[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.