[HN Gopher] Satoshi - Sirius emails 2009-2011
___________________________________________________________________
Satoshi - Sirius emails 2009-2011
Author : lawrenceyan
Score : 251 points
Date : 2024-02-23 13:37 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mmalmi.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (mmalmi.github.io)
| baerrie wrote:
| Next step, feed this text into into some nlp/llm and search the
| web for a match to find who Satoshi is
| xtiansimon wrote:
| Alexander Hamilton
| codetrotter wrote:
| Len Sassaman
|
| https://evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-
| satoshi-e483c8...
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Was Len known to type in British English and use British
| terms?
| captaincrunch wrote:
| As a Canadian who was raised on British English, I
| seamlessly switch between British and American English
| when interacting with clients from the US, England, and
| Canada. This flexibility in language is quite natural to
| me. Furthermore, for someone who meticulously conceals
| their identity, adapting in such a manner would likely be
| effortless and unremarkable.
|
| Cheerio, Later, Take care eh?
| Symbiote wrote:
| In one of the messages Satoshi writes "gotten", which
| would be unusual for a Brit.
|
| There's also a lot of -ize. My money is on a Canadian, or
| a non-native-English European living in Britain.
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| Agreed, "been" would be more typical for a Brit
| stevekemp wrote:
| "gotten" would be less unusual for a Scottish person,
| although it is usually used in the context of "ill-gotten
| [gains]" it does crop up now and again outwith that.
| cachvico wrote:
| Curiously, in #217 Satoshi used "gotten", which doesn't
| exist in British English - it's a word that is normally
| only used by Americans.
| dboreham wrote:
| It does exist (in that British people are aware of the US
| usage and "ill gotten gains") but sounds like a clueless
| person talking, or a child, so unless deeply exposes to
| American English nobody would use it themselves. I'm
| beginning to, but only after 30 years in the colonies.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Hm. Listen some more! We use it in the US Midwest
| routinely. Had gotten dehydrated. Have gotten bit by that
| issue. We've gotten the flu around here pretty frequently
| this winter.
|
| Then there's misbegotten, begetting, begotten.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| mixing British and American English is also common for
| European non-native English speakers
| Log_out_ wrote:
| You shall know by the assembled slang what series they
| watch
| radicalbyte wrote:
| I'm British and I use the word. "They've gotten good".
| Coders in particular have to learn American and a lot of
| us just use American on the internet unless we're talking
| in an English (or UK - English, Welsh, Scottish, North
| Irish) corner of the interwebs.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Or even Cornish! I was pleasantly surprised to find
| Cornish written across the side of the buses whilst
| visiting Plymouth. It's not much more than a linguistic
| and cultural curiosity, unfortunately, with even the
| excitement of the Cornish Revival being wholly
| insufficient to reach a critical mass of contemporary
| speakers. However, if there's just a faint possibility
| we'll be able to preserve the tradition I'm all for it.
| jjeaff wrote:
| yes, the article referenced above referenced several
| tweet's from Len using Britishisms like "bloody". He was
| an American, living in Europe. Satoshi also referenced
| Euros (rather than pounds).
| Boogie_Man wrote:
| The article in the comment you responded to contains the
| following information:
|
| "Since COSIC was based in Leuven, Len was living in
| Belgium during Bitcoin's development. This is salient
| given that a number of facts suggest that Satoshi was
| based in Europe...
|
| Satoshi's writing exhibits spelling and word choices
| idiosyncratic of British English such as "bloody
| difficult", "flat", "maths", grey", as well as the
| dd/mm/yyyy date format. However, Satoshi also refers to
| Euros rather than pounds. These clues leave us with a
| paradox: they suggest Satoshi was European, yet someone
| with the requisite skillset and exposure to Bitcoin's
| primary influences would likely have been American. Much
| of the Cypherpunk community coalesced conferences and
| meetups, part of why a disproportionate number hailed
| from America and especially SF. The jobs where one could
| have gained cutting-edge professional infosec and crypto
| experience were similarly concentrated in the US.
|
| Strangely enough, Len used the very same British English
| as Satoshi even though he was American."
| someplaceguy wrote:
| > Len Sassaman
|
| It's not him, no double spaces in his writings.
| vintermann wrote:
| There's already far more text written by him (as well as code),
| and there have been run comparisons of it against all the
| seriously proposed candidates.
| cryptonector wrote:
| A good writer can probably change his/her demeanor and style
| in writing when changing personas. I'm sure it's hard work,
| but I'm also sure that practice makes it possible -- at least
| for some gifted people. It's also possible that Satoshi isn't
| a single human being, but an organization that can dedicate a
| lot of effort to this sort of thing.
| bboygravity wrote:
| This guy got famous for doing just that:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa
|
| I think he even broke up with his girlfriend through
| letters in which he pretended to be someone else (if I
| remember correctly).
| f321x_ wrote:
| Really interesting
| neom wrote:
| For those curious about the court case it's referencing, here is
| the context: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-
| assets/2024/02/07/craig... (https://archive.is/7YyMl)
| semiquaver wrote:
| If you prefer an (outdated but entertaining) podcast:
|
| https://www.alabseries.com/episodes/episode-3-faketoshi-the-...
| imperialdrive wrote:
| I found several interesting exchanges, such as around/after email
| #212.
| sema4hacker wrote:
| Are all of the digital fingerprints created by Satoshi (emails
| and posted code) completely untraceable, with no archives of
| domains, IP addresses, access logs, etc., still in existence that
| might identify where he was logging in from?
| dogman144 wrote:
| Last I read the domain registration for Bitcoin.org (I think)
| is the main exposure point.
|
| But, what you raised is why I don't buy they haven't been ID'd.
| Digital fingerprints across multiple forums, and platforms, the
| logs to find a way in are there somewhere.
|
| I figure it is Len Sassaman.
| layer8 wrote:
| Meredith Patterson might know, then.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Len was a Linux guy, Satoshi was not. There's even an email
| here that says just that, "technically much more linux
| capable than me."
|
| https://mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/#email-241
| Geee wrote:
| Also, see
| https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/77358901774917632
| where Len doesn't seem to be a fan of Bitcoin. Not sure
| what he means by that though.
| mortallywounded wrote:
| Satoshi stepped away from Bitcoin in 2010 and handed over
| the project to the maintainers.
|
| Len started posting about Bitcoin in 2010 (post Satoshi
| handing the project over).
|
| It seems to me, if Len was Satoshi, he grew distant from
| the project. Maybe it wasn't the cypherpunk utopia he
| envisioned. Maybe the wikileaks and silkroad issues
| weren't what he wanted to enable. Perhaps he wanted to
| distance himself further from the project.
| tdudhhu wrote:
| He was also depressed at that time.
| dogman144 wrote:
| My understanding is around the time SN left correlated to
| around the time Len's mental health escalated. That
| noted, RIP/don't mean to crassly speculate about what
| sounded like a talented and difficult life.
| dogman144 wrote:
| I think you'd have to factor in Satoshi's opsec measures
| though vs taking them at their word at being bad at Linux,
| consider SN displayed very capable opsec in other forums.
|
| Len had significant time and topic correlations to
| many/basically all iirc of the feeder research and projects
| that clearly fed into BTC. SN also went offline around the
| time Len passed. Those two factors plus the related details
| sealed it for me.
|
| Edit - like if I was known to research under Szabo and
| Finney (iirc) right around the same time BTC launched, was
| known to advocate to peers to launch controversial open
| source under pseudonyms, and so on, I'd probably wrap my
| public persona under "BTC sucks" and my SN persona under
| "idk linux well," and so on. Seems an obvious step to take.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Have you considered Le Roux? Someone who had a real
| motive to create Bitcoin, and who had actually written
| Windows based crypto software before.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Given his past it's hard to imagine Le Roux sitting on
| hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bitcoins, even
| from inside a federal prison.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Pretty good incentive to say nothing isn't it?
