Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 905 posts

Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#101

Post by vzaliva »

djao wrote: post #34

The refusal to provide email metadata is the most damning evidence. Adam Back clearly has the emails; he is the one who provided them in the first place during the previous court case. Everyone knows he has the emails. If Adam Back and Satoshi are two different people, the metadata should be exculpatory, and easy to share. There's literally no reason whatsoever to hide the metadata unless he is the one. In a court of…

What would it show? If he logged in to Santoshi's email account and sent an email to his personal account, the metadata would be in order, and we would learn little from it.

Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#102

Post by hardwaregeek »

A fun counter factual: try “proving” that famous scientists are their collaborators based on this methodology. Obviously Hardy and Littlewood are the same person. They’re both British mathematicians who use analysis and number theory and have similar sensibilities in politics and math.

Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#103

Post by Simulacra »

Every time I see one of these articles about "unmasking" Nakamoto, I always wonder the same thing: why? I don't really see a compelling reason to unmask this person. Surely there are other more important things a journalist can spend their time looking into. It's the same with Banksy: why?

Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#105

Post by browningstreet »

DeliciousSeaCow wrote: post #69
apeace wrote: post #66

I have always thought Satoshi must be dead (as a couple of past suspects are). How could someone not want one hundred BILLION dollars? There is no person alive who could resist that. I'm sorry, there's just not. To be fair, if Back was Satoshi, he would need to hide it so his company can go public, or whatever. Because that way he might make -- who knows! -- hundreds of millions of dollars? Even if moving the coins c…

Back has earned generational wealth already, and the wealthy borrow (at rates lower than capital appreciations) against capital to fund all their living. If I were Back, that's exactly what I'd be doing to preserve anonymity.

The billionaires ruining the world right now are certainly satisfied with their respective hauls.

Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#106

Post by Dove »

modeless wrote: post #88

I don't believe anyone claiming that Satoshi is still alive. There is zero chance any human who put so much effort into creating something would remain silent while it became a $2 trillion phenomenon that succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Satoshi is certainly dead.

I once became so famous that a community of several hundred people knew and recognized my name for a few years. At the time, it was very ego-flattering, and I was delighted to have done something that had such a big and positive impact. However, as an experience it really did not agree with me, and even this very minor level of fame has left me resolved to never, ever, ever become that famous again if I can help it.

I don't think I am unique in that. In fact, I perceive that it is very normal for public figures, not merely to fade from public attention, but to actively seek out seclusion.

While I'm not Satoshi, I would put the odds of someone in such a position of maintaining radio silence far from "zero chance". I would put it more around 70 or 80 percent. And at any rate, it is certainly what I would do.

Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#107

Post by ploum »

modeless wrote: post #88

I don't believe anyone claiming that Satoshi is still alive. There is zero chance any human who put so much effort into creating something would remain silent while it became a $2 trillion phenomenon that succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Satoshi is certainly dead.

My theory is that Satoshi is a persona created by Adam Back and Hal Finney.

They probably devised something where both needed to agree and sign something for Satoshi to act. This also allowed them to say "I’m not Satoshi Nakamoto".

They also probably ensured that anything that belongs to Satoshi required both of them. The death of Hal Finney ensure that Satoshi died definitely.

But they may have "killed" him before by burning the keys because, when Bitcoin started to become a success, they probably anticipated the need to "kill" satoshi (few remember but Bitcoin passing 1$ was considered as a crazy bubble at the time! Some become millionnaires and exited when BTC did the 30$ bubble. Satoshi’s stack was already closely observed, bright mind of that time would have anticipated the need to kill it). Or it was just that "satoshi" was not needed or they accidentaly deleted some keys.

Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#108

Post by neffy »

ShowalkKama wrote: post #59
djao wrote: post #34

The refusal to provide email metadata is the most damning evidence. Adam Back clearly has the emails; he is the one who provided them in the first place during the previous court case. Everyone knows he has the emails. If Adam Back and Satoshi are two different people, the metadata should be exculpatory, and easy to share. There's literally no reason whatsoever to hide the metadata unless he is the one. In a court of…

>There's literally no reason whatsoever to hide the metadata unless he is the one. privacy?

Time? He´s busy starting a company, taking the time to drag out decade old emails and digging out the meta data for a journalist who is borderline stalking (assuming he even has them somewhere). I wouldn´t give that the time of day either.

Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#109

Post by refulgentis »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #102

A fun counter factual: try “proving” that famous scientists are their collaborators based on this methodology. Obviously Hardy and Littlewood are the same person. They’re both British mathematicians who use analysis and number theory and have similar sensibilities in politics and math.

The Hardy-Littlewood comparison cuts the other way. Two collaborators in the same subfield sharing terminology is the baseline, not evidence of anything. What makes the Back case interesting is convergence on things that have nothing to do with cryptography: the same Napster vs Gnutella analogy, the same celebrity email filtering idea, the same obscure FDR gold ban interest, the same weird hyphenation errors. Pick any two cypherpunks at random and you won't find that kind of overlap on non-technical quirks.

Then add the negative space. Back was one of the most prolific voices on these lists for a decade, especially on digital cash. Satoshi shows up, Back goes quiet. Satoshi leaves, Back comes back. Hardy and Littlewood never had that problem.

Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#110

Post by mijoharas »

int32_64 wrote: post #40

If you've ever seen Back's twitter you would know he's not Satoshi. I'm still firmly in the Finney camp. Every couple years one of these articles shows up focusing on one of the core Satoshi suspects, at least do a Wei Dai one next time.

So I just searched the article for Finney to see why it claimed it wasn't him. It claims Satoshi was active after Finney had died?

What's that about? I used to be of the opinion that it was probably hal, but haven't paid too much attention. What's the counter evidence here? And why do we disregard that?

Post reply on HN