Its a good story but it sorta seems like the author decided on Adam Back then was working backwards to prove it by the end
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator
291–300 of 905 posts
Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator
#292> I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography. > So does Bitcoin. A Bitcoin user has two keys: a public key, from which an address is derived that acts as a digital safe deposit box; and a private key, which is the secret combination used to unlock that box and spend the coins it contains. > How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptograp…
>I read up to here, but I wasn't convinced that this is the revelation that the author claims The rest of the arguments is as weak: 1) both released open-source software 2) both don't like spam 3) both like using pseudonyms online 4) both love freedom 5) both are anti-copyright etc. Basically, the author found that Adam Back used the same words on X as Satoshi did in some emails (including such rare words as "dang,"…
Yep, As fans of Larson's The Far Side, probably every American and Americo-phile computer geek and cypherpunk used 'dang'
Same goes for the rest of your list.
Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator
#293Adam fits better as someone Satoshi respected, not who Satoshi was... Bitcoin explicitly cites hashcash. If Adam was so careful, why would he name himself in the paper; tongue-in-cheek? hide in plain sight? I don't buy it... Hal Finney is the strongest alternative, but even there, I’m not fully convinced. Hal had the technical profile, mined early, and received the first transaction. But he also feels almost too obvi…
You could game theory this out forever. Maybe he put his name in there because people like you would only use first order logic and conclude that it wasn't him because it would be crazy to "hide in plain site".
I always had Adam Back as my main candidate because HashCash somehow had the same energy and thought to it. But I have no concrete reason to believe it was him.
Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if those similarities are indicating more than 'generic internet hacker' for both of them. You only need 23 bits to identify a person but those are 23 uncorrelated bits, and all the 'similarities' presented here are extremely strongly correlated with themselves.
Where are you getting 23 from? That's only 8-ish million values max.
Probably used logn not log2.
>>> math.log(8_000_000_000)
22.80270737862625Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator
#295Pretty 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…
A major problem with the article is the author's inability to weigh the evidence: actual evidence, like presence/absence pattern, is buried whereas p-hacking stylometry (let me try another expert, this one didn't give me what I wanted! let me feed him the Satoshi/Adam Back tells that I'm already in love with!) is majority of the article. It also includes absolute garbage like the vistomail spoof email during the bloc…
I've had the fortune/misfortune to be directly or peripherally involved in nearly a dozen situations that made it to press and there isn't a single case where the story represented in the article wasn't blatantly misinterpreted from the facts. In nearly every case what was mentioned in the article was the complete opposite of what actually happened. Biggest/Most-egregious offenders were Vice and Vox Media but included are the NYT, WaPo and Time.
One can only narrow the things they care about to those they can verify (or personally affect them) and go after primary sources themselves and form their own conclusions. I'm no longer convinced that modern journalism is good for anything more than starting bonfires.
Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator
#296My working hypothesis has always been that Satoshi was a CIA or NSA working group partly to fund black ops. Also, it could be that Bitcoin was a psyop to get people used to digital currency followed by the bait and switch to CBDC. Seem to be working.
Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator
#297Adam fits better as someone Satoshi respected, not who Satoshi was... Bitcoin explicitly cites hashcash. If Adam was so careful, why would he name himself in the paper; tongue-in-cheek? hide in plain sight? I don't buy it... Hal Finney is the strongest alternative, but even there, I’m not fully convinced. Hal had the technical profile, mined early, and received the first transaction. But he also feels almost too obvi…
I had always assumed that all of them shared the pseudonym of Satoshi, along with Nick Szabo.
Back wrote the white paper with input from Hal and Nick Szabo. Sassaman did the coding work on the client. Sassaman had the keys to the Satoshi wallet, hence it never moving since his passing.
Since Satoshi is a collective, it means that each of them individually can claim, without lying, that they're not Satoshi.
That's my uninformed guess.
Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator
#298> I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography. > So does Bitcoin. A Bitcoin user has two keys: a public key, from which an address is derived that acts as a digital safe deposit box; and a private key, which is the secret combination used to unlock that box and spend the coins it contains. > How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptograp…
All of us "olds" had this as a hobby. Or used it regularly.
Just a bunch of weird stuff in this article.
Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator
#299I found this article about as compelling as all the other attempts at identifying him. Half of the cypherpunks (I was pretty active) had the same set of interests in public key cryptography, libertarianism, anonymity, criticism of copyright, and predecessor systems like Chaum's ecash; we talked about those in virtually every meeting. The most compelling evidence is Adam Back's body language, as subjectively observed…
The body language thing really bothers me. Personally, if someone accuses me of lying, but I am actually telling the truth, I immediately start acting like a liar. It's really embarrassing and hard to explain. I can't believe such a seasoned reporter is leaning so hard on "his face went red."
It did make me think - if he seems nervous under this questioning, it could be because he's actually Satoshi. Or it could also be because he's thinking something like, oh god, if this jerkoff convinces a bunch of people I'm actually Satoshi, all of the businesses I've worked so hard to found will collapse, I might be convicted of crimes around lying about it while founding these businesses, I might get targeted by any number of criminal gangs or even nation-states who will do all kinds of torture to me and my loved ones and will never believe that I'm not actually Satoshi and don't really have a secret stash of a bazillion Bitcoins.
Naturally, this journalist doesn't seem to care much about any of that, or that it wouldn't really change anything at this point besides making the life of whoever it actually is hell.
Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is, most of the people heavily involved in early Bitcoin are fairly characterized as cryptoanarchists, a group strongly devoted to the principle of privacy and liberty effected through technological means. The refusal to provide personal communications metadata by such a person is evidence of nothing but their steadfast commitment to the philosophy that presented them with the opportunity to be part of thos…
Then again, if I weren't Satoshi, but people suspected that I was, I'd be willing to do just about anything to prove that it's not me. No one in their right mind would want that kind of target on their back. Satoshi is either dead, or he lost his keys and probably wishes he were.
Handing over email metadata, or whatever your interrogator wants from you, will only cause them to shift the goalposts, or find something they want to find in the metadata even if it exonerates you.
There is no reason to cooperate with journalists with a slant.