| astoor wrote:
| Given his past it is easy to imagine his keys got
| misplaced while on the run or met with some kind of
| "unfortunate accident".
| dogman144 wrote:
| I've read the various write ups, and iirc the New Yorker
| piece and who/the group they pointed and a write up on
| Len seemed to make the most sense. Fun area, been a while
| since I dug into it.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Very few projects are created truly anonymously. I
| believe the Bitcoin creator had a real motive to stay
| anonymous, and a practical use case that was driving him
| to make Bitcoin eg transferring large amounts of
| illegitimate wealth internationally and outside of the
| banking system.
| dogman144 wrote:
| there's pretty clear documentation on the motivations for
| why it was made, but I suppose it could be duplicitous
| and hard to ever verify one way or the other unless SN
| wallets became active again.
| ClickedUp wrote:
| Interestingly, Le Roux added "Solotshi" to his name on
| his 2008 passport:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/44I9wlL.jpeg
|
| Solotshi/Satoshi.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| But that just makes your theory unfalsifiable and
| uninteresting. For every contradiction you can just say
| "That's what he wanted you to think!"
| dogman144 wrote:
| Right, it obviously spirals into this issue and others
| like it.
| asveikau wrote:
| I don't think you can fake being blind to unix style when
| writing c++. The c++ style that grew out of the windows
| world is kind of unique.
|
| (Although I personally am both a longtime enthusiast of
| unix-like OSes and a former MS employee, so I am familiar
| with both ... But I find that to be kind of rare.)
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _I think you'd have to factor in Satoshi's opsec
| measures though_
|
| Lying about trivial and mundane stuff is a wildly hard
| thing to maintain over any period of time and, for long-
| term opsec, more likely to cause issues than not.
|
| Being "linux capable" or not is mundane and vague enough
| (as well as applicable to enough people) that there isn't
| really any gain in lying about it but it adds risk in the
| case that you slip up in your maintaining of that lie 10
| years down the road.
|
| There are much more effective ways to resist being
| identified, which are also easier to maintain long-term.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Well, a lot of other effective things were done as well
| as you say.
|
| For me, comes down to that I disagree that the creator of
| one of the most consequential tech break through that
| hits at the core of national sovereignty and control
| didn't think of a lot of angles to this. Early
| Cypherpunks, of which SN was certainly one, were a pretty
| insane/intense crew in these areas.
|
| And to your point about the difficulty of maintaining
| trivial deceptions long term, well Len passed pretty soon
| after the initial years.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _didn't think of a lot of angles to this._
|
| I'm not saying it wasn't thought about. If anything, I'm
| saying the opposite.
|
| When you think about it long enough, you realize that
| many of the 'little lies' carry more risk than they are
| worth. Lying about being "linux capable" falls into that
| category.
|
| > _And to your point about the difficulty of maintaining
| trivial deceptions long term, well Len passed pretty soon
| after the initial years._
|
| I was speaking more generally about opsec and lies which
| aren't worth the trouble and increased risk.
|
| Specific to your comment: If Len knew they would die soon
| after, there is less incentive to lie about little things
| like linux capability. If they didn't know they would die
| soon after, they would care about the long-term opsec.
| dogman144 wrote:
| All interesting points. I think I disagree with the last
| part due to my original post - nobody knew how this would
| turn out, but those involved knew projects like this
| consistently attracted serious State attention.
|
| B/t protect the protocol by trying every possible angle
| against this sort of "adversary" (which, here in 2024,
| seems to have worked), versus cutting corners, the
| comprehensive nature of SN's opsec seems to imply it'd
| show up in a lot of small ways like lying about Linux.
| Analysis of the codebase also had similar findings about
| attention to detail ("thought of everything" sort of
| difficulty regarding appsec).
|
| Overall, there's a good write up on Len as SN worth
| digging into if the topic is interesting. I also think
| the '11 New Yorker piece got close to the truth.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _versus cutting corners, the comprehensive nature of
| SN's opsec seems to imply it'd show up in a lot of small
| ways like lying about Linux._
|
| I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself poorly, or if we're
| maybe just speaking past each other, or I'm not
| understanding you.
|
| You're saying that not lying about linux capability would
| be "cutting corners".
|
| I'm saying that not lying (in this specific situation)
| _would be the better opsec_ , and that anyone serious
| about opsec against government-level adversaries would
| not bother lying about such a mundane detail because it
| is all risk with no benefit to opsec. This concept was
| taught to me at a previous job where the adversaries were
| of the same magnitude as governments, and I'm confident
| that anyone seriously into the opsec/prviacy "scene"
| would concur.
|
| Satoshi was, obviously, careful about opsec. Therefor I
| do not think they would lie about such a trivial and
| vague detail such as saying someone else is more linux
| capable than they are, because it would be a risk to lie
| about it compared to not lying.
| ak_111 wrote:
| I know it sounds utterly morbid, but has anyone proposed
| the conspiracy that Len was "suicided" after his identity
| was identified by a very shady -- possibly state-backed
| -- actors . This guy was a walking bag of cash at that
| point and people have been killed for far less.
| mortallywounded wrote:
| Len was a Macbook user, but he would not have done Bitcoin
| on his personal laptop. It's much more likely he used
| available PCs in a computer lab on the campus he
| studied/worked at, which were likely Windows machines.
|
| It's also been shown Satoshi (and Len's) activities aligned
| and they overlapped with a school/academic year.
| mortallywounded wrote:
| Here's Len's macbook as proof:
|
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/enochsmiles/449655745/
|
| Fun fact, he was experimenting with email based image
| uploads on flickr. That was around the time Satoshi
| suggested they build an image hosting site that accepts
| Bitcoin.
|
| It's not a leap to assume Len's brain made the following
| cypherpunk leaps:
|
| remailer (anonymous email) -> image upload by email ->
| pay via semi-anonymous crypto currency
|
| Len's own bio says, "I have a very strong interest in the
| real-world applicability of my work."
| subsubzero wrote:
| yup, agree, also looking how Len writes, he is definitely
| not Satoshi. You can see on his twitter(Len) -
| https://twitter.com/lensassaman that he is quite punctual,
| ie. sentences end with periods, quotation is accurate. What
| gives it away is every sentence he writes on twitter is one
| space after the period, Satoshi is 2 spaces every single
| time. Also seeing the same thing for Hal
| Finney(https://twitter.com/halfin), so my deduction is
| neither of them is Satoshi.
| stavros wrote:
| Hal's personal site has two spaces after a period.
| subsubzero wrote:
| I see one space - https://web.archive.org/web/20140403012
| 916/http://www.finney...
|
| EDIT - really interesting, could very well be Hal, every
| sentence after a period ends with 2 spaces - view-source:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20140403012916/http://www.fin
| ney...
| stavros wrote:
| View source.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Wait, what causes this kind of replacement ??
| stavros wrote:
| HTML considers whitespace insignificant.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| PINE (the mail client) had a ^J keyboard shortcut to
| justify the lines. It's been a long time since I used it,
| but I seem to recall that it would insert double space
| after period when you hit that key. It might even have
| been possible to set it up to auto justify on save/send.
| I suspect that's why a lot of old (plain text) email had
| the double space after period and perhaps still does in
| OSS circles.
