[olalonde]

Not only is there not much evidence backing the Peter Todd theory, but there are many issues with it:

1) Why wouldn't he have used his Satoshi identity to discredit Craig Wright and save himself and fellow core developers a lot of pain and suffering?

2) Why wouldn't he have spent any of his large BTC stash?

3) Why is he fine being known as an early Bitcoin developer and adopter, but not fine being known as its creator?

4) How would he have a copy of the "20th Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux", given that it was only distributed to attendants and university libraries in the Benelux?

5) How would he have gotten his hands on the British version of a newspaper on 03/Jan/2009?

Due to 1), I highly doubt that Satoshi remained an active member of the Bitcoin community following his departure. The fact that he stayed silent during the "block wars" and the Craig Wright shitshow shows a complete indifference towards Bitcoin or more likely, that he was dead or incapacitated.

I'm not saying Sassaman is Satoshi, but simply that Sassaman is a much better candidate. This is a picture that Sassaman took of his office in 2007: https://www.flickr.com/photos/enochsmiles/488460964/. Notice anything interesting?

[nullc]

I don't have a dog in this fight, but I have late 2010 backups with a copy of the "Design of a secure timestamping service with minimal trust requirements" paper. It was rendered with a January 2009 copy of ghostscript. Just based on the dates there are reasonable odds my copy is the same one Satoshi had. Satoshi contacted the authors he cited for information on how to correctly cite their work, he didn't actually have to have seen the symposium document. Considering that it's title used the same language as Satoshi, it wouldn't have been surprising for him to have turned it up -- or one of the people Satoshi contacted might have suggested it.

Lots of possibilities.

I would take the source that you're taking these arguments from with a huge grain of salt.

> I'm not saying Sassaman is Satoshi, but simply that Sassaman is a much better candidate.

A hand full of random coincidences which are unsurprising for people of their interests isn't good evidence for any of them.

And it's also not unusual for people to have access to proceedings for events they didn't attend, or even to have them outright, e.g. I have a big set of FC proceedings but only was actually attending for a couple-- https://files.catbox.moe/w1dhwn.jpeg.

[olalonde]

> I don't have a dog in this fight

Neither do I, I was simply comparing them from a Bayesian point of view. There is indeed no "smoking gun". What you say about the citation is possible but I estimate that it's more likely he had a physical copy (I would change my mind about that if we found out he had indeed contacted the authors for citation information).

Also, Sassaman has some important points in his favor that Peter Todd lacks:

1) he is dead. I find it unlikely that Satoshi is still alive and even more unlikely that he is still alive and very publicly involved in Bitcoin.

2) strong connection to one of the white paper's citations

3) cares a lot about privacy/anonymity, e.g. he tried to convince Bram Cohen to release BitTorrent anonymously

But he also has some points that work against him: not being known as a Windows C++ programmer, his wife not believing him to be Satoshi, etc.

Overall I feel Sassaman is more likely than Todd, but I am not convinced he is Satoshi.

[alchemist1e9]

> 1) he is dead. I find it unlikely that Satoshi is still alive and even more unlikely that he is still alive and very publicly involved in Bitcoin.

As morbid as it is we should all admit we want Sassaman to be Satoshi. It would be undeniably a better outcome for Bitcoin. I hope it can be proved personally.

What I don’t understand is why his wife wouldn’t help prove this. It would be in her interest in my opinion and likely the drives and systems he used can be tracked down and confirmed as either destroyed or still encrypted.

Satoshi’s coins are the elephant in the room. If the world is really headed towards a Bitcoin reserve world and value of a coin comtinuing to increase… then the Satoshi hoard can make him the first trillionare. The uncertainty around control of those coins is probably already a tail risk uncertainty that is holding back Bitcoin.

Back to Peter Todd it’s curious he was also actively working on distributed timestamping in 2007/8 apparently. Though I have yet to track down his code and only recently learned this.

If you didn’t watch the doc you probably should we have to acknowledge Todd’s and Back’s body language was definitely at a minimum curious.

