[dobbsbob]

Plenty of people on the cryptography mailing list mined the first coins like Hal Finney who wrote he is leaving them for his kids which is why they havent moved. Satoshi buggered off the day Gavin announced he was presenting BTC to the CIA seems odd he wouldnt stick around and try to influence development if he was a gov agent. His opsec was perfect though, which could mean he was an NSA or GCHQ employee doing this as a secret side project for himself. Nobody has had better opsec than Satoshi not once did he talk about anything personal even in PMs to Gavin or leave indicators to analyze. Somebody even scanned for every unique word Satoshi used to match it up to existing whitepapers and mailing lists, nothing turned up

[celticninja]

yeah, the one thing that makes me think this was the work of one person is the fact that a group, even a close knit group of NSA/CIA/GCHQ operatives could not produce, test and release something liek this without one of them making an error. I assume that satoshi thought through the production and release of this software well in advance of actually doing it, i.e. never suggesting it on a forum account, never testing or discussing it with anyone until he was soewhat ready to go. However his posting to the cypherpunks group does make me think he was at least a lurker on there before he signed in as satoshi, hence his decent OpSec.

[dobbsbob]

The gateway monitoring argument is also pretty feeble since how are they going to extract ID scans or other info from worldwide gateways or p2p sales. Sure bitcoin is risky if using a major exchange in a western country but good luck getting info on a trade from a Russian exchange, or IRC exchanger connected via Tor who lives in Vietnam

[gwern]

> Somebody even scanned for every unique word Satoshi used to match it up to existing whitepapers and mailing lists, nothing turned up

Really? Who was that, I don't recall ever hearing about a real textual analysis being done.