|
| I think the default vim justification worked that way
| too. Around this time I went through a phase of bloody-
| mindedly using Mail/mailx and vi on OpenBSD while still
| sending mail through my ISP's SMTP and using fetchmail to
| grab it through POP3. I would not at all be surprised if
| cypherpunk types were doing the same thing, even if their
| main desktop or laptop was Windows and they used single
| space after period for non-email communication.
|
| Edit to add: I just looked up fmt(1) manpage[0] and it
| specifically mentions using it to format mails, and that
| the default is two space after period.
|
| [0] https://man.openbsd.org/fmt.1
| someplaceguy wrote:
| The bitcoin whitepaper was written in OpenOffice and it
| also has double spaces after periods, which doesn't fit
| your theory.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| I don't really have a theory, just sharing my experience
| growing up being taught to use two spaces, then in the
| early 2000s consciously adjusting my writing style back
| to one space, then having my plaintext emails still end
| up with two spaces anyway.
|
| It's interesting that a document written in a WYSIWYG
| word processor would have two spaces because I think what
| originally got me to switch to one was word processor
| auto corrects removing the extra space, or at least
| putting blue squigglies in during the grammar check.
|
| I guess my feeling is that although this might be an
| indicator of authorship, it's not necessarily a smoking
| gun one way or the other.
| dogman144 wrote:
| There's a great write up on Len that digs into this style
| of analysis and others, and that's what sold me. Worth
| reading if it the topic interests you, it's linked
| elsewhere here I think! Lots of fun spacing, timezone to
| forum posts analysis, who worked and researched with
| who...
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Just trace its usecases, it leads to both EU/FED exploring a
| digital fiat and a digital passport, must be someone who has
| worked with the government
|
| My theory: the CIA/NSA
| greyface- wrote:
| There is some evidence pointing to a Covad IP address in Los
| Angeles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29728339
| tambourine_man wrote:
| There is a great book and/or movie just waiting to be made about
| Satoshi. Such a great story.
| cachvico wrote:
| Broaden "Satoshi" to the creation story of Bitcoin, and there
| already are; Banking on Bitcoin is a good one.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Banking on Bitcoin is such a useful explainer of the space
| and its implications. Not a lot of that content around
| anymore.
| noman-land wrote:
| No one has a good ending!
| thinkmassive wrote:
| Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians,
| and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency
|
| by Finn Brunton
| wslh wrote:
| The top Satoshi archeologist is Sergio Lerner:
| https://bitslog.com/
|
| Official security auditor of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
| jesperwe wrote:
| Maybe HE is Satoshi!
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Big brain move, be the leading authority on not identifying
| yourself.
| chrononaut wrote:
| Made me think of
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen
|
| > In the letter, he gave the names of three KGB agents
| secretly working for the FBI: Boris Yuzhin, Valery
| Martynov, and Sergei Motorin ... Hanssen was recalled yet
| again to Washington, D.C., in 1987. He was tasked with
| studying all known and rumored penetrations of the FBI to
| find the man who had betrayed Martynov and Motorin; this
| meant, in effect, that he was charged with searching for
| himself.
| noman-land wrote:
| Satoshi double spaces after periods.
| chrisoconnell wrote:
| The real analysis is here.
| dboreham wrote:
| Must be American then.
| raid2000 wrote:
| Or just above the age of 35 or so?
| hansvm wrote:
| Or if their typing instructor grew up around that time.
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| I thought the double spacing was a typewriter thing. Is it
| uniquely American?
| seanhunter wrote:
| It is not.
|
| I learned to do it because old-school unix vi would
| identify your sentences better for sentence-based moves if
| you had 2 spaces after the period. I'm actually trying to
| unlearn it now because you don't need it for any kind of
| vim/neovim and I read on some ultrapedantic typesetting
| website that it's wrong for some reason I don't quite
| remember now.
|
| In any case it's definitely _not_ specifically American
| (neither am I) and all the other "forensics" that people
| are trying based on vocab etc are somewhat of a stretch
| also. eg non-Americans use "gotten" non British people use
| "British" English (eg people from Ireland or from former
| British colonies for the most part) non-Americans use "ize"
| sometimes for spellings (I could never be bothered to learn
| the few exceptions needed to spell "ize/ise" words
| correctly in the British style and worked enough for
| American companies who wanted US spelling as a house style
| for my personal spelling to be even remotely consistent and
| certainly not indicative of where I am from.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| As a British person, despite having been taught that the
| '-ise' suffix is 'proper' English, I have made some
| effort to unlearn this habit, as it was never really
| based on any etymological roots anyway. Here's what
| Wiktionary has to say about it[1]: Many
| English verbs end in the suffix /aIz/. Historically, this
| has been spelled -ize on words originating from Greek
| (for example baptize, Hellenize), while -ise has been
| used, especially in -vise, -tise, -cise and -prise, on
| words that came from French or Latin roots (for example
| surprise, supervise). In the 19th century, it became
| common in the United Kingdom (due to French influence)...
| to use -ise also on words that had historically been
| spelled -ize (hence baptise, Hellenise). However, the...
| Oxford English Dictionary continue to use the spelling
| -ize on Greek words, and -ize has always been the
| spelling used in the United States and Canada on such
| words.
|
| The whole debate becomes rather moot when it is
| considered that Ancient Greek didn't use the Latin
| script, so both '-ize' or '-ise' would have looked
| distinctly foreign to a Greek author two thousand years
| ago. Horace so succinctly noted that "Captive Greece took
| captive her savage conqueror and brought civilisation to
| barbarous Latium", but he might have been a little less
| glowing if the orthography of Greek loanwords was as
| heated a debate in Rome as it is in contemporary Britain!
|
| [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ize
| seanhunter wrote:
| I must also be American in that case. (Hint: I'm not).
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Exactly how we learned to do in keyboarding class. It's still
| with me after all these years.
| RajT88 wrote:
| My wife double spaces after periods, and although she is a US
| citizen, she is not a product of the American education
| system.
|
| My wife is Satoshi Nakamoto.
| bombcar wrote:
| Now I'm sensing a whole "I am Spartacus" thing happening.
| DrBazza wrote:
| I'm Satoshi and so is my wife.
|
| I didn't think double spaces after a full stop is an
| American thing. We were taught that in the 70s back when
| typewriters were still a thing. And I can't break the
| habit today.
| bombcar wrote:
| I've seen it from various people from various
| backgrounds. The biggest commonality is age (typewriters)
| but I've seen it from youngsters, too.
|
| I split the difference as my typing grew up with LaTeX so
| I want a slightly larger space after a period, but I
| don't care to type it ;)
| RajT88 wrote:
| I was taught typing on electric typewriters in junior
| high, and yes 2 spaces after a period.
|
| Which is strange, because my first typing experience was
| on Apple IIe's in grade school. I don't recall any typing
| instruction back then, so probably my double space habit
| comes from the electric typewriter instruction.
| bombcar wrote:
| The "double space" for typewriters comes from style
| guides based on typesetting which was based on
| limitations of the type used in the ancient days.
|
| There's much argument over whether it is proper or not,
| and if so, how much. See _The Elements of Typographic
| Style_ or _A Few Notes on Book Design_ - https://mirror.m
| ath.princeton.edu/pub/CTAN/info/memdesign/me...
| ramses0 wrote:
| Dr.[space]Pepper is a soft drink.[space][space]This is a
| new sentence. Actually, "Dr Pepper" doesn't use a period
| so the point is void, but there's definitely some
| potential semantic (and display) differences between the
| periods in (eg) N.A.S.A. and the periods at end of a
| sentence. Not quite as straightforward as you might
| think.
