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Paul Le Roux is Satoshi?

martinshkreli.substack.com

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Re: Paul Le Roux is Satoshi?

#121

Post by omgomgomgomg »

blueside wrote: post #48
jshchnz wrote: post #16

I'm honestly not sure there could be a more unreliable source for this

Shkreli is live streaming this right now and somebody on his voice chat just said to him "No offense Martin, but you're probably the last person I would go to if I had incontrovertible evidence of Satoshi's identity" For all the horrendous shit that this Shkreli guy is known for, I always think of his Microsoft Excel skills first.

I always wonder why people are so impressed about his excel skills.

I have seen many people in BI being much better. He just knows his shortcuts and pivot tables, this is standard stuff.

And the mayor discipline, if anything, are customized macros which run cross device for a whole department, like opening one reports, filtering the data, creating a new file with a date stamp etc and sending reports and stats.

Re: Paul Le Roux is Satoshi?

#122

Post by retrac »

cmatthias wrote: post #38

Can someone who knows more than me about the internals of bitcoin help me understand: 1) Is there a place on a blockchain explorer somewhere where I could find the signature that Shkreli has posted? I tried looking up the wallet address and found the transaction from Jan 2009, but I don't see that signature anywhere. 2) The reason I ask the first question is that I believe that if the private key is compromised, then…

At its core, a Bitcoin address is a public/private key pair used to sign data. One type of data you can sign is a Bitcoin transaction, which when signed and valid, gets processed by the Bitcoin network. "Send 0.01 BTC to xyz" -- signed retrac. But it's standard public key cryptography, and you can use that key to sign any kind of data.

The signature in question was not posted to the Bitcoin network. It's almost exactly like signing an email with a PGP signature. The message/signature pair alone are proof that the message was signed by the key in question.

2) Yes. Anyone with the private key could sign a message. And for clarity, such things are not date-stamped in a secure way, so there's no way to know when it was signed.

For me, one major incongruity is that, it is possible to post such data to the Bitcoin network. If you need a permanent record of when a key signed something, that's honestly about the only thing blockchains are good for! Hal Finney understood this very well. So when he allegedly signed that message 8+ years ago for future generations to finally know the truth, why didn't he take advantage of an architecture, that he helped create, that enables making such claims in a (more) verifiable manner?

Re: Paul Le Roux is Satoshi?

#123

Post by macjohnmcc »

nothrowaways wrote: post #105
macjohnmcc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with Paul before he went down the path of the criminal. He seemed really smart too bad he went bad. This would be in 1991 or 1992. I also worked with one of the programmers caught as part of the Madoff 5. I'm hoping that is all of my brushes with people who go bad.

From your experience with him, do you think he has the academic background to write the Bitcoin paper?

He is brilliant. Thinks very highly of himself so I suspect likely also a sociopath. Encryption is one of the things he is known for.

Re: Paul Le Roux is Satoshi?

#125

Post by cmatthias »

retrac wrote: post #122
cmatthias wrote: post #38

Can someone who knows more than me about the internals of bitcoin help me understand: 1) Is there a place on a blockchain explorer somewhere where I could find the signature that Shkreli has posted? I tried looking up the wallet address and found the transaction from Jan 2009, but I don't see that signature anywhere. 2) The reason I ask the first question is that I believe that if the private key is compromised, then…

At its core, a Bitcoin address is a public/private key pair used to sign data. One type of data you can sign is a Bitcoin transaction, which when signed and valid, gets processed by the Bitcoin network. "Send 0.01 BTC to xyz" -- signed retrac. But it's standard public key cryptography, and you can use that key to sign any kind of data. The signature in question was not posted to the Bitcoin network. It's almost exact…

This is great info, thank you! I agree that it’s strange that Finney wouldn’t have posted this message to the blockchain. Unfortunately I think most people superficially familiar with bitcoin don’t understand cryptography deeply enough to realize that the most likely explanation for all of this this is that Shkreli or an associate is in possession of Finney’s private key.

Re: Paul Le Roux is Satoshi?

#126

Post by dibt »

mmastrac wrote: post #11

> Paul Le Roux operated under numerous pseudonyms: > Paul Solotshi Calder Le Roux, backed with a Congolese diplomatic passport[4] Interesting... Solotshi This is a good read: https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-inte...

Hal Finney lived a few blocks from a man named "Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto."

From https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/03/25/satosh...

"I received an email from an old cryptography community acquaintance of Finney's who has asked to remain anonymous. The email was titled "What are the odds?" It pointed out that Hal Finney had lived for almost a decade in Temple City, the same 36,000 person town where Newsweek found Dorian Nakamoto. Finney's address was only a few blocks away from the Nakamoto's family home."

Re: Paul Le Roux is Satoshi?

#127

Post by dang »

Related:

Paul Le Roux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25177556 - Nov 2020 (2 comments)

New Evidence Suggests Satoshi Nakamoto Is Paul Le Roux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20115607 - June 2019 (146 comments)

The Mastermind: The Next Big Deal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11594606 - April 2016 (6 comments)

The Mastermind, Episode 7: The Next Big Deal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11591274 - April 2016 (12 comments)

Eyes Everywhere: Encryption programmer Paul Le Roux and his commando kill squad - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11541971 - April 2016 (58 comments)

He Got Greedy: How the U.S. Government Hunted Encryption Programmer Paul Le Roux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11496782 - April 2016 (115 comments)

The Strange Origins of TrueCrypt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11395220 - March 2016 (10 comments)

He Always Had a Dark Side - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11381625 - March 2016 (351 comments)

Re: Paul Le Roux is Satoshi?

#128

Post by blueside »

omgomgomgomg wrote: post #121
blueside wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shkreli is live streaming this right now and somebody on his voice chat just said to him "No offense Martin, but you're probably the last person I would go to if I had incontrovertible evidence of Satoshi's identity" For all the horrendous shit that this Shkreli guy is known for, I always think of his Microsoft Excel skills first.

I always wonder why people are so impressed about his excel skills. I have seen many people in BI being much better. He just knows his shortcuts and pivot tables, this is standard stuff. And the mayor discipline, if anything, are customized macros which run cross device for a whole department, like opening one reports, filtering the data, creating a new file with a date stamp etc and sending reports and stats.

It doesn't impress me now but it was the first exposure I had to see Excel being used fluently. I later learned that it was very common in the world of finance and nothing exactly impressive. It's like how I impress somebody with my mediocre sql skills until they see a real dba in action.

Re: Paul Le Roux is Satoshi?

#130

Post by TacticalCoder »

jaycroft wrote: post #94
mjfl wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It appears that someone else (definitely not Hal) has the private key to that address. So Paul le Roux, by the message? > 1Q2TWHE3GMdB6BZKafqwxXtWAWgFt5Jvm3 is Hal Finney's (Not Satoshi's) address. Where do you get this? EDIT: I am proposing not that Paul LeRoux is Satoshi, but that he is in possession of Hal's key, and produced that signature as a troll.

No, that particular message could be created by anyone (including people who are not Paul le Roux), who has the key to the 1Q2 address, at any time, past or present. All we have to go on right now is that someone knows the private key that corresponds to the 1Q2 address and used it sometime before the last hour to generate a hash of a message that says that Paul le Roux sent bitcoin to Hal Finney.

How do we know the message was signed during the last hour and not in 2017 or 2014 or whatever? Does it include the hash of a Bitcoin block created in the last hour?
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