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

nytimes.com

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

#521

Post by mike_hearn »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #393

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 ide…

It seems very unlikely to me. I've had personal correspondence with Satoshi, and met Adam Back in person, and I can't see it.

Actually I don't see how anyone involved with Blockstream could be identified as Satoshi. They never believed in what Satoshi was doing and built their whole company around the claim that Satoshi had screwed up the core of the system's design, despite that nothing about the design or its assumptions had changed. They spent years raising investor capital (why would you do that if you were rich?) specifically to build a system designed to replace Bitcoin for end users.

The last time I met Adam he was trying to convince me to not continue working on Satoshi's original design, and none of his arguments were technical. Satoshi had a totally different approach.

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

#522

Post by zarzavat »

danso wrote: post #75
kaladin-jasnah wrote: post #3

> I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography. > So does Bitcoin. A Bitcoin user has two keys: a public key, from which an address is derived that acts as a digital safe deposit box; and a private key, which is the secret combination used to unlock that box and spend the coins it contains. > How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptograp…

I don't blame you for this initial reaction, which would have been mine too had I not known who the author was. I don't mean that I automatically trust anything published by the reporter who busted Theranos (and won two Pulitzers for other major investigations). But I do mean that if John Carreyrou and his editors decided to publish something this long, that means they (and they're lawyers) are willing to die on this…

If Mr Carreyrou is such a good writer then he should be embarrassed to publish trash:

> In keeping with this belief, Mr. Back made his Hashcash spam-throttling software open source.

> Satoshi did a similar thing. He released the Bitcoin software under M.I.T.’s open-source license, which allowed anyone to use, modify and distribute it without restrictions.

The numerous observations such as this only seem impressive to people who don't know anything at all about the subject. Occam's Razor suggests that the reason that such irrelevant observations were included is because Carreyrou doesn't know anything at all about the subject.

> When we compared those errors with the writings of our hundreds of suspects, Mr. Back was a clear outlier. He shared 67 of Satoshi’s exact hyphenation errors. The person with the second-most matches had 38.

The article does not improve.

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

#523

Post by bjackman »

connorboyle wrote: post #309

> 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.

To me this was just the cherry on top though, there's a huge list of such correlations that seem wildly unsurprising.

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

#524

Post by Lapsa »

SXX wrote: post #416
Lapsa wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a killer from Moscow used to cost $5000

After events of last 4 years in Russia you can probably be killed there for $100 or for a wrong look. Lots of trigger happy ex-convict veterans with PTSD are around. For now they are busy killing their wives and relatives, but eventually they will run out of money for alcohol and will have to find a "job".

sad state indeed. people deserve better than that

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

#525

Post by nickvec »

piekvorst wrote: post #384
connorboyle wrote: post #309

> 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.

I heard through the grapevine that both Satoshi and Back were human beings. Coincidence? I think not. /s

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

#526

Post by virtualritz »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #386
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…

This is a journalistic publication with a foundational value of transparency. If you study the history of institutions that favor transparency, they rarely ever need to further justify efforts of transparency beyond that underlying value. Transparency needs no further analysis of second order effects. “What is gained…?” is simply not a question asked, for the same reason that advocates for privacy rarely if ever circ…

> Transparency needs no further analysis of second order effects.

By that logic we don't need judges.

Just read what the resp. law says and 'apply' it.

Bizarre.

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

#527

Post by mike_hearn »

cloche wrote: post #208
cloche wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read the article yet but I remember this as well. IIRC Adam went the route of more towards a centralized group controlling Bitcoin's future during the BTC/BCH debates/fork. It seemed against what Satoshi would have pushed for. Plus Adam's group seemed like a catalyst for Gavin stepping back as a result of the political in-fighting and mud-slinging. It would be a huge surprise if Satoshi were Adam. Personall…

Adding on now that I've read the article and this situation is covered: > The following year, in 2015, the Bitcoin community fractured over a proposal to increase Bitcoin’s block size. A faction led by two Bitcoin developers, Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn, wanted to make the blocks much bigger to accommodate more transactions. But this was controversial... > Mr. Back fiercely opposed increasing the block size. In a s…

It helps to understand the context at the time.

The small block faction, of which Adam was absolutely one of the ring leaders, were willing to do literally anything to win. They were and still are collectivist totalitarians. Above it was described as a debate, but it wasn't, it was more like a war. Amongst other things, the small block faction:

• Launched botnet attacks on any node or company that expressed support for big blocks. They took Coinbase offline, they took any mining pool offline for merely allowing users to vote for big blocks. They took out entire datacenters because it hosted a single node expressing support for bigger blocks in its version handshake. One of these attacks was big enough to take out the internet for an entire rural ISP.

• Constantly lied about everyone who was working on bigger blocks. I've actually met people who said they didn't trust me because I worked for British intelligence. I've never worked for British intelligence!

• They wrote a tool to fuck with the vote we were trying to run. Back was fully in support of such tactics: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3hb63g/bip_suggest...

• They constantly manipulated people, promising them they'd work on a compromise solution whilst actually refusing to do so and organizing conferences with rules like "nobody is allowed to discuss solutions to the problem" or "nobody is allowed to make written notes".

... and more. I don't recall Adam expressing any opposition to these acts or trying to stop them. Frequently he was directly engaged in them (not sure who was behind the DDoS attacks, but none of the Blockstreamers publicly asked them to stop).

Satoshi's account had been hacked at that time, and one of the main arguments for raising the block size was simply that it wasn't controversial at all - it was in fact the planned roadmap for Bitcoin from day one, that everyone had signed up to and that Satoshi had discussed. Given their willingness to lie to everyone else and use outright illegal tactics to win, would a small blocker have forged an email from Satoshi? Absolutely they would, which is why nobody cared about it and it made no difference. Especially as that email inexplicably refuted a position Satoshi had repeatedly defended for years, without explanation.

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

#528

Post by fiskeben »

Lerc wrote: post #112

I found this amusing. >P.G.P., a free encryption program used by antinuclear activists and human rights groups to shield their files and emails from government surveillance. I find it fascinating to see how the users of a program change, based on how a reporter wants to build or diminish. At least it's going in a positive direction today.

I think it's mind boggling that in 2026 encryption and signing of emails is still not a common thing, only because it's Google's business model to snoop on their users' email. For that reason we can't use email to send sensitive data and need apps for every little thing that could have been an email.

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

#529

Post by vntok »

orangepanda wrote: post #441
brainwad wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It's a pretty well known entity. You can find more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_Foundation

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

#530

Post by hdgvhicv »

jmyeet wrote: post #319
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 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…

If you were to attempt to transfer money out if those wallets it would have a knock on effect on the price.
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