| bombcar wrote:
| The books go into it, and LaTeX has \\. for periods that
| are not sentence-stops (there's even more, as word-
| breaking and line-breaking come into play, as you don't
| want to end a line with Dr. when it's part of a name,
| etc.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| My wife is Satoshi too ! _insert two spaced salute_
| RajT88 wrote:
| There is an inside joke here as well.
|
| I regularly accuse my wife of being Satoshi Nakamoto.
| jinwoo68 wrote:
| It might be just that he uses Emacs for writing emails. Emacs
| uses double space after periods by default.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Emacs uses the _presence of double spaces after periods_ as
| a marker that that particular sequence of text is the end
| of a sentence. It doesn 't insert them by default, but
| rather interprets their insertion in a particular way.
|
| See: sentence-end-double-space, a variable, and sentence-
| end, a function, both defined in 'paragraphs.el'.
|
| Other editors made this same interpretation of existing,
| common practice.
| stavros wrote:
| I heard that Satoshi was Hal Finney (from a good friend of
| Hal's). Looking at his personal site, guess how many spaces
| there are after a period:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20140403012916/http://www.finney...
| jablongo wrote:
| On this website there are single spaces following periods.
| stavros wrote:
| View source.
| elaus wrote:
| When HTML is rendered, multiple normal white space
| characters collapse into one, e.g. if you write "<p>Hello
| it's me</p>" it will be displayed in a browser as "Hello
| it's me". The source code tells the whole truth.
| aqfamnzc wrote:
| Haha, HN seems to have removed your demo whitespace.
| (Even in the source)
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| I think it's a fair bet that Satoshi is either dead, insane,
| or the government. Finney checks the most likely one.
| neom wrote:
| The government is a new (but fun) one for me! What's the
| theory there?
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| It's a mechanism by which the CIA(or others!) could pay
| operatives covertly.
|
| I'm pretty sure i read this like a decade ago, but to me
| it makes sense. Especially given that numbers stations
| apparently blared out orders into the late 1900s.
| maipen wrote:
| Never made sense to me.
|
| Bitcoin is open. Cash is private and anonymous.
|
| If monero was the first currency to come out I would've
| considered that.
| alicelebi wrote:
| Blast from the past.
| raid2000 wrote:
| > The VPS has 320MB RAM, 50MB of which is currently free. There's
| also 500MB swap space.
|
| Every MB counts!
| layer8 wrote:
| > It's kind of fun to read about the state of "VPS hosting"
| from those days. Lots of downtime. Unexpected reboots.
|
| Absolutely not my experience from those days, VPSs were rock-
| solid for me.
| raid2000 wrote:
| Maybe they were trying to save money. There's another quote
| where Satoshi suggests being frugal:
|
| > It might be a long time before we get another donation like
| that, we should save a lot of it.
| wolrah wrote:
| > Absolutely not my experience from those days, VPSs were
| rock-solid for me.
|
| Likewise, my personal toy VPS actually dates back to 2009 and
| the only unplanned downtime it's ever had were when Linode
| was one of the targets of one of those big DDoS waves a few
| years back. Even then it was online and working fine
| internally, just limited in its ability to reach the outside
| world.
|
| The VPS itself has been rock solid and in 15 years the only
| times it's not been at least trying to serve whatever I have
| on it have been when I've rebooted it for updates.
| swozey wrote:
| I found those specs really curious as I worked in webhosting
| (even rax which is in the thread) and we didn't have anything
| near that low for a vps, but reading further I guess they're
| using some random fly-by-night webhost that doesn't even have a
| cPanel or Plesk license or anything for the user to self-
| service, they base all of their pricing on linode and you have
| to call/ticket in to manage your site.
|
| I don't know the background of satoshi, etc (of course) but
| that's a $10 vps and they're complaining about running out of
| memory, etc in the thread.. Why so cheap? Dedicated xeon
| servers back then were 80-250 and vps filled every other price
| range.
|
| And if they just need to compile a python widget on linux with
| a desktop WM... we had the technology to do that locally in
| 2009..
| ajross wrote:
| > Why so cheap?
|
| It was an amateur open source project hosting a simple site
| for project collaboration, in an era before the FAANG bubble
| in engineer salaries. I think $10/month for a hobby thing is
| about right.
|
| Also recognize that this was still in the "OMG how did
| computers get so fast" era. Our intuition about the time was
| still colored by the 486's on which we'd all installed Linux
| for the first time (or the Sparcstations we used at school,
| same deal). Even today a 100+ MHz device still "feels fast"
| to me, and recognize that I write audio firmware on 400-800
| MHz DSP cores.
| swozey wrote:
| I mean, I just said I was in this business back then. I was
| probably 22 and making a whole $40k in my first "real"
| engineering job at Hostway, then Hostgator, then Rackspace,
| etc. And I owned multiple servers. A $40 VPS was not a big
| ask in 2009. I absolutely didn't make FAANG salary nor did
| 99.9% of our VPS customers. We used to stick 1-3k customers
| on one $350/month dell poweredge.
|
| We had _millions_ of customers with VPS of various pricing
| and traffic and businesses.
|
| > Also recognize that this was still in the "OMG how did
| computers get so fast" era.
|
| I'm so confused by this statement. I've been in datacenters
| since 2005, if we ever had a "omg fast cpus" moment
| anywhere in that time line it was when AMD Epyc came out
| around 2016 and we could push massive PCIE bandwidth for
| vfio/etc. Beyond that we've been sitting on various 2-4ghz
| xeons for 25 years. I'm confused on the 486 comparison. I
| had a 486 when I was 8, 31 years ago.
|
| TWO THOUSAND AND NINE 2 0 0 9
|
| "Before the SV balloon in salaries".. dude, we're talking
| under a $100/month... In 2009. Your comment makes it sound
| like this was the yesteryear of computers, like 1988 or
| something, this comment has me so confused.
|
| The entire thread is them talking about putting a
| tiddlywiki+phpbb on a VPS. This, aside from LAMP/etc stacks
| were the most common hosting product sold and were usually
| $5-10/mo plans. I have a feeling they're actually using one
| of those scammy "free" webhosts you used to be able to get
| off of somethingawful, etc. that would disappear after 2
| months and were probably CSAM vectors.
|
| It's just a very strange level of frugality, which is
| mentioned in this HN thread elsewhere. It sounds like they
| were only using donations to move forward, nothing wrong
| with that, just interesting how low skill/researched their
| infrastructure stuff is for someone who seemingly can
| create a thing like bitcoin.
| ajross wrote:
| You lost me. You asked why someone would rent a bottom
| tier hosting solution in 2009, and I told gave you an
| answer as someone who was paying somewhere around that
| for hobby projects at right around the same time. I mean,
| I'm sure you're right in some sense that there were
| better choices, there always are.
|
| But this wasn't a weird choice at all, unless you want to
| inform it with a BTC quote from 2018 or whatever.
| fenalphthalein wrote:
| Honest inquiry here - What I don't understand is how people think
| the identification of Satoshi is "bound to happen". What did the
| person do wrong, exactly?
|
| Based on how I understand it, if the person did nothing wrong by
| inventing Bitcoin, no investigation will occur and no judge will
| sign off on a search warrant to get the ID data. No private
| investigator will be able to obtain the data either, as ISPs
| wouldn't just dish out private info like that without a warrant.
|
| Did the inventor of Bitcoin do something wrong to allow for a
| judge to violate their privacy in a court case? That's the only
| way I see the info getting out, but is there a crime to allow
| that situation to arise?
|
| What other (legal or illegal) path is there to identify a person
| who posted something online?
| keiferski wrote:
| The USG seems pretty intent on implementing KYC across the
| entirety of the financial system, so it wouldn't really
| surprise me if they aimed to identify wallets holding large
| (say, $100 million USD or more) amounts of Bitcoin.
