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

nytimes.com

441–450 of 905 posts

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

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Is that what they call visiting private islands these days?

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

#442
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…

I think it's a pretty good case. I always wondered why would the inventor would use pseudonym in the first place. Surely, not even the most visionary person could anticipate how hugely popular the thing would become. This is why I was intrigued by Newsweek investigation [1]. However, seeing this article, I am leaning towards the person being someone who had been active in crypto culture for a long while, before creating Bitcoin. The story about Napster, and the paranoia around government going after the inventor ties in nicely towards the motivation to remain anonymous.

The word, phrasing use is a good evidence. I do wonder though why didn't the author try to analyze the source code similarly? Did it prove something to the contrary?

Also, Satoshi jumping in to defend block-size out of the blue sounds too reckless for someone so careful about anonymity. Possible explanation might be that he let his guard down seeing an attempt to "butcher" his creation.

In any case, I am convinced that it was most likely a single person and if not Adam, I think there are no more than 3-4 people who are possible candidates.

[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/face-behind-bitcoin-2479...

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

#443

The simplest filter to exclude potential Satoshi candidates is to read Satoshi's early posts discussing bitcoin which never seems to come up in these convos. He had a calm, cool, consistent, professional demeanor. Always worlds different than the people people claim him to be. You'd have to believe these public figures were playing 4D chess where they invented a persona and spent a couple years impeccably roleplaying…

This comment rings true to me as someone who contemporaneously read Satoshi's posts (not from the very beginning but on bitcointalk.org). People are underestimating how difficult (and probably pointless) it is to create and maintain a whole personality in aid of subterfuge. There are so many other easier and less risky ways to achieve the same goal than to adopt a consistent persona that's far from your own; you could, for example, release the code with one anonymous paper and then disappear completely, and then create three or four random new personas as needed to push it along publicly. That's more plausible (and less work) than sustaining a "Satoshi" with a very different personal style from yourself and then also, as it happens, speculatively fashioning fake email conversations with yourself, years in advance, in order to throw people off the scent in the future.

Among people who try to guess Satoshi's identity, there is also a surprising bias toward fame or at least well-known people. There is literally zero reason to think that Bitcoin came from a person anyone had heard of or has heard of since. It's a big world. Many (most?) interesting and novel open-source contributions, hash algorithms, cipher algorithms, key-exchange protocols, and so on come from previously unknown figures. Pick any random open-source project and try to guess who created it as if you didn't know; most people wouldn't do a good job, and thinking "oh, it has something in common with Twitter so it must have been Jack Dorsey" would have a terrible success rate. And, as it happens, well-known people tend to like fame and don't try to stay anonymous.

I could name hundreds of smart, experienced, and relatively unknown tech-company employees, professors, and open-source contributors who would have all the necessary broad skills to have written Bitcoin. It's not that rare. The contribution itself is rare but that's like lightning; the insight of invention strikes unpredictably. Assembling high-level systems that use cryptography isn't something that requires that you post to mailing lists or message boards of cryptography enthusiasts. And even if that weren't true, there are hundreds of useful, moderately used cryptosystems that most people haven't heard of and that would never make the radar of a NYT author who (evidently) thinks it's a coincidence that two different cryptosystems might use asymmetric ciphers.

The NYT article boils down to "I had a hunch from this person's body language and, out of a community of a few hundred identified figures, I found a methodology to confirm that it was him." It's a hair better than that and honest with regard to some of its own limitations, but in the end it's no more convincing than that. The upshot is that there's some circumstantial evidence in favor of a particular person, although there's significant circumstantial evidence in the other direction too. It's astonishing to me that the NYT published this piece.

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

#444

Can I just ask why people are so fixated on revealing Satoshi's identity? This article phrases it as some pure, innocent and almost academic pursuit, driven by curiosity and the mystique itself. But the amount of effort spent on trying to find Satoshi is immense. He must be the internet's most doxxed person by now. Is it just because of his wealth? Is someone trying to exact revenge on him? Or is he wanted by the aut…

It's a silly topic to spend (waste) time on, but I can't help it, I just find it sort of fascinating.

It's a mystery where you have to try and put together different pieces of evidence, match things up, try and look for hidden connections - a certain type of human mind (mine, I guess) just finds that process rewarding.

I've gone down most of these rabbit holes and my 2c is it's one of these two people, not any of the most common candidates: Len Sassaman or Paul Le Roux.

Sassaman is dead and Le Roux is in federal prison in the US, which explains why the coins haven't moved

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

#445

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…

Well .. you probably thought the same when John was unmasking Theranos

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

#446

> And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software. I know the author isn't claiming this is definitive evidence, but I think it's so comically weak it is probably not worth mentioning at all.

It seems like this “journalist” speaks English. Guess who also spoke English? That’s exactly right, Satoshi did.

Did you know Back had an interest in Japan? A rare and unusual trait within the cypherpunk community! /s

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

#447
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…

And the "evidence" they presented includes things like, body language.

> I presented my evidence piece by piece. In his soft British lilt, Mr. Back insisted he wasn’t Satoshi and chalked it all up to a series of coincidences. But at times, his body language told a different story. His face reddened and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat when confronted with things that were harder to explain away.

Yes, they unironically wrote this.

Everyone knows that if you already believe someone is lying, you'll see all the signs that he's lying. It's confirmation bias 101, and this is unashamedly published on a so-called credible journalism outlet.

I think if something bad happens to Mr. Back (I hope not), the NYTimes is at least morally responsible.

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

#448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not to be a jerk, but it'd be helpful for a reader to know how and why you came to that conclusion.

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

#449
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

I always found that case a bit odd. For one he was blogging under his real name and had made his medical practice known, so you could just google him. It was upending his psychiatry practice because he blogged, albeit in anonymized fashion, about his patients without disclosing it to them which I'd say is unethical but at the very least in the interest of his patients to be made known to them. I would be pretty pisse…

It’s legal to publish anonymous patient data, doctors do it frequently e.g. in “case studies”. As long as it can’t be traced back to the patient I don’t see why they should care (I wouldn’t). And since it increases public knowledge (e.g. how to treat future patients) I think it’s not only ethical, but should be encouraged.

Doxxing also increases public knowledge, but knowing who’s behind some online pseudonym is much less useful than patient anecdotes (what would you do with the former? Satisfy your interest (or what else do you mean by “public interest”)?). Moreover, unlike anonymous patient data, it has a serious downside: risking someone’s job, relationships, or even life.

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