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Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto

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Re: Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto

#111

Post by irremediable »

michaelt wrote: post #102
irremediable wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Alright, I get that Satoshi might have spent those old coins before. But can he/she spend them now without everyone knowing about it?

Re: Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto

#112

Post by thrill »

ISL wrote: post #29
stfu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GP may not have had ideology in mind. Bitcoin is probably worth more when everyone has some.

BC is worth more when everyone wants more than they have.

Re: Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto

#113

Post by joosters »

AJ007 wrote: post #109
joosters wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Idiot or not, his identity took some time to be discovered. People are oh-so-wise after the fact about DPR's dumb mistakes but can't tell the difference between their perceived brilliance and hindsight.

Successfully hiding your identity is an all-or-nothing measure; either you are outed, or you stay anonymous. So the only remaining way to gauge how well someone hid before the final reveal is to look at how long it took people to find them and how much effort likely went in to finding them.

DPR ran Silk Road for some time before being discovered. In that time, countless law agencies sought him, he was a massive target for online fraud, blackmail, vigilanteism or even simple crime.

Just imagine if you tracked him down; a quick break-in and some force and you could escape with a laptop worth tens/hundreds of millions of dollars, none of which would be reported to the police!

Re: Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto

#114

Post by yohanatan »

joosters wrote: post #113
AJ007 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Idiot or not, his identity took some time to be discovered. People are oh-so-wise after the fact about DPR's dumb mistakes but can't tell the difference between their perceived brilliance and hindsight. Successfully hiding your identity is an all-or-nothing measure; either you are outed, or you stay anonymous. So the only remaining way to gauge how well someone hid before the final reveal is to look at how long it to…

What makes you think that the authorities had no motivation to leave him in play for a while before busting him?

Re: Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto

#115

Post by gwern »

jfoster wrote: post #91
gwern wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a quick litmus test when someone proposes a Satoshi candidate X: "how did $X pay for DigiRock hosting of bitcoin.org in August 2008 when DigiRock accepts only yen and has no English language support?"

I think that's a misleading litmus test. Only yen could be worked around through a prepaid card, stolen card number, gratis account, and probably other methods I'm not aware of. Lack of English support doesn't necessarily make the person Japanese. Westerners can learn Japanese or use translation tools.

Well, of course you can excuse it away (at the cost of adding complicating details and raising the question of why, if they used one of your suggestions, they later switched to the 21x more expensive Anonymousspeech hosting).

The point of the test is to quickly asses whether the person trying to dox Satoshi has done even their basic homework and realized that it's an issue for their theory? If they haven't even looked at the Bitcoin.org WHOIS history, that says something important about the depth of their research into the question.

Re: Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto

#116

Post by nkuttler »

nkuttler wrote: post #24
Jtsummers wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question, then, why the need to provide a negative comment when you didn't even examine the material presented? EDIT: Won't out the author's identity, but parent post explained that he had only skimmed the article. The original post was asking who the computer scientists were and why this wasn't just link bait.

I did, but not in detail. I just see too many unsubstantiated negative articles about bitcoin that it gets tiresome sometimes. I'm glad to know I was wrong this time.

Re edit: No, I never asked who the authors were and frankly it's not relevant. Anyway, it's sunday, and I'm waiting for the publication. It was also pretty obvious from my other replies that I started this thread..

Re: Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto

#117

Post by joosters »

yohanatan wrote: post #114
joosters wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idiot or not, his identity took some time to be discovered. People are oh-so-wise after the fact about DPR's dumb mistakes but can't tell the difference between their perceived brilliance and hindsight. Successfully hiding your identity is an all-or-nothing measure; either you are outed, or you stay anonymous. So the only remaining way to gauge how well someone hid before the final reveal is to look at how long it to…

What makes you think that the authorities had no motivation to leave him in play for a while before busting him?

Nothing at all. But they certainly weren't able to hold back the other potential discoverers of his identity that I listed.

Re: Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto

#119

Post by michaelt »

irremediable wrote: post #111
michaelt wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Alright, I get that Satoshi might have spent those old coins before. But can he/she spend them now without everyone knowing about it?

The coins that are known to be Satoshi's (because they were mined when Satoshi was the only one mining) can't be spent without people knowing about it. But the coins that were probably mined later, where we don't know who mined them? Those can be spent easily.

It's pretty likely a fair number of coins belong to Satoshi, as mining must have been pretty easy in the days when people paid 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas.

Re: Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto

#120

Post by natch »

RexRollman wrote: post #118

As hard as it is to remain anonymous, how did Satoshi Nakamoto do it? No misstatements that betrayed his identity? No IP addresses that point to him or his location?

He's anonymous to us, but probably not to the government. They can do stylometric analysis of his writing and zero in on him.
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