| dannyw wrote:
| Realistically the threshold will be something like $100.
| le-mark wrote:
| Would this not be self reported by wallet owners? Because if
| each transaction uses a unique wallet address, funds are very
| difficult to connect to an owner. Until they're connected to
| a sale to fiat at least?
| keiferski wrote:
| Yes but my point is more that if the resources of a nation
| state are at play, they will probably be able to figure out
| who Satoshi is/was.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Governments are going to argue that the creation of BitCoin and
| lack of KYC to use it is a major contributor to money
| laundering.
| ekabod wrote:
| Maybe one country jurisdiction thinks he may owe taxes, so they
| may investigate.
| dogman144 wrote:
| The space has moved past this risk for a lot of reasons, to
| start. And it's hard to understand I think in light of modern
| (relative to pre-2018/19) widespread mainstream adoption.
|
| But, a long term protection for BTC when it was smaller and tbh
| anyone's guess how it would turn out (still is IMO), was: who
| are you going to haul into senate hearings, court, cryptography
| export control violations, whatever over BTC?
|
| This happened ample times in the recent past before BTC with
| digital money attempts and cryptography projects. It's
| happening now with mixers on btc and ethereum. It was a real
| risk to BTC in its own way.
|
| With BTC then and now, there was no real leader though. There
| were important core devs and industry leads, but no one held
| true sway like, say, Vitalik did with eth early days.
|
| So it wasn't so much a firm "did something wrong" risk for
| BTC's founder, but more of a concern that the US govt had taken
| _very_ heavyhanded measures against many similar projects to
| BTC. As there was no one to target in BTC's case, this
| protection played a large role in its early push into staying
| power.
|
| Also going to color this with CIA had the lead dev at the time
| visit them to discuss it in _2011._ So there was certainly some
| real sustained attention to it from the start.
| fenalphthalein wrote:
| Sounds like this person was really smart to begin with. High-
| level societal awareness caused them to choose the private
| route, and focus on releasing something for the greater good.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if this person never even took a
| single bitcoin for themselves, other than the ones used for
| code testing purposes. That would create another avenue for
| people to come after them if it became public that they
| hoarded some of the Bitcoin for themselves.
| reactordev wrote:
| This. Maybe, Satoshi saw where it was going, knew it had
| wings, didn't want to be the elephant's plaything in some
| senate hearing, and bowed out. Sometimes people make things
| because it's the right thing to do. Other times people make
| things because they are experimenting and seeing what
| sticks. This was a case of both. The right idea, at the
| right time, without hubris, and without someone to blame or
| throw in court if the experiment fails.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| > I wouldn't be surprised if this person never even took a
| single bitcoin for themselves, other than the ones used for
| code testing purposes.
|
| Unlikely - https://coincodex.com/article/28459/satoshi-
| nakamoto-wallet-...
| jjmarr wrote:
| The value of his publicly-known wallets are well into the
| tens of billions. Yet Nakamoto has not cashed out.
| arein3 wrote:
| Maybe he will cash out in the future if his cryosleep
| awakening will be successful
|
| Allegedly this guy is nakamoto https://en.m.wikipedia.org
| /wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scienti...
| tromp wrote:
| Satoshi could have chosen a 0 BTC subsidy in the blocks he
| mined. Or he could have burned all the BTC he mined. But he
| chose to do neither, leaving himself as the biggest BTC
| owner ever.
|
| Other coins have been designed in a way where the founders
| can only obtain coins by mining them in very small
| quantities or buying them on the open market (mostly by
| fixing the block subsidy forever).
| dogman144 wrote:
| I mean that "other coins design" part is looking at this
| aspect from the 2024 perspective of many blockchains many
| designs existing.
|
| In 2009, calling Bitcoin the only blockchain in town
| doesn't even do service to its extreme novelty at the
| time.
|
| There were no other ideas on how to design, let alone any
| ideas on what would work long term, and there were no
| "open markets" for crypto haha.
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| Or he deleted the keys.
|
| Also can you choose a smaller subsidy? Wouldn't that be
| an invalid block?
| tromp wrote:
| Yes, the coinbase can be any value from 0 to the maximum,
| which is subsidy + fees. It has been below the maximum
| several times in fact.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| When in 2011 ? You seem to mean that it was unknown by then,
| but it wasn't : 2011 was pretty much the year when it blew up
| into the public consciousness, spreading from the likes of
| Slashdot and Ars Technica into more generalist publications
| (also causing its first - or was that 2nd? - bubble popping)
| :
|
| "The Crypto-Currency" - The New Yorker (2011)
|
| https://archive.is/wsbcQ
|
| (I love how I picked it randomly, and the first two subtitles
| are "Bitcoin and its mysterious inventor." and "It's not
| clear if bitcoin is legal, but there is no company in control
| and no one to arrest.")
| dogman144 wrote:
| I know what you're getting at but I disagree with the
| analysis and I'll try to frame what I mean, which is
| somewhat the opposite.
|
| I mean the '11 visit is indicative of serious attention
| paid to by serious people very early on relative to the
| rest of crypto's history. As in, the founder was right to
| be cautious.
|
| "Early on" in this case means that outside of tech pubs and
| curiosity pieces due to the compelling founder mystery, the
| space was treated as a joke by and large. Like watch
| Banking on Bitcoin, and imagine trying to convince critics
| of it at that time that ETFs, crypto aide to Ukraine, 3x
| nation state adoptions, custody teams at big banks, and so
| on were all coming. I would just completely disagree if you
| argued this wasn't the theme then. So yes, 2011 and intel
| agency interest is quite early on.
|
| For example, it's taken 15 years to get tangible regulatory
| clarity which arguably just starting finally with the ETF.
| paulpauper wrote:
| this is like winning lotto ticket but not cashing it .
| anyone in theory could have read the article or related
| ones and bought some, but you would needed to hold
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| It only takes one person at an ISP to steal and leak the data.
| I mean, an IRS employee leaked the president's tax returns and
| is currently in federal prison for it. I imagine the stakes are
| much lower for just stealing some IP address assignment data
| from an ISP archive(if such an archive exists).
| reactordev wrote:
| It only takes one VPN to hide it.
| ziddoap wrote:
| VPN's shift the trust, they don't eliminate the need for
| it.
|
| Feel free to read the above as:
|
| > _It only takes one person at a VPN provider to steal and
| leak the data._
| mksybr wrote:
| Perhaps he only communicated as satoshi over Tor.
| reactordev wrote:
| You've never played Uplink I see. One doesn't just hop to
| one VPN and call it a day...
| paulpauper wrote:
| probably used TOR
| mortallywounded wrote:
| I don't think it's a legal issue. People want to know who it
| was and credit where it's due.
|
| Satoshi didn't do anything wrong but distributed consensus was
| finally solved (or so it seems) and that's a big deal.
| reactordev wrote:
| Idolization of Satoshi is strong. For that reason alone, if I
| were him/her, I would disappear. The work is self-evident and
| the idea a dime a dozen. The execution of it and the fact
| that it was accepted is what we should be idolizing. Which is
| exactly what happened. BTC became a _thing_ and was no longer
| an _idea_. I reject anyone claiming to be Satoshi because
| Satoshi would never claim to be Satoshi. ;)
| mortallywounded wrote:
| That's why I hope the truth comes out. If say, Satoshi is
| Len, then Satoshi is no longer a god. He's a regular dude,
| that suffered like many people and tragically took his own
| life. There's a lot to unwrap there.
| reactordev wrote:
| Maybe, we are better off NOT knowing. Having closure
| could mean the end of BTC. It could mean the end of a lot
| of things. It could also be beginnings, no doubt.
