I think Satoshi is a Stone Soup.
Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history
81–90 of 167 posts
Re: Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history
#82Satoshi came out of retirement in March 2014 to state that he was not Dorian Nakamoto, in the wake of a Newsweek article that falsely fingered the latter as Satoshi: https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/06/satoshi-dorian/ I still think it was Hal Finney, who was in similar cypherpunk circles, created the first PoW system, received the first Bitcoin transaction, lived in the same town as Dorian Nakamoto for 10 years, was di…
I think it's Nick Szabo. This is the article that convinced me: https://www.bitcoininsider.org/article/78686/i-designed-bitc...
It's 100% Nick Szabo with Hal Finney's help.
There's a non-zero chance that there's an NSA/IC employee who worked with them. Just based on the 1996 NSA paper "How to Make a Mint" and the potential that a government cryptocurrency is the ultimate solution for the inflation problem. Regulated stablecoins and/or a CBDC is the perfect way to disintermediate the banks from the dollar.
Source: speculation but I was around before bitcoin
Re: Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history
#83Re: Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history
#84My money is on Paul Le Roux.. most hackers are too uppity to write windows software. Le Roux was a pragmatist with a real practical need to move dirty money without banks.
Yes, but, really, the very pragmatical nature of Le Roux somehow makes me doubt he would have left the initial wallets untouched all these years. He is an interesting character, for sure, but does not seem the kind to not use a big lever at his disposal.
La Roux has been in custody since Satoshi disappeared.
Re: Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history
#85Satoshi came out of retirement in March 2014 to state that he was not Dorian Nakamoto, in the wake of a Newsweek article that falsely fingered the latter as Satoshi: https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/06/satoshi-dorian/ I still think it was Hal Finney, who was in similar cypherpunk circles, created the first PoW system, received the first Bitcoin transaction, lived in the same town as Dorian Nakamoto for 10 years, was di…
> I still think it was Hal Finney
Finney didn't mix British and American English the way Satoshi did in his writing.
Finney was also an experienced and much better developer[0] than Satoshi[1]
[0] https://github.com/halfinney/bitcoin/commit/dc411b51e0a3cffc...
[1] https://github.com/Maguines/Bitcoin-v0.1/blob/master/bitcoin...
Re: Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, there is no reason to believe that.
There is reason to disbelieve it. The text analyses that have been done point at Satoshi being an individual. Beyond that, if it were a group, they could have used someone as a spokesperson, but then you have a conspiracy of Satoshis, which is less possible. People, and especially geeks, like to talk. Someone would have tripped up by now, or moved bitcoin to fiat.
I agree that the group increases the risk of someone talking.
Would having a spokesperson that knew the identity of group members be a significant risk once this amount of money is involved? It would surely motivate serious threats to the spokesperson and their family?
By the time there was media interest in the identity of Satoshi, what would have been the value of their holding? Even then, whoever it is had to have held to their privacy even in advance of Bitcoin being worth incredible amounts of money.
Re: Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history
#87My money is on Paul Le Roux.. most hackers are too uppity to write windows software. Le Roux was a pragmatist with a real practical need to move dirty money without banks.
Most hackers I know write software for pretty much any other OS because of how much easier it is than writing software for Windows, not because they're uppity. Some may be ideological purists, sure, but I think you'd be very hard pressed to find a hacker that says the developer experience on Windows is easier/nicer/better than the developer experience on Linux or MacOS.
Re: Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people already explained above that Satoshi is just a pseudonym so there is nothing certain about the person’s gender.
No. The norm is follow the gender assumption based on the pseudonym. If the person picked a female name, everyone would happily call the person “she”, as it should be.
Can you link a style guide that captures this norm? I usually consider pseudonyms to function like a pointer to the real person when the real person is in scope. If my HN handle was JaneAustism and I was being referenced in a discussion about things pertaining to my meatspace identity and I was a male, I would expect to be described with masculine pronouns. If the discussion was not related to my meatspace identity, I would, in a pseudonymous context, not expect to be referred to as she/her just because my handle contains a female name. My gender is likely irrelevant (or at least unknown) in that context and I would expect they/them.
Re: Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history
#89It’s funny that people always guess that Satoshi is someone already famous as opposed to someone who is not known.
Just some lurker of that early mailing list, absorbing knowledge that eventually culminated into the code and paper. The number of unknown great programmers is a lot. What I think is interesting is that it was both code and a paper, not only code. So at least a grad student. And likely someone that starts many projects, because they left after only one year. Something else could have gotten more interesting.
Re: Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went deep into the PLR rabbit hole because I too believed that PLR could have been Satoshi. The one dagger to the heart of the theory is that PLR lived in the Philippines at the time. If you line up Satoshi’s posting times with PLR’s local time zone, you’d have to assume that PLR was posting from 4-9ish in the Philippines.
> you’d have to assume that PLR was posting from 4-9ish in the Philippines. Ok? Why is that a dagger in the heart? My most active posting times are 4-9 and I don't even know if you're talking AM or PM because both work for me.
You mostly sleep between 9pm and 4am?