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Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

Gwern has a long history of obsessive and misdirected behavior on this subject which is likely to cause harm to others. This particular case is Gwern's N-th accused "satoshi"... and this time the evidence consists mostly of counter evidence.

For example, these pgp signed emails are signed with the key with short ID 5EB7CB21 which is not the well known key, does not exist in old keyserver dumps, and has a pref-hash-algos list of "8 2 9 10 11", which is the list that GNUPG started generating a year (commit e50cac1d848d332c4dbf49d5f705d3cbbf074ba1) after the date on the key. The well known key, which the new key claims to be generated within 24 hours of, has "2 8 3" which was an the prior list of hashes.

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And you have a history of jumping the gun in declaring evidence as false or not true which likewise likely caused/causes harm.

Such as your public and forceful "rebuking", in an authoritarian manner, of the then revelations, with evidence, that gox had 200k btc, which latter of course was shown to be true and showed that you were in no way rebuking anything, but abusing your position.

One would think you would have learned and keep your mouth until the dust is settled and you are in a better position to judge, but it seems that you like far too much making authoritarian, seemingly conclusive when not warranted, proclamations instead.

That is not to say, of course, that this guy may not be satoshi, but I'd take care hours after the announcement especially if I was in your position.

Amen

If you believe that gwern has done something to warrant this criticism, I would really love to understand that.

Does gwern's reply on Reddit address what you just wrote?

And as I pointed out in my subsequent replies which you have left out, I am perfectly aware that PGP public key metadata (not pgp.mit.edu timestamps, since the keyservers are only reading what the keys say!) can be backdated at creation, and this is why we put our effort into nailing down the creation and modification dates of the blog post in third-party archives like the IA and Google Reader.

Our case was not based on the key creation dates and it is bullshit for you to imply that it was or that their unreliability torpedoes the article.

Can you point out which part of the gizmodo or wired articles were based on mistaken evidence from gwern's investigation?

Basically every piece of evidence that can falsified in this case is falsified. The PGP key used to sign the emails: Backdated with almost complete certainty. The blog posts? edited in 2013 to include the 'bitcoin hints'.

What is more likely: Someone who is Bitcoin's creator in hiding, went and created a pile of provably falsified information that they were Bitcoin's creator, plus left some circumstantial evidence that can't be decided .... Or someone who _wasn't_ Bitcoin's creator, went and created false evidence and had some circumstantial evidence by chance (or falsified too but not proven yet)?

In any case the complaint isn't even so much about this particular drama-fest, it's about the repeated behavior. This time it looks like it may have precipitated a raid on someones house (otherwise the timing is more coincidental than most of this evidence), had it been in some places in the US perhaps the victim (or at least their dog) wouldn't even be alive now.

> This particular case is Gwern's N-th accused "satoshi"

Not with this degree of certainty.

What certainty? Here's what they have: possibly backdated keys; edited blog entries; leaked emails. All from same, untrustworthy source. That's not certainty or concrete. It would probably be tossed out of court in the U.S. the second the defense brought up the blog editing.

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