[alchemist1e9]

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41803918

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.

[nullc]

I don't have a position on the email timestamp stuff: I can't have one because no one has ever seen the headers, and you shouldn't either.

I don't think there is anything curious about the fact that I'm unwilling to lie or intentionally exaggerate my beliefs simply because it would further another preference of mine. -- The request for the headers on that message goes back long before anyone ever suggested any interaction with Hal.

Rather, I think it would be "curious" and show a lack of integrity if I were to just stop asking a question after a situation was created where my request was no longer in the interest of my other arguments.

[alchemist1e9]

I agree we should see headers. I support your request for email headers with or without DKIM signatures.

I suspect we actually agree on many items.

I also support your question about the debug.log IP leak. I hope to study that in the next few days. That IP leak if real is probably the strongest lead we have on Satoshi.

Do you support unmasking Satoshi if it is possible?

[nullc]

> Do you support unmasking Satoshi if it is possible?

No.

The only argument I've heard to justify this which is at all credible is that the ownership of a particular pool very early coins may be a matter of significant public concern. I'm dubious of this argument given that it's a couple percent of the total and people seem to not care at all about other similar consolidations in Bitcoin. And it's normal for very wealthy people to be largely unknown e.g. in the US we have absolutely no idea who most billionaires are, a lot of the supposed lists are just speculation and nonsense. (a fun related story: https://sherwood.news/power/who-died-and-left-the-us-7-billi... )

But for the purpose of this discussion I'll accept that ownership of those coins matters. (I don't think we'd make any progress on debating that)

But if the motivation is those coins, we're not even sure they belong to Satoshi. And to the extent there is a concern it's a concern that their use could be disruptive to the economy, their identity alone is unlikely to help -- like why would Adam Back vs Petertodd matter for that question?

So what I think is that if we think carefully about what all this means and we're honest about it-- this demand for their identity is so that the public can use coercion to make them destroy their coins. The author of the documentary said the quiet part out loud in a surprisingly extortionary sounding tweet: "Satoshi, if you have access, you could burn the stash. Bring an end to this. Protect yourself, protect the network." (https://x.com/CullenHoback/status/1844144664825430242)

I think that kind of coercion would be immoral. But worse than immoral it would be unnecessary:

If the users of Bitcoin feel so threatened by these unmoved early coins that they're willing to ungratefully violate privacy of Bitcoin's creator, a person who might not even own those coins, in an act which might harm the creator seriously but not even address the concern ... they could instead just adopt a fork that makes those early unmoved coins forever inaccessible. -- and perhaps let whomever owns them come out to argue against it.

(Heck, people have already created such forks though that wasn't their motivation-- some forks have diverted all not-recently moved coins to the forks creators, as a kind of premine).

The fact that they haven't indicates that they don't feel that way. To summarize, I think trying to pursue Satoshi's identity is:

An ungrateful attack on someone who gifted the world with something new and interesting and whom wronged no one, motivated by fear of some trove of coins that may not even belong to the target, a fear which would not be addressed by merely knowing their identity (even assuming the coins were theirs), and if it does address it-- it would probably be through coercively depriving them of their coins by subjecting Satoshi to threat and attack... when all along the people supposedly being protected could, if they cared about it enough, simply neutralize "the threat" themselves by adopting a version that didn't have it, or by just not using Bitcoin at all. Clearly they don't feel that strongly.

But attacking someone elses privacy and safety is something many people don't consider much of a cost, I guess.

I just don't buy it.

If it sounds like I've made up my mind on the issue, remember that I've had some 14 years to think about this question.