| However, like Schrodinger's cat, it's best if it's kept
| in a state of quantum entanglement.
| hansvm wrote:
| > as ISPs wouldn't just dish out private info like that without
| a warrant
|
| ISPs regularly sell private data to the highest bidder.
| Similarly with payroll providers and whatnot (a non-trivial
| fraction of my paystubs -- not just salary, but withholding,
| exempt tax status, ... -- are available to anyone with a few
| dollars; historically, it _seems_ like the only buyers have
| been employers trying to see if their salary offers aligned
| with my expectations).
| fckgw wrote:
| They'll sell anonymized data in aggregate but no, you can't
| just go to an ISP and buy the user behind an IP without a
| court order.
| hansvm wrote:
| They sell "anonymized" data, not just "aggregated". The
| only missing link is tying that back to a real person
| (i.e., they haven't solved differential privacy; they've
| just given the illusion that they're not selling personal
| data). Tying it back to a real person is easy though
| because the non-anonymized fields (age, gender, salary,
| zip-code, ...) are uniquely identifying for most
| individuals and are available for sale tied back to a real
| human from other sources which you can fuzzily join the ISP
| data into.
|
| It's similar to how bitcoin transactions (before mixers and
| whatnot) were de-anonymized. You have the secret
| information (an identity), the public information
| (transaction history), and you're able to fuzzily join that
| public information to other public sources containing the
| secret information to also have secret information tied
| with the original "anonymous" source.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Just to re-emphasize, because I think it's really poorly
| understood: most "anonymized" data is a few additional
| data points away from being re-identified.
|
| Data re-identification was already happening in 2006
| (just one example below). And now there's exponentially
| more data available to use for this purpose.
|
| > _We apply our de-anonymization methodology to the
| Netflix Prize dataset, which contains anonymous movie
| ratings of 500,000 subscribers of Netflix, the world's
| largest online movie rental service. We demonstrate that
| an adversary who knows only a little bit about an
| individual subscriber can easily identify this
| subscriber's record in the dataset. Using the Internet
| Movie Database as the source of background knowledge, we
| successfully identified the Netflix records of known
| users, uncovering their apparent political preferences
| and other potentially sensitive information._
|
| [1]
| https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf
| welder wrote:
| Yes you can, companies have deals with ISPs for individual
| real-time mobile and home browsing data. If you pay enough
| it has real names, otherwise it has person id and household
| id along with other data that makes it easy to associate
| with the real person or household.
| acdha wrote:
| American ISPs injected tracking codes into their user's
| HTTP traffic so they could get paid by advertisers. I would
| not speak in absolutes about that, especially because
| anonymizing data is a hard problem which even we'll-
| intended people have made mistakes with.
| usrusr wrote:
| Dark sarcasm take: there's a large volume of early bitcoin that
| may or may not be lost forever. The risk of addresses that have
| gone dark a long time ago lighting up again must have a big
| influence of any bitcoin evaluation that is at least in part
| based on reason. Fossilized coins could hugely change the
| supply/demand dynamic. The documented death of a person
| believed to be Satoshi would significantly shift that risk
| assessment. Nobody would _know_ wether the person took
| meaningful keys to their grave or not, but the risk equation
| would contain one scenario less than before in the category of
| old coin flood.
| thefatboy wrote:
| Why do you think they want his identity because he did
| something WRONG?
| aillia wrote:
| I hear your point and it's a valid one. Consider the recent
| case of Tornado Cash and the Open Source Is Not A Crime
| movement. Two individuals were arrested for developing open-
| source code on GitHub. Just last week, GoFundMe shut down the
| Tornado Cash legal defense crowdfunding. This suggests that the
| state is more interested in protecting itself from individuals
| rather than defending their rights. This could potentially set
| a precedent where inventors or developers of decentralized
| technologies could be targeted, even if they've done nothing
| inherently wrong. If interested you can learn more here:
| https://wewantjusticedao.org/
| thisgoesnowhere wrote:
| Well either that or what they were doing is just obviously
| illegal and they should be at fault for it.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Tornado Cash was what, money laundering and circumvention of
| sanctions? Pretty illegal.
| cududa wrote:
| Oh this is bullshit and you know it. Another example of "we
| didn't call it a security so it's not a security"
|
| They weren't arrested for the code. They were arrested for
| actively participating and profiting off money laundering
| with North Korea being a customer.
|
| Zero-knowledge proofs are different from public ledgers.
| That's where the issue comes in to play. The Treasury
| Department has already given guidance that cryptocurrency
| mixers fall under Know Your Customer laws and the Bank
| Secrecy Act, and are required to know who exactly is using
| their services and how.
|
| It's not "Criminalizing Open Source". You live in a society
| with laws. Obfuscating classic financial products with tech
| jargon worked for the first half of the decade.
|
| Y'all are just mad it doesn't work anymore and claim "You
| just don't understand the technology. You haven't issued
| guidance on specifics of crypto currency. You can't use
| hundred year old laws"
|
| Yes, you can use 100 year old laws. At the end of the day,
| the financial shenanigans of most crypto, exchanges, and
| tokens are _fundamentally_ the same things that have already
| been regulated. You just have new words.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You live in a society of variable laws that change at
| runtime get applied unevenly.
| avgDev wrote:
| Tornado cash was doing something illegal.
|
| GoFundMe is a business, which may do whatever it wants.
| Tornado Cash has no rights to obtain funds though GoFundMe.
| soojimit wrote:
| Tornado Cash is a protocol which can be used by both good
| and bad actors. Saying TC was responsible for bad actors
| laundering their crypto through the protocol is like saying
| auto makers are responsible for car crashes or Bob Kahn is
| responsible for all the illegal activities on the internet.
| treffer wrote:
| These court orders might also happen if someone _claims_ that
| crimes have happened.
|
| The legal system has to come to that conclusion, which requires
| an investigation.
|
| Yeah it must be an important claim. That's of course completely
| unacceptable and illegal. But it is one way such warrants could
| happen.
| tim333 wrote:
| I think people who follow / read up on the thing have a pretty
| good idea who it is but as you say he didn't really do anything
| wrong. Reasons for anonymity include not having criminals try
| to extort you and maybe some government having a go over money
| laundering or people suing for this of that so I think people
| with a good idea stay quiet to respect Satoshi's desires.
|
| I've got a theory he may come out and donate to a charitable
| foundation when he's old and near the end.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > ISPs wouldn't just dish out private info like that without a
| warrant.
|
| ISPs routinely sell such information for money en masse. Police
| departments are a major buyer, but also ad agencies and others.
| Plus, bribing a low level employee for access to such records,
| or directly infiltrating the ISP to get access yourself, is
| child's play to any determined group.
|
| It is extraordinarily naive, especially in a post-Snowden
| world, to think that any and all information available to a
| private company is not also available to, at least, spy
| agencies of the parent state.
| falserum wrote:
| > Did the inventor of Bitcoin do something wrong to allow for a
| judge to violate their privacy in a court case? That's the only
| way I see the info getting out, but is there a crime to allow
| that situation to arise?
|
| This feels like wrong framework/approach. Fundamentaly question
| here: "is it worth it for somebody?" Economists path to an
| answer: If for somebody[3], profit[1] of identifying satoshi
| outweighs the cost[2], it will be done.
|
| [1] profit in very abstract sense. E.g. elimination of
| (perceived?) threat, aquisition of credible threat to other
| enemies, political points, money, making an example for others,
| showing off skills.
