago
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.

link
costco 609 days ago
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.
link
nullc 609 days ago
> 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.

link