141–150 of 905 posts
Obviously Satoshi and Banksy are the same person. They are both from the same era and British.
There are so many people I know from that Era who believed the same things that Mr. Back believed in. Half my work colleagues at the time where interested in distributed computers, Postage pay, and algorithmic payments.
I am not convinced
Pretty compelling story. Not necessarily for its revelations, but for the fact that John Carreyrou and the NYT decided to publish it at all. If it were by anyone else, I would have stopped reading after the first thousand words of meandering narrative, but Carreyrou is staking his massive and impeccable investigative journalistic reputation on this mountain of circumstantial evidence and statistical analysis. Him tor…
Does Carreyrou give reasons for eliminating Hal Finney from being (part or all of) Satoshi?
I found this amusing. >P.G.P., a free encryption program used by antinuclear activists and human rights groups to shield their files and emails from government surveillance. I find it fascinating to see how the users of a program change, based on how a reporter wants to build or diminish. At least it's going in a positive direction today.
Some of the "isn't it interesting ..." type coincidences would, as people on this forum would know, be commonplace among the subculture or even just technologists, and often lack the comparison to the overall Cypherpunk corpus - for example: no, studying public-key cryptography in grad school certainly isn't a high-signal differentiating tell for Satoshi-ness.
For some he does provide that though, and they're certainly compelling.
What I like best about the Back attribution is that it totally makes sense in context of my operating model of humans and passes the Occam's Razor test: Still actively involved, interested in the governance, interested in acclaim/prestige, built up wealth masking his other wealth, etc. Ego and "Tell me you're Satoshi without telling me you're Satoshi" written all over it.
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?
Satoshi supported big blocks in his writings and empowered the pro-big block Gavin when he disappeared. Adam is a well known supporter of small blocks, ultimately the "winning" side of the debate. They are not the same person.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this misses the point. The point is that interests and writing style matches, which means there's a higher chance they are the same person. The more similarities you find, the closer the match. It's in no way proof, of course. But it does provide good reason to look closer
The interests and writing style differentiate Mr. (Dr.?) Back from the general public, sure. But from what I’m reading, they don’t do a great job of distinguishing between 90s hackers. “Get this, his PhD thesis dealt with a computer language called C++, just like Bitcoin papers used ” seems both confused and impossibly lazy to me. > “Scrap patents and copyright,” Mr. Back wrote in September 1997. > Satoshi did a simi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of those similarities can be explained by Satoshi having read what Back wrote.
You need someone who read Back's obscure 1997-1999 cypherpunks posts about combining Hashcash and b-money, implemented exactly that system a decade later, independently came up with the same non-technical analogies and trivia, wrote with the same hyphenation errors, and then happened to be active during the exact window Back went silent. The more you flesh out the "someone who read Back" profile, the more it just sou…
As for the hyphen errors, they are common for people for whom English is their second language. I commit hyphen errors similar to what is described all the time because English hyphenation makes absolutely no sense. In fact, reading the list of examples, the mistakes listed makes more sense to me than the correct way of writing those.
I also switch back and forth on a lot of the phrases the article mentions.
I also switch back and forth between US and UK spelling, because I learned UK spelling at school, but was far more exposed to US spelling in practice.
This seems to me to be exceedingly weak.
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.
Hell, even if I didn't burn the keys initially, I might do it as I observed it starting to take off. I'd be more attached to the idea and its success than to the idea of being filthy rich (and at risk of jail, extortion, and murder). It would feel like a giant middle finger to the parts of the system I disliked.