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HBO documentary suggests Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is Peter Todd

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Re: HBO documentary suggests Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is Peter Todd

#121

> Todd reportedly denied he was the bitcoin creator: "Of course I'm not Satoshi," he said.

The genesis block has a message from a relatively obscure British newspaper in it (The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks). Not something I would expect a frontier Canadian in their 20s to be sourcing from.

That and various other evidence (coding style, british-english spelling) has suggested to me for a long time that it's an older gentleman from the UK, likely with an academic background in economics or related distributed systems. I don't know either way, but it seems borderline libel to suggest without much more substantial evidence that it's Peter Todd.

Re: HBO documentary suggests Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is Peter Todd

#123

Just finished watching the doc on HBO. The key piece of evidence seems to be this comment from Peter Todd: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2181.msg28739#msg287 ... It stands out to the producers because: 1) Peter makes it just after joining the form, so he is unlikely to have detailed knowledge of bitcoin. 2) He seems to be finishing Satoshi's thought, as though he returned to an earlier post forgetting which…

> Peter makes it just after joining the form, so he is unlikely to have detailed knowledge of bitcoin. The fact that the inputs, outputs, and fee of a transaction must add up isn't exactly "detailed knowledge" :) I don't think it took me all that long to figure that out when I first tried understanding how Bitcoin worked. And frankly, the core of Bitcoin really isn't all that complex! You can have a very good underst…

So basically you're saying that the 3 day gap between your first post and your demonstrated understanding is actually reasonable, assuming you spent those 3 days immersed in understanding the code & design at play.

Re: HBO documentary suggests Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is Peter Todd

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 to Adam Back. Who is more likely to build ontop of some obscure code base called "Hash Cash"? Some random people that trolled the same forums or the original creator of it? Imo this "secret" is known by many people as I have seen so many censorship and misdirection campaigns throughout the years if people mention Adam being the one. Him being Satoshi also makes bitcoin core seem more legitimate. He can guide his c…

Indeed there's really nothing positive to be had from coming out as Satoshi at this point regardless of who it is. Criminals and governments will be falling over each other to try to get their take.

One addendum here: If I was personally Satoshi, I would come back and try to convince everyone to switch to proof of stake instead of proof of work and then subsequently disappear again. If you need a non-politicized reason why (something other than climate change), just go with my joke one of solving one of the outcomes of Fermi's Paradox (distant civilizations don't send signals because all energy is used to mine cryptocurrencies).

Re: HBO documentary suggests Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is Peter Todd

#125
post #93

Just finished watching the doc on HBO. The key piece of evidence seems to be this comment from Peter Todd: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2181.msg28739#msg287... It stands out to the producers because: 1) Peter makes it just after joining the form, so he is unlikely to have detailed knowledge of bitcoin. 2) He seems to be finishing Satoshi's thought, as though he returned to an earlier post forgetting which…

The forum is/was public, so there is no reason to create an account until you're planning to post something or send a private message. Why is this my first post on bitcoin-dev: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2011... ? I'm sure you've heard the adage, "It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it." But online when you're silent you'…

Oh hey Greg :-D Did you watch the movie yet? Was fun.

I'm definitely still team Dave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Kleiman

Last time I talked to Peter was in 2019 and he was making fun of me for spending Bitcoins continuously since 2011, and said Bitcoins are supposed to be hoarded like gold or something, not used as money. Definitely not the attitude of someone who supposedly burned the million Satoshi coins (which was a claim from the movie, I guess some leaked IRC transcript or something). I wouldn't be surprised if the leaked transcript came from Peter himself. He seems to get off on weird deception plays like that.

Re: HBO documentary suggests Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is Peter Todd

#126
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The world is a big place. It's likely that in 2008 thousands of people had the right skillset to create Bitcoin, any one of which might have done it. As long as Satoshi wants to stay hidden, we're not going to find them.

