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

391–400 of 905 posts

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

#391

Post by mapmeld »

qnleigh wrote: post #327
mapmeld wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

It's strange. I'm sure that he talked to experts who would immediately say, yes many programming languages exist. But two cryptographers who wrote money systems both using C++ is not informative. Today maybe we could expect one to use Rust.

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

#392

Post by brainwad »

adventured wrote: post #330
jmyeet wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.

That hasn't been his goal. For the last two decades he's been running a huge charitable foundation...

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

#393

Post by acjohnson55 »

I think there's a pretty good chance Adam Back is Satoshi, but I don't think this is a great article. Perhaps he's rendering a careful scientific process in a way that makes for a readable narrative, but as written, it sounds like a lot of gut feel and confirmation bias.

The biggest new contribution to the Satoshi question seems to be ad hoc stylometry. To have faith in his methodology, he should be testing it on identitying other people. If he were to show me that a repeatable methodology that doesn't require hand tuning can identify other people with low error rate, and it said Back=Satoshi, that would be much more convincing.

Like so much tech writing done by non engineers, there are many places where mundane things are made to sound remarkable (e.g. Black's thesis used C++, the "heated debate").

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

#394

Post by iwontberude »

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…

Well given they have hunreds of millions of dollars to protect themselves with, it seems like it would be a good time to start using it.

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

#396

Post by ergocoder »

olalonde wrote: post #218

All you need to know about this "quest": https://xcancel.com/austinhill/status/2041986130871251141 Plus, the most obvious reason that Adam Back is not Satoshi is that he'd absolutely take credit for Bitcoin if he could. And he would have put an end to Craig Wright's legal circus. The most plausible explanation is that Satoshi is either dead or incapacitated.

> The most plausible explanation is that Satoshi is either dead or incapacitated.

He could have lost the key and doesn't want to be a target or ridiculed. Happened to a lot of people.

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

#397

Post by creatonez »

johnfn wrote: post #346
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…

The NYTimes infamously doxxed Slate Star Codex[1], despite him basically begging them not to because it would upend his psychiatry practice, back in 2020 for no reason other than because they could. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416

[flagged]

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

#398

Post by adastra22 »

olalonde wrote: post #379
adastra22 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And your HN account was created right between the release of the white paper and Bitcoin 0.1. Coincidence? Are you Satoshi?!? That’s about the level of investigative journalism performed by NYT here. Thanks for being sensible.

Maybe :) But seriously, Satoshi is most likely a relatively unknown dude. Why would you spend so much effort hiding your identity and then become a very public figure of the Bitcoin community?

I founded a company with Adam. He is not Satoshi. Neither is Szabo. Best not to speculate publicly as no good comes from it - not least of which there are organized crime rings targeting potential suspects for violent kidnapping or home invasion.

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

#399

Post by prmoustache »

bluecalm wrote: post #341
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 was thinking along the same lines. Isn't it just doxxing? Going deep into someone's online history and making hypothesis about who they are in real life, then publishing their name and what they do?

Let's keep in mind that doxxing is not a universal concept nor are its mechanisms universally perceived as negative/frowned upon outside of specific online areas.

I don't know of any law against it except for specific populations like law enforcement and even those usually have exceptions for journalism.

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

#400

Post by testdelacc1 »

creatonez wrote: post #397
johnfn wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NYTimes infamously doxxed Slate Star Codex[1], despite him basically begging them not to because it would upend his psychiatry practice, back in 2020 for no reason other than because they could. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416

[flagged]

Could you share a link to where he promotes race science?
Post reply on HN