Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

881–890 of 905 posts

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

#881
post #145

This was a fun article, but also an oddball collection of strong and weak claims. Some of the "isn't it interesting ..." type coincidences would, as people on this forum would know, be commonplace among the subculture or even just technologists, and often lack the comparison to the overall Cypherpunk corpus - for example: no, studying public-key cryptography in grad school certainly isn't a high-signal differentiatin…

Interesting: my Occam's Razor test is "$100B sitting around untouched, how can that be?" Well, simplest answer is that satoshi is dead.

Or he doesn't have the keys or never owned the wallets attributed to him.

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

#883
post #296

My working hypothesis has always been that Satoshi was a CIA or NSA working group partly to fund black ops. Also, it could be that Bitcoin was a psyop to get people used to digital currency followed by the bait and switch to CBDC. Seem to be working.

Reality is seldom as fun as people's theories.

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

#884

john mcafee already unmasked who it is years ago. "Now, there are only two of the accused who were British and only one of those has two spaces in every one of his papers. Figure it out people. It'll take you 15 minutes." british guy. the paper has two spaces after periods, and only one of these two british guys has two spaces after each period. seems pretty conclusive. it's Adam Back

It's common for older writers to insert two spaces after a full-stop. In fact, go through the cypherpunk mailing list (and many others) and you'll see it was the norm. As for Satoshi being British, he used predominantly British English but occasionally used American spellings and terms; it easily could've been intentional misdirection.

Adam Back doesn't write at all like Satoshi. Back's writings are filled with grammatical errors and he often makes spelling mistakes, which Satoshi seldom did.

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

#885

Satoshi has many contributors. In my view, he/she is not one person but many. Why, because it would take a genius with multiple skills, e.g. engineering, programming, cryptography, mathematics, financial knowledge and a lot of time, a lotta time to come up with something like this. It is more plausible that Satoshi was a rogue AI, ET, the Illuminati or future time traveler instead of one single person :)

Bitcoin wasn't anything extraordinarily revolutionary; it built upon others' work over decades of collaborative progress, and introduced few truly novel ideas. Very impressive work by all means, but it didn't require genius-level skill or knowledge.

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

#886
post #885

Satoshi has many contributors. In my view, he/she is not one person but many. Why, because it would take a genius with multiple skills, e.g. engineering, programming, cryptography, mathematics, financial knowledge and a lot of time, a lotta time to come up with something like this. It is more plausible that Satoshi was a rogue AI, ET, the Illuminati or future time traveler instead of one single person :)

Bitcoin wasn't anything extraordinarily revolutionary; it built upon others' work over decades of collaborative progress, and introduced few truly novel ideas. Very impressive work by all means, but it didn't require genius-level skill or knowledge.

Perhaps I am not as smart as I led myself to believe but the sound and words of the voice at the other end of the phone that called my then sff company job's tech support line (when IT jobs were more abundant) were way over my head.

With that being said, you are correct about "BTC being built upon others'" work over decades of collaborative progress, e.g. Hashcash (proof-of-work from 1997), B-money (1998), Bit Gold (1998), Adam Back's Hashcash, Wei Dai's b-money, Nick Szabo's Bit Gold, with the core tech involving public-key cryptography, Merkle trees, blockchain concept (from Haber/Stornetta 1991), etc. I used AI just to get a summary of previous tech BTC is based on.

Though I am a technical person, or at least that's what I tell myself, most of the above concepts and technology is beyond my reach. I would think somebody that knows that kind of stuff, either has a lot of time on their hands, has a lot of resources or has a lot of talented and technical friends.

But what do I know. I am just a "Brain Sturgeon" :)

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

#887
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would make a good tv show where a small group in a secretive TLA org started this but then made so much money they decided to keep it to themselves and get rich. "Sorry director, the experimental project was a failure. We deleted it all now to clean up and free resources. Oh and yeah unrelated, I need to hand in my notice. Want to spend more time with my ...er... family. Thanks."

People who've seen what the nation state can do to those who draw it's ire don't do such things. But other than that it would make a good show.

What are you talking about? The feds cant even prosecute arson against minority religions https://revealnews.org/podcast/trial-and-terror-rebroadcast/

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

#889

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or what if Satoshi deliberately destroyed their key? The motivations behind Bitcoin were clear. All the wealthy people I know don’t really do it for the money. The money is the gauge or the metric they use to judge how well they are playing the game but what motivates them is the love of the game and their sense of purpose. If someone was to truly believe that Bitcoin was going to be a gold/USD/Eurodollar/swift etc.…

100% and just based on the cypherpunk origins of this whole thing, this the most likely scenario.

Also I think that people discuss this stuff in a very narrow minded way. “Is it one person or multiple people?” Maybe it was one person to begin with then others joined in to contribute under the pseudonym.

Given all the available information (including the DHS worker revealing that Satoshi was identified by the USA government and he was multiple people)[0] this is the most likely case.

[0] - https://youtu.be/MAOrjlub4Qc?t=2612

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

#890
post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when journalism is a business, stuff like this happens...

And it's always been a business.

but there's also state funded journalism, so they are not forced to do whats commercially viable
Post reply on HN