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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

#81

Absolutely insane. (1) It's not Peter Todd. Anyone who knows Peter Todd and/or was around in the early days, can clearly tell Satoshi and Peter are not the same person. (2) No good comes from speculation over the identity of Satoshi. When someone living is named, their life becomes absolute hell and the security risk imposed on them is very real. When someone dead is proposed, that hellish experience is passed to the…

>HBO’s theory relies on a message from Peter Todd claiming to be the ‘world’s leading expert on how to sacrifice your bitcoins’ I just can't imagine the real Satoshi saying something this stupid.

That quote actually comes from an early technical conversation I was having about proof-of-sacrifice. Specifically, a conversation lamenting the fact that we kept on inventing neat tricks faster than we could actually use them - by "world's leading expert" I was making fun of the fact that I was technically the world's leading expert in something relatively simple and obvious to Bitcoin experts... yet even I hadn't actually put the technique into practice in a production application.

If you freeze-frame the film at the right point and actually read the full conversation, this is obvious. I don't have it handy. But some people posted screenshots on Twitter (which HBO may have taken down via DMCA... they were getting video clips taken down too).

These days some stuff actually uses proof-of-sacrifice in production. The best example I think being Joinmarket: https://github.com/JoinMarket-Org/joinmarket-clientserver/bl...

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

#82

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 understanding of all the parts after just a few days carefully studying it. Which is exactly what I did: I sat down with the Bitcoin Core codebase and figured out what all the code did. Especially at the time, it really wasn't that big of a codebase.

> After watching the doc it does seem like Adam and Peter know a good deal more than they are letting on, even if it wasn't them specifically, it seems likely that they have some idea who it was.

I can't speak for Adam. But I have no idea who Satoshi is. If anything, I think it could be literally hundreds or even thousands of potential people. Bitcoin is something so simple that you didn't need to be a super-genius to come up with it. You just needed to understand some relatively high-level, basic, cryptography and have a brilliant flash of inspiration. Satoshi was a very competent C++ programmer (it's a myth that his code was bad). But there's lots and lots of very competent C++ programmers out there.

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

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredibly dangerous of these "journalists". Putting targets on people's back as well as possibly being slander. Any bitcoin oldheads know it's not Peter Todd based on tons of behavioral, timestamped, and logistical evidence. The actual leading candidate is Len Sassaman if you look objectively at the evidence.

It's definitely Hal Finney. The fact that Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto lived a few minutes away from him, and Hal was a marathon runner who could have easily seen his mailbox, and also that Satoshi disappeared when Hal's ALS became overwhelming, is all the evidence you need.

It is definitely not Hal Finney. Hal’s wife has been through enough.

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

#84

Absolutely insane. (1) It's not Peter Todd. Anyone who knows Peter Todd and/or was around in the early days, can clearly tell Satoshi and Peter are not the same person. (2) No good comes from speculation over the identity of Satoshi. When someone living is named, their life becomes absolute hell and the security risk imposed on them is very real. When someone dead is proposed, that hellish experience is passed to the…

It's incredibly dangerous of these "journalists". Putting targets on people's back as well as possibly being slander. Any bitcoin oldheads know it's not Peter Todd based on tons of behavioral, timestamped, and logistical evidence. The actual leading candidate is Len Sassaman if you look objectively at the evidence.

it's not any of them

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

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He would've had to mimic someone else in that early crypto-sphere who does match the stylometry much much better. That person was also familiar with Hal's PoW implementation (where Hal mentions it was an implementation of this guy's concept) 3 years before the Bitcoin paper, but attempted to obfuscate that fact.

Why don’t you stop being coy and say who you think it is?

they’re saying they think it’s adam back

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

#86
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.

I think it is likely the 2014 message was actually Satoshi and there really is no evidence to the contrary. It rules out Len or at least Len as the exclusive creator

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

#87

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…

Cool to get a reply from you directly, thanks!

It seems unlikely to me that it could be thousands of people, given the correspondence had with various people it seems likely to me that a few people have information that could lead in the correct direction. But I guess we'll never know.

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

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredibly dangerous of these "journalists". Putting targets on people's back as well as possibly being slander. Any bitcoin oldheads know it's not Peter Todd based on tons of behavioral, timestamped, and logistical evidence. The actual leading candidate is Len Sassaman if you look objectively at the evidence.

It's definitely Hal Finney. The fact that Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto lived a few minutes away from him, and Hal was a marathon runner who could have easily seen his mailbox, and also that Satoshi disappeared when Hal's ALS became overwhelming, is all the evidence you need.

Please don't accuse Hal of being Satoshi, these accusations have resulted in his family being threatened and extorted.

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

#89
post #60
post #3

Peter Todd is downplaying the accusation on Twitter by retweeting and discussing this tweet: https://x.com/BitMEXResearch/status/1843788557925921052 To my reading, the bitcointalk reply only makes sense as a snarky comment (ie Todd isn't Satoshi). and the fact it was 1.5 hours after the Satoshi post also suggests it wasn't the same person making a quick correction.

If it was Satoshi making a correction, he could’ve just edited his original post because bitcointalk allowed for post edits even back then.

Also, at the time petertodd's account was named 'retep' and didn't have any immediately obvious connection to his identity. If there had been a slipup he could have just abandoned the account and certainly not later had it renamed to his legal name!

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

#90
post #52

I still think it's Paul Le Roux, on the basis that this would be the funniest outcome.

It would also be pretty funny if it was actually Craig Wright but he lost his private key.

only possible if he had a never disclosed frontal lobotomy. the guy is a technical idiot.
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