|
| [2] "cost" is also used in very abstract sense. E.g. Favor from
| a known(or compromised) judge, man hours dedicated by FBI/MI6,
| money, negative press budget after "bending" some rules, risk
| of getting caught by supriors/underlinglins/press/constituents.
|
| [3] "somebody" - to no surprise - can be anybody/anything. E.g.
| A corporation, a government, maybe single branch or department,
| maybe sole individual able to use his government position for
| personal gain, an employee of ISP, a blockchain historian, most
| likely Satoshi's ex.
|
| Important to note: both individuals and governments do break
| the law when they think it is necessary.
|
| I find at least two credible incentives to find satoshi:
|
| - bitcoin can be used to lounder money, circumvent financial
| sanctions, so governments want to stop that and make example of
| it.
|
| - Satoshi, has 1 000 000 bitcoins. That's a lot of money. a)
| banal roberies are done for far less. b) CIA or similar might
| want to know who wields this much resource, friend or foe
| (especially if its value would grow even more)
|
| How Satoshi can be uncovered I have no idea, but the story of
| Silkroad owner shows, that minor slipups can be revealed after
| number of years.
| mortallywounded wrote:
| If you want a detailed look at all of the Satoshi evidence
| (circumstantial and others), check out this paper:
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.10257v14.pdf
|
| If you want the TLDR; the meat is the "Candidates" section about
| Len Sassaman and the original Bitcoin paper's references (in
| particular, how Len was the only person with the right skill set,
| in the right place, at the right time to even get a copy of the
| referenced work).... among a mountain of other circumstantial
| evidence.
| intotheabyss wrote:
| Small blockers in shambles
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| Anyone have a TLDR summary of what is interesting in this very
| long page?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Just chitchat during the development of bitcoin. You can
| understand a lot about how bitcoin design choices came to be
| from Satoshi own reasonings. The white paper doesn't spell
| these out in detail
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| I guess specifically I'm curious how this would be
| relevant/useful in the court case mentioned.
| chrsw wrote:
| I just assumed "Satoshi Nakamoto" was an alias for a small group
| of people all working on the same code base/idea.
| TheBlight wrote:
| That seems unlikely. The original code base was fairly small
| and very much reads like one person was responsible for writing
| it. Also, the more people who know a secret the less likely it
| is to be kept.
| chrsw wrote:
| This is true, but having multiple people involved makes it
| every difficult to pinpoint one true source. Plus, when I say
| multiple people I mean 2-3 or 3-4. Not like a big operation.
| And if these small number are so paranoid about privacy and
| identity that they invented Bitcoin, I would expect them to
| be able to keep a secret.
|
| I just find it hard to believe there isn't a single soul
| walking on this planet right now that has any idea who
| Satoshi Nakamoto is/was.
| elwell wrote:
| Satoshi seems to have delved in the dark art technique of
| print output debugging: https://github.com/Maguines/Bitcoin-v
| 0.1/blob/2c7a4c9bbb793c...
| ak_111 wrote:
| Satoshi having the foresight and discipline to take careful
| measures that would enable him to keep his identity secret, and
| succeeding to do so up to this point is almost more impressive
| achievement of his technical skills than bitcoin.
|
| Even back in 2009, it was difficult (impossible?) to operate
| online without leaving tons of digital footprint, and we can
| guess that for sure state-backed actors tried to identify him and
| probably failed. Unless of course he was a state-backed actor(s).
| medo-bear wrote:
| > Unless of course he was a state-backed actor(s)
|
| I'd be even more impressed if some state had the foresight to
| come up with Satoshi
| ak_111 wrote:
| Well, one of the theories I fancy is that we know that Dorian
| Satoshi Nakamoto worked on a classified defence project, now
| it is almost impossible that he was the creator of btc,
| however there is a chance that a group of security service
| hackers who interacted with him while he worked there were
| inspired by this eccentric persona and thus decided to adopt
| his name as a joke when they were thinking of made-up
| moniker.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| Why do you assume state-backed actors failed to identify him?
|
| I would guess he is probably known with a high degree of
| certainty to at least one nation's intelligence but that
| publicizing that knowledge and the documentation of it is not
| in anyone's interest.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| I would assume that his entire identity is a little more than
| a cutout for a U.S. state intelligence agency.
| voidfunc wrote:
| This. I assume Satoshi is nation state actor. Most likely
| the US.
| neoncontrails wrote:
| What makes you think the US would be motivated to
| hamstring its own Federal Reserve, or threaten the
| dollar's status as the world's reserve currency?
| lolinder wrote:
| What makes you think that Bitcoin poses _any_ threat to
| the dollar or the Federal Reserve?
| krick wrote:
| > probably failed
|
| That's silly. The fact that you don't know who somebody is says
| nothing about what some "state-backed actor" knows. If
| anything, I'm fairly confident that some people in NSA/CIA know
| who he is for a decade at least, and "probably" have it written
| in some documents that will long outlive you. Of course, this
| is as proofless statement as you saying that they "probably
| failed" to figure it out, but what you are saying basically
| amounts to "it is so unlikely for this to happen, so it's such
| a miracle it _probably_ happened! " A more reasonable thing to
| say would be "it is so unlikely for this to happen, so it
| _probably_ didn 't happen".
| biorach wrote:
| > That's silly.
|
| That's unnecessary and a bit childish and devalues the rest
| of your reply
| verve_rat wrote:
| I think you are over reacting.
| xdavidliu wrote:
| I would argue that saying "childish" is just as unnecessary
| as saying "silly"
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| >That's...childish
|
| That's unnecessary and a bit silly and devalues the rest of
| your reply
| deepsun wrote:
| There are limits on secrets lifetime that's highly dependent
| on number of people in it. Someone even tried to calculate a
| formula
|
| In democratic societies it's very hard to keep a thing secret
| that involved 10+ people for 20+ years.
| roenxi wrote:
| If that calculation was completely wrong, how would anyone
| know? We never get a perfect snapshot of the world to
| compare with.
|
| What that stat really says is any conspiracy involving 10+
| people, if the details manages to stay secret for 20 years,
| will likely never come to light.
| eganist wrote:
| With the US at least, it can probably be loosely tested
| by comparing declassified records (50 years on) with
| program size at the time.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Well, the Manhattan project is a good example of something
| that remained secret from the public for far longer than
| any formula would predict, given the gigantic amount of
| people involved (though of course other state actors knew
| about it long before).
| asmr wrote:
| If you dig a lot you will find a footprint. There is evidence
| that there was a small core team and that satoshi may not be a
| single person, if it is, he is most likely to be Wei Dai. The
| other likely alternative is of course the hypothetical state-
| backed actor.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Wei Dei is one of my suspects too, mostly because of
| Crypto++, but not only.
|
| Why do you suspect is Wei Dei, was there any reveals
| regarding this in the lasts few years?
| idontwantthis wrote:
| What is the rationale behind a state creating BTC?
| wil421 wrote:
| Fund or obfuscate funding for programs they want but the
| public or political appetite doesn't want to know about it.
| krapp wrote:
| That's already what black budgets are for. And funding
| drug cartels.
| lazide wrote:
| And Tor?
|
| Similar possibilities.
| tremarley wrote:
| On 21/08/2008 Satoshi claims he was not aware of Wei Dei's
| "B-Money" paper.
| diggan wrote:
| On the other hand, if they were Wei Dei, they wouldn't
| exactly say "Ah yes of course, I wrote this paper but don't
| use that name, use Satoshi" but they would of course say
| "Oh I didn't know, I'll put a reference to it in my paper".
| dist-epoch wrote:
| State backed actors in the West don't go on a hunt without
| orders. Who would be so interested to order his identity
| discovered? And for what purpose?