Gov/CIA most definitely knows who Satoshi is. Even if he always used TOR/anonymous IPs, when accessing his @gmx.com account, with the number of sign-in's he had, it must be an absolute certainty, that he want through rogue exit nodes or some other de-anonymization methods we are not aware of, but deployed by gov. agencies.

An IP was leaked in 2009 though tied to Satoshi in Los Angles

Re: HBO documentary suggests Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is Peter Todd

#127
post #47

imo it's pretty obvious that he was Hal Finney, potentially with collaborators, and no amount of scripted emails, etc. disproves it for me

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.10257v14 This paper makes a pretty good case that the late Len Sassaman was Satoshi. Its a pretty thorough examination regardless if you think it was Len or not and doesn't come to a definitive conclusion.

some other person not listed

Re: HBO documentary suggests Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is Peter Todd

#128
post #93

Just finished watching the doc on HBO. The key piece of evidence seems to be this comment from Peter Todd: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2181.msg28739#msg287... It stands out to the producers because: 1) Peter makes it just after joining the form, so he is unlikely to have detailed knowledge of bitcoin. 2) He seems to be finishing Satoshi's thought, as though he returned to an earlier post forgetting which…

The forum is/was public, so there is no reason to create an account until you're planning to post something or send a private message. Why is this my first post on bitcoin-dev: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2011... ? I'm sure you've heard the adage, "It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it." But online when you're silent you'…

It's hard not to be a little coy when you helped build something that usually takes an empire to build with some bad code and a few hundred loosely affiliated weirdos on the internet. I still don't think most laypeople (or honestly most people in the "crypto" space) really understand the significance of what was invented with Bitcoin.

Re: HBO documentary suggests Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is Peter Todd

#129

imo it's pretty obvious that he was Hal Finney, potentially with collaborators, and no amount of scripted emails, etc. disproves it for me

Reasons why it probably wasn't Hal Finney.

1. Satoshi emailed me at the same time Hal was taking part in a marathon. Yes, technically emails can be delayed, but ... why? There was no urgency in those discussions.

2. Hal preferred to write C and was still writing C up until the moment he sadly passed away. Satoshi wrote in modern(ish) C++. Note that the same problem applies for Len Sassaman and basically everyone who has been fingered as a possible Satoshi. The combination of C++, Win32 and cryptography is not very common in the cypherpunk space.

3. Hal was a professional cryptographer who worked on an encrypted messaging product (PGP). Satoshi had some fairly basic misunderstandings about cryptography, like believing that you can't use elliptic curve keys to encrypt messages, and referenced having to do research to understand the cryptography he needed. Why would Hal pretend to be a newbie at cryptography, up to and including not having features Satoshi said he wanted?

4. Hal did try to create digital cash already, but tried to build it on trusted computing hardware. He had a long term interest in that approach, as did I, and his last project before his death was one I suggested related to this tech. In fact there are emails between me and Hal in list archives pre-Bitcoin where we swap notes on Intel LaGrande. If Hal had been Satoshi it seems likely that Satoshi would have at least commented on the ways TC could be used at some point, but Satoshi never showed any awareness the tech exists.

6. If you're trying to be anonymous, why would you immediately and pointlessly reveal your identity by messaging yourself?

7. He denied that he was Satoshi.

Re: HBO documentary suggests Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is Peter Todd

#130
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The world is a big place. It's likely that in 2008 thousands of people had the right skillset to create Bitcoin, any one of which might have done it. As long as Satoshi wants to stay hidden, we're not going to find them.

Gov/CIA most definitely knows who Satoshi is. Even if he always used TOR/anonymous IPs, when accessing his @gmx.com account, with the number of sign-in's he had, it must be an absolute certainty, that he want through rogue exit nodes or some other de-anonymization methods we are not aware of, but deployed by gov. agencies.

> Gov/CIA most definitely knows who Satoshi is.

This is my assumption. It's too critical a question to leave unanswered, from a national security perspective.

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