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

nytimes.com

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

#321

Post by CamperBob2 »

icelancer wrote: post #300
CamperBob2 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I tend to agree with you, to be honest. Seems fairly clear that Carreyrou was going to conclude that Back is Satoshi, come hell or high water.

Kind of a disappointing piece of work from the guy who took down Theranos. His journalistic talents are sorely needed elsewhere right now.

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

#322

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

apeace wrote: post #67
raphlinus wrote: post #29

I 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."

Just a shot in the dark but any chance you grew up in an intensely religious household?

I grew up evangelical and I've noticed this tendency in myself, and saw the connection to how the authorities at my school or church basically demanded dishonest performances or apologies under threat of physical punishment. Several friends over the years have said roughly the same, so I have an armchair theory this is pretty prevalent for that sort of childhood.

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

#323

Post by Skidaddle »

benlivengood wrote: post #258
wjessup wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% of people who've ever had DHMO have died. This is scientifically verified and yet nobody does anything about it.

Truly, we can eliminate the null hypothesis because only ~93% of humans who have ever lived have died. [0] [1] [0] https://www.prb.org/news/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-... [1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Over 90% of people who've ever had DHMO have died.

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

#324

Post by raisin_churn »

pgalvin wrote: post #251
Theodores wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PGP was different then. In the 90s the internet was unencrypted and the only people using PGP were those that had a reasonable need for it. However, there were a couple of big problems that the armchair historian would not be aware of. First off, communicating with PGP was hard. Imagine you are based in London and you want to publish something controversial without getting taken to court. You could email someone in N…

> However, they just change their original message, maybe to remove a typo, change the date or add a friendly note. Then the three letter agency does a glorified 'diff' and they are subsequently in on the chat. Could you expand on this please?

They cannot because PGP has no such vulnerability.

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

#325

Post by Lu2025 »

empath75 wrote: post #226
dotancohen wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pretty compelling story. Not necessarily for its revelations, but for the fact that John Carreyrou and the NYT decided to publish it at all. When is the line crossed from journalism into doxxing? Whoever created Bitcoin has a legitimate safety reason to stay anonymous. Anyone suspected of holding that much wealth becomes a target - as does their family.

I hate this idea that doxxing is some kind if crime. “Who is the creator of bitcoin?” is a matter of great public and historical interest. Finding out who he is, is the purest form of journalism.

Username doesn't check out.

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

#326

Post by jsnell »

refulgentis wrote: post #109
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 an…

> Pick any two cypherpunks at random and you won't find that kind of overlap on non-technical quirks.

That could be a valid methodology if you pre-registered the list of quirks before doing the investigation.

But in this case the journalist clearly didn't do that, but tweaked the set of quirks until they produced the desired outcome.

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

#327

Post by qnleigh »

mapmeld wrote: post #314
Lerc wrote: post #112

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.

This section stood out to me because it started out explaining PGP to a layman like this, but then the author gets overly excited that a cryptographer would be interested in... basic cryptography > I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography. So does Bitcoin. [...] > How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptographic technique that Satosh…

We also have this gem:

> And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software.

Amazing! I bet they both for loops too! I heard Bitcoin relies heavily on for loops.

Infuriatingly, to people who don't know much about programming, these pieces of 'evidence' might sound quite compelling, because it will all sound equally obscure to them.

I'm only a quarter of the way through this piece, but I'm finding it very hard to take seriously.

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

#328

Post by rurban »

Aba wouldn't have said: "Send X bitcoins to my priority hotline at this IP and I’ll read the message personally."

Because aba knew about how email worked, unlike Satoshi. A hotline is not at in IP, it is at a domain with an MX record. Satoshi was a Windows guy.

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

#329

Post by vintermann »

dotancohen wrote: post #210
danso wrote: post #79

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…

> Pretty compelling story. Not necessarily for its revelations, but for the fact that John Carreyrou and the NYT decided to publish it at all. When is the line crossed from journalism into doxxing? Whoever created Bitcoin has a legitimate safety reason to stay anonymous. Anyone suspected of holding that much wealth becomes a target - as does their family.

Isn't it a matter of legitimate interest for me to know whether you're obscenely rich or not? After all, if you are, you can probably do things like buying elections and sending hitmen after my family.

Either way, why can't they just deal with it the way other obscenely rich people deal with it?

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

#330

Post by adventured »

jmyeet wrote: post #319
gyomu wrote: post #312

Simple question for anyone who’s familiar with this world of journalism: how does the author and the NYTimes cope with the fact that making such claims paint a huge target on the person they claim to have “unmasked”? Satoshi’s wallets are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and there have been kidnappings/torture/murders for much less than that. Do they just not care about the ethical implications? And really, for…

I think the wallets go well beyond "hundreds of millions". Aren't there like a million Bitcoin in dormant wallets associated with Satoshi? Personally, I'd assumed that whoever the person or persons were, they're dead because nobody can resist the pull of tens of billions of dollars regardless of their ideological position on cryptocurrencies. But that's just a guess. There's absolutely a public interest in this. Sorr…

An estimated 22,000 addresses, 1.1 million Bitcoin. Present value $78 billion. That would make him the 23rd richest person in the world. Bill Gates by comparison is 'only' worth $102 billion these days.

If you priced Gates backwards in gold, his $102 billion is about $13 billion two decades ago. He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.

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