It seems likely there were at least 2 DPRs. Ulbricht hints at this in his interview: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/an-inte...
The link to Ulbricht's identity as DPR seems to go back to the beginning of the site. It seems more plausible he did that interview and made up the multiple DPR story to: A: Advertise his willingness to sell out. B: Perhaps toss a bit of confusion onto anyone following him.
C: In the Princess Bride the Dread Pirate Roberts chooses a successor which will use the same name.
I agree with you that there's no way DPR is Satoshi. DPR seemed to be learning to code when launching Silk Road. While Bitcoin had bugs (lots of them) to start with, it is not amateur level computer science. It's not even reasonable to assume that a dude who needed help getting curl to talk to a proxy would be competent enough to work with very advanced crypto concepts, and even invent a few things of their own (usin…
> And, Satoshi wouldn't need Silk Road to be fantastically rich in Bitcoins. As far as we know, he's got a vast swath of the first mined Bitcoins, even if he gave away most of it. (Which is possibly how Satoshi's identity will be revealed...if suddenly there's a new trillionaire in the world in five years...well, might be Satoshi.) Out of interest, aren't Satoshi's coins all held in a small number of wallets, so peop…
From what I've heard, Satoshi's coins are spread around a lot of 50 btc wallets, and they're not so much known to be Satoshi's as suspected to be hers because there seems to have only been one person mining the blockchain at the start [1].
As other people started running the clients, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell Satoshi from any other miner.
So though Satoshi may never have spent the bitcoins mined when she was the only miner, she could still have mined and spent many coins once there were a few hundred other miners.
This currently isn't "news," as the paper hasn't been published yet, and none of the disclosed findings are too damning or conclusive. That being said, it's important for two reasons: 1.) the paper gets published tomorrow, which will lead to a round of negative press, regardless of the claims' merit. 2.) More significant: it highlights what I see as an existential threat to the Bitcoin experiment: a.) the poor distri…
Spend a $1 billion of your early bitcoins disrupting Bitcoin or spend $1 billion to buy bitcoins today and disrupt it. Either way costs the same doesn't it?
> And, Satoshi wouldn't need Silk Road to be fantastically rich in Bitcoins. As far as we know, he's got a vast swath of the first mined Bitcoins, even if he gave away most of it. (Which is possibly how Satoshi's identity will be revealed...if suddenly there's a new trillionaire in the world in five years...well, might be Satoshi.) Out of interest, aren't Satoshi's coins all held in a small number of wallets, so peop…
From what I've heard, Satoshi's coins are spread around a lot of 50 btc wallets, and they're not so much known to be Satoshi's as suspected to be hers because there seems to have only been one person mining the blockchain at the start [1]. As other people started running the clients, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell Satoshi from any other miner. So though Satoshi may never have spent the bitcoins mined when…
Nobody deserves a billion dollars and if someone was to become a billionaire I feel it is more likely the people holding BitCoin would be more concerned with their own value appreciation than all cooperating to devalue a single entities value. You also have to consider that wide adoption of BTC would mean a diverse set of people with a diverse set of values. I've often read that in the US (as an example, but I'm sure…
It's only considered voting against your own interest when a poor person does it. When a relatively well off person is campaigning for higher taxes, voting against their won interest, then it's a principled stand.
I had never looked at it from that angle before. Interesting.
I doubt that the link here amounts to DPR knowing SN personally, or even worse, DPR being SN. Obviously I don't know DPR or SN, but I really doubt that DPR is SN or even communicated with him. The reasons are entirely circumstantial but from what I've read of both of them: - DPR is arrogant. - DPR makes stupid mistakes. - SN is fairly humble. - SN is smarter than DPR. - SN doesn't make mistakes. Is it possible that D…
SN makes mistakes. Most notably the bad build that required global cooperation from the miners to roll back.
That was due to an improper update the community made to the code, not the code that SN wrote himself.
This currently isn't "news," as the paper hasn't been published yet, and none of the disclosed findings are too damning or conclusive. That being said, it's important for two reasons: 1.) the paper gets published tomorrow, which will lead to a round of negative press, regardless of the claims' merit. 2.) More significant: it highlights what I see as an existential threat to the Bitcoin experiment: a.) the poor distri…
the lack of even distribution of early wealth Totally! All we need is an "affordable bitcoin act" and the problem is solved. Without being snarky: I just dislike when people tie political ideology into their evaluation of new technology.
"I just dislike when people tie political ideology into their evaluation of new technology."
Tying political ideology to the evaluation of new technology is the MO of Bitcoin's supporters. If you wanted to focus strictly on technology, Bitcoin would never have gotten off the ground. No security definition, design documents spread across human language and source code, no attention given to the various ways distributed systems can be attacked or can fail, etc. The only reason Bitcoin became popular in the first place is that people with a particular political ideology saw a chance to realize their dreams.
Since when does "person X is connected to person Y" mean "person X is person Y"? They're "obviously"[1] not the same people. That by no means shows there is no connection. [1]: Which isn't to say "definitely" but it'd be quite a lot of misleading going on to no obvious end - better covering up "created something fascinating" than "sold drugs and hired hitmen"?
X is connected to Y is the sneaky way that headlines say "X is Y" without technically saying X is Y This way if X actually is Y they can say they called it, but if X is not Y, then they weren't incorrect
I see that it could be used that way, I guess, but I don't think it's an appropriate interpretation. If X actually is Y then there is a connection, and they deserve some credit, just less than if they'd said "X is Y". If X is not Y then they "weren't incorrect" because they weren't incorrect, so parent is incorrect to label them as such. If X is not Y and there is some other interesting connection, they were correct and deserve just as much credit as if the two wind up shown to be the same person.
There's no way in hell Satoshi is anywhere connected to "DPR". Look at the OPSEC between the two. Satoshi carefully concealed his identity even in the early crypto mailing list days of Bitcoin. Ross Ulbricht failed at this completely throughout his underground career. Satoshi was a pretty good developer, Ulbricht posted to Stackexchange the most basic of php questions. Satoshi seemed to be very aware of the power of…
Ross Ulbricht failed at this completely throughout his underground career. That's a bit of revisionism. It turned out that he made mistakes, which in hindsight now make his identity seem 'obvious', but it took some time for his identity to become known, despite DPR & SR being very high-profile targets for many different people. If he really had been rubbish at this, his identity would have been known so much sooner.
Mistakes which included publicly posting an email address with his full legal name on a bitcoin forum while using that same nickname to post on a drug forum, all in the same time period.
Additionally he baited and trolled the mainstream press. The US government & US prosecutors do not react well to criminals who attempt to repeatedly publicly humiliate their failure to catch them.
My honest opinion was this guy was a fucking idiot.
Is this level of pedantry really necessary? According to Wikipedia, the name is generally given to males.
Against the rules I guess, but thank you. I don't care if Satoshi is he/she/it (well the "it" case could be interesting) but having to add " or she " to every sentence sounds tiring.
Then phrase it another way, without the pronoun. The whole point of this discussion is that we don't know who Satoshi is/are, so don't bake assumptions into your thoughts and writing on the topic.
It's not pedantry - it's helping yourself think clearly.