My biggest concern is all 3 identified - Back, Maxwell, and Todd appear to be engaged in deflection and confusion tactics. They seem to promote this narrative that it’s best we don’t know who Satoshi was and so many people could be etc, I don’t buy that reasoning.

I hope Sassaman is Satoshi. Why not start having candidates show some alibis like Mike Kern has done for Finney … which curiously nullc has just questioned, though I’m glad he has, we should see the email headers the more we know to help track down Satoshi the better at this point imho. I’m aware many Bitcoiners seem to disagree with that opinion and it’s notable Back has not released his supposed correspondence with Satoshi at all.

[greyface-]

> Satoshi’s coins are the elephant in the room. [...] tail risk uncertainty that is holding back Bitcoin.

New protocol rule: all coinbase outputs from before block 105,000 are unspendable after block 1,050,000.

[alchemist1e9]

Something like your proposal will have to be included in any future hard fork that takes Bitcoin dark by adding full privacy. It’s likely miners will one day embrace such a fork if governments become hostile to their business.

[alchemist1e9]

We all want Sassaman to be Satoshi. For the sake of debate I’ll reply to your issues with the Peter Todd theory:

> 1) Why wouldn't he have used his Satoshi identity to discredit Craig Wright and save himself and fellow core developers a lot of pain and suffering?

In the documentary he tells you himself. He destroyed Satoshi thats “what he would do if he was Satoshi”. I can relate even. I’ve “destroyed” one of my own pseudonyms once and it was probably a panic move on his part.

Also don’t forget the 2015 “satoshi” email which people assume is “hacked” yet it’s completely possible it’s authentic. Satoshi may have retained access to the email address after all other data was “destroyed” simply because he remembered the passwords and didn’t delete the email account. Yet what was the lesson from that? nobody would believe it’s Satoshi unless the message is signed … which Satoshi can’t do … because the PGP keys are deleted.

> 2) Why wouldn't he have spent any of his large BTC stash?

Again because he destroyed Satoshi. But alternatively why move or spend coins if you don’t need to? I have unmoved coins from 2013. Somebody from very very early felt the need to move their coins recently, likely for security reasons as it moved to multisig.

29 Jan 2009 - mined coinbase transaction ——> !! https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/77fe7a6eb5e98bf53...

> 3) Why is he fine being known as an early Bitcoin developer and adopter, but not fine being known as its creator?

There is a LOT of baggage being Satoshi. Without PGP keys or other keys to sign with NOBODY will believe him anyway, is that not true?

> 4) How would he have a copy of the "20th Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux", given that it was only distributed to attendants and university libraries in the Benelux?

retep could have easily been emailed this. He was also working on timestamping project like Sassaman though I have yet to see this project and code that supposedly exists.

> 5) How would he have gotten his hands on the British version of a newspaper on 03/Jan/2009?

Borders. It was awesome back then. My wife and I often reminisce over the foreign newspapers section of Borders. They were only 1 or 2 days old and very enjoyable. In Toronto Borders they would have had an excellent selection of newspapers from all over the world and especially British newspapers. They were flown in air mail since 1980s like that. I miss Borders over Barnes and Noble A LOT.

> Due to 1), I highly doubt that Satoshi remained an active member of the Bitcoin community following his departure. The fact that he stayed silent during the "block wars" and the Craig Wright shitshow shows a complete indifference towards Bitcoin or more likely, that he was dead or incapacitated.

As we can see your issues with Todd are not as solid as you think.

> I'm not saying Sassaman is Satoshi, but simply that Sassaman is a much better candidate. This is a picture that Sassaman took of his office in 2007: https://www.flickr.com/photos/enochsmiles/488460964/. Notice anything interesting?

I wish his wife could help prove it was him. She is clearly traumatized overall so perhaps she doesn’t yet accept she should help. The tweet about “according to it’s creator” is almost a smoking gun.

Let’s hope Satoshi is Sassaman, however I fear the case for Todd is much stronger than we all would think initially.