|
| They found Bin Laden who didn't allow anyone of his associates
| to come within 50 km of him with an electronic device.
|
| We will only find out what FBI/CIA is capable of when the
| Justice Department orders the identity of Satoshi to be
| discovered.
| k12sosse wrote:
| We got him, look at the map! See the 50' no-radio circle in
| the middle of that city? He's there.
|
| Sometimes a lack of signal is a signal itself.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Read again, of his associates. He lived in a village, among
| other houses and people with phones.
| paulpauper wrote:
| he's a human. only 7 billion of them
| nostrademons wrote:
| He's probably dead. My two top picks for who Satoshi might be
| are Len Sassaman (died 2011) and Hal Finney (died 2014)
|
| There's little point in unmasking somebody who's already dead -
| their ability to influence future events is gone. So even if
| state intelligence surveys knew who it was, there'd be no
| benefit to unmasking it.
| bilater wrote:
| It's super obvious from his writing his first language is
| English. Most likely Hal Finney.
| xvedejas wrote:
| I used to think so too, but the case for Len Sassaman is
| similarly strong.
| ak_111 wrote:
| What is the strongest evidence AGAINST Sassaman?
| overkill28 wrote:
| His wife doesn't think it was him (https://twitter.com/mara
| dydd/status/1364325186372304904?t=yY...) and the original
| Bitcoin code/executable was Windows based whereas Sassaman
| was known to Mac/Linux
| mortallywounded wrote:
| Those are weak pieces of evidence.
|
| Meredith appears to be telling the truth. She didn't say
| Len wasn't Satoshi, she simply said to the best of her
| knowledge he wasn't. That doesn't mean he wasn't working
| on it covertly.
|
| One of Len's best friends (Bram Cohen) knew Len was
| posting pseudonymously on the cypherpunk mailing list but
| never knew what handle he was using. Also, when Bram was
| about to release BitTorrent Len tried to convince him to
| do it anonymously. It's not hard to believe that Len
| would have done it secretly; even from his wife.
|
| Furthermore, Meredith can't be 100% trusted. When Satoshi
| handed the project over to the maintainers and stopped
| posting to the cypherpunk mailing list in late 2010,
| Meredith tweeted, "Bitcoin isn't ready for prime time
| yet, according to its creator. Interested people can help
| finish it, though!"[1]
|
| Satoshi never said those words publicly or privately-- so
| it's a curious thing to say.
|
| As for the computer...
|
| It's likely Len used university computer(s) for the
| development as the commit times and communication line up
| with an academic schedule. It's likely the university had
| Windows computers. Plus; it's one way to isolate the
| environment and reduce the chance of information leakage
| (could have even been a Windows VM).
|
| [1]: https://twitter.com/maradydd/status/1216358213327667
| 2?t=dk8C...
| someplaceguy wrote:
| Also, from what I can see, he didn't use two spaces after
| a period.
| ak_111 wrote:
| Genuine question, if you are satoshi and not insanely media shy,
| what would be a real concern for not divulging your identity in
| 2024?
|
| You are rich enough to manage any security, tax or legal hits
| that you need to manage.
|
| Furthermore due to BTC being completely mainstreamed, the credit
| you will get for inventing btc would be epic.
|
| The least of it would be noble prize in economics. You will
| literally be a living cult leader like no other in history. Think
| of all those BTC fanatics finally meeting their leader. See the
| way Elon fanatics follow Musk and multiply that by 100.
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| I would imagine security is one argument. There are plenty of
| people and groups out there who have lost large amounts of BTC
| and who would like to believe that satoshi has the power to
| restore them or otherwise manipulate the currency.
| ak_111 wrote:
| I don't think he will need to worry more about security than
| say Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Annoying, but certainly doable
| with the money he has.
|
| But I can imagine that can factor in for lots of people who
| are risk averse and don't like the burden of having 24/7
| tight security around them.
| nabakin wrote:
| Not wanting the lifestyle that would certainly come with it
| like harassment, being recognized constantly in public, drawn
| into lawsuits, controversy, the market hanging on his every
| word, swatting, etc.
| mortallywounded wrote:
| I believe Satoshi was a cypherpunk and a remailer dev.
| Cypherpunks had a history of doing things anonymously on the
| mailing list and even trying to out one another (a sort of
| game).
|
| Furthermore, as a remailer dev Satoshi was all too familiar
| with what happened with the penent remailer[1]. He knew such
| services will become a legal target by the powers that be. This
| is why Satoshi even said we "kicked the hornets nest" when
| Wikileaks/Silkroad began accepting Bitcoin.
|
| He knew the powers would be coming.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer
| andriamanitra wrote:
| Most people don't want to be cult leaders. Unless they are an
| attention hungry person (which we can safely rule out at this
| point) they have nothing to gain from making their identity
| known. And I assume the tax authorities might be somewhat
| interested in their bitcoin stash...
| tdudhhu wrote:
| It is almost strange to read that they are handling the project
| as something very big and important. At that time it was
| absolutely not obvious that it would become big and mainstream.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| There was a lot of resentment towards bailouts at the time and
| making an alternative system
|
| Many people would have been passionate about their quests
| towards a solution. Many people still make redundant things
| without knowing the hurdles involved and are just as
| passionate. I have a client thinking they are going to "bank
| the unbanked" with a mobile app not using crypto at all, in
| 2024
|
| One reason why Satoshi would have been extremely passionate is
| because they had solved one of the unsolved problems of
| computer science up until 2008 which was the Double Spend
| Problem, and 2009 was his first production implementation of it
| called Bitcoin
|
| so you have a person that was seeing everything that the field
| of computer science had touched over the last half century, and
| knowing a solution for a unsolved aspect that prevented it from
| touching other industries and seeing how expansive that would
| be
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| > To think about what a really huge transaction load would look
| like, I look at the existing credit card network. I found some
| more estimates about how many transactions are online purchases.
| It's about 15 million tx per day for the entire e-commerce load
| of the Internet worldwide. At 1KB per transaction, that would be
| 15GB of bandwidth for each block generating node per day, or
| about two DVD movies worth. Seems do-able even with today's
| technology.
|
| So Satoshi would have increased the block size by now.
| swah wrote:
| "I've been at full-time work lately, and will be until the end of
| June, so I haven't had that much time to work with Bitcoin or my
| exchange service. I have a working beta of my service though, and
| a few weeks ago made my first transaction: sold 10,000 btc for 20
| euros via EU bank transfer. Maybe I can make it public soon."
| encoderer wrote:
| I love this mystery and I'm so grateful for it.
|
| Growing up we had DB Cooper and Deepthroat - interesting and
| compelling stories but those guys are famous only for being
| anonymous. They didn't really _do_ anything special.
|
| But satoshi...
| bsparker wrote:
| and banksy!
| superjan wrote:
| That's no secret anymore, is it?
| welder wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Satoshi is German.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6562461
| ak_111 wrote:
| So Satoshi used: Japanese pseudonym. German email domain.
| British English and a US Timezone.
|
| His ability to generate entropy in his identity is
| significantly underrated.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Bitcoin Inventor Satoshi Nakamoto Emails Revealed in Court_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39474691 - Feb 2024 (2
| comments)
| greyface- wrote:
| Satoshi Nakamoto <satoshin@gmx.com> wrote: >
| There are donors I can tap if we come up with something that
| needs > funding, but they want to be anonymous, which
| makes it hard to actually > do anything with it.
|
| I wonder who these donors were.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Is there a website listing people that Satoshi definitely could
| not be? That it seems would be more useful to our evergreen "Who
| is Satoshi" discussions.
| aqfamnzc wrote:
| How would we really rule anyone out?
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