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Comment by spdustin | Hacker News Reader

Okay seriously, is anyone contacting the authorities to see if this man is still alive? I do not know who to contact or what his location is. His "blog" post sounds like a suicide note - I've had the misfortune of reading others, and there are telltale signs - and it doesn't appear that anyone is taking steps to see if he's okay.

Maybe he is a liar, maybe he's Satoshi, who gives a shit at this point when the jaded comments make it sound like we've been invaded by 4chan.

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This post reminds me of a tactic abusive people use to prevent their victims from leaving them. When confronted with their bad behavior, they apologize profusely and pretend to feel remorse for their actions to the point that people worry about them. Once people feel adequately sorry for them and are distracted from their bad behavior, they go right back to doing what they were doing.

But the giveaway that shows it's all fake is that they never really get to the root of the bad behavior and do anything to fix it. In this case, Wright still hasn't admitted that he isn't Satoshi and doesn't have the key to the genesis block.

I've seen this behavior far too many times from my ex--I'm not going to give in to it here. Sure, someone should go check that he's not going to kill himself. But that should not for a second distract from the fact that he's a liar and a fraud, and this is likely just his latest ploy.

My ex did the same thing and it's pretty shitty, but it still deserves serious attention. The best route is to call the cops and ensure they get proper medical attention if nothing else for a strong jolt to reality.

I don't think she would be alive now if I hadn't made that call.

Abusive people commit suicides as well.

Once you know it's a tactic you can't allow yourself to fall for it anymore or you'll end up trapped, regardless of what the final outcome is.

However it's not right to go around guessing that someone like this guy is using that tactic and ignoring what could be a serious cry for help when you have no idea if he's an abusive person.

Abusive people aren't always abusive by calculation. Sometimes this "tactic" is completely honest, at the moment.

All of this wouldn't be that much of an issue if we weren't so pathologically curious all the time, the press wouldn't have any "story" whatsoever.

It's us angry monkeys who are the creators of this kind of behaviour.

At least on HN let's concentrate on the technology FFS.

AFAIK none of the current "blockchain" tech has managed to successfully introduce a robust "proof of stake" system versus the wasteful "proof of work" yet - and that's just one of the many problems we need to solve.

Essentially the whole Internet is broken so unfortunately we cannot even seriously talk about the significant scalability issues which AFAIK all of the current decentralised crypto state machines still suffer from out there on the githubs...

Yeah, this basically the reason I still click on most Trump stories I see, even though I strongly disagree with the guy and know a lot of what he says isn't true.

To be certain, it is; it's a textbook tactic used by abusers who themselves suffer from some neurosis. Abusers sometimes do, after threatening it so much, anneal themselves with the constant threats and their perceived ineffectiveness, actually follow through as a final, "I'll show them!"

Either way, it is a loss of life. I do feel better knowing that his safety (or, at the very least, status as a living, breathing human being) is confirmed. I also think he needs help, real professional help, to overcome whatever is pushing him in this apparent downward spiral.

Of course, he could just be some asshole trying to get airtime or to socially engineer access to Satoshi's funds. Maybe Satoshi had a psychotic break, and he (as Satoshi) is the result of it? Point is that we have only the evidence that has been shared (by him, the media, former colleagues) in a very haphazard way. It's easy to get wrapped up in theories and plot twists when there's a level of anonymity between us and the subject of our conspiracies. We simply do not know. Maybe we won't ever know.

Hopefully the next step for him begins a path to peace, rehabilitation, restitution, acceptance or any combination thereof.

Sadly, this type of behavior is also the hallmark of a master manipulator. Given his track record of deceit upon deceit (lied about PhD as confirmed by university, lied about supercomputer as confirmed by SGI, got caught backdating PGP key, multiple acquaintances in Australia on record about his sketchy business practices, etc. etc), I'd guess that the emotion here is significantly less than genuine.

That said, I agree that if I knew the man, or had any idea where he is then I'd feel compelled to check in on him. But it sounds like people have checked in on him and he's OK [1].

But I'm guessing it's just more showmanship and more attempts to distract from the fact that he has no proof he's who he's claiming to be.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11636144

I saw the post within a minute of two of it going up and also read it as a suicide note. I reached out to everyone I knew and heard back indirectly through someone else that he's ok.

He's also updated his homepage in the last few minutes.

Despite knowing just how much of a manipulator Craig is I think it's worth erring on the side of caution here.

Thank you for letting us know. Whether he's a lying asshole or not, I've learned the hard way to take someone seriously when they seem to be threatening self-harm, even if they've been insincere in the past. Someone who feels the need to lie so much isn't exactly neurotypical, and depressive thoughts with suicidal ideations often go along with such a compulsion. Better safe than sorry.

Thanks again for checking in.

The Goodbye at the end is worrying, but he simply needs to do one small action to prove his case and put an end to it all.

It would take less than 5 minutes, which leaves the question, why drag it on like this?

Because mental health issues can cause rationalizations to stack one on top of the other. It sucks, but it would explain it.

(I'm not actually claiming that's what's actually going on, for what it's worth. Just that the behavior has a familiar feel.)

I read the Goodbye as someone backed into a corner who can't prove it.

I read it that he is still trying hard to maintain the image of Satoshi to the public. Satoshi also disappeared like that.

It feels like a rage quit. Completely frustrated when you simply cannot win, there is only one option remaining. Anger and self-pity.

Probably because there are enough people who would still claim that he's not Satoshi. They'd just say he stole the signing key or something. There are already some saying that it was a colleague who he's taking the credit for, it's only a small leap for conspiracy nuts to jump to the theft idea.

Of course, it's vastly more likely that he is not Satoshi and he's just trying to save face.

At this point he's had a week of having everyone he knows hounded by the media. It might have just been a slip of the tongue/party joke he just rolled with and didn't expect to get this big.

When your every action gets a Guardian article it can be a scary time for anyone. Especially those who've not experienced it before.

How does flying two prominent bitcoin devs to a 1:1 meeting you constitute a "slip of the tongue"? He has experienced it before -- last year when he tried the same thing.

> It would take less than 5 minutes

I wouldn't keep the keys to US$ 500 million on my laptop's hard drive.

Side note, but I've thought about this and wondered the same thing. Where do you keep 500M? In your house on an offline hard disk that can be stolen? In a safe deposit box? This is a true data backup scenario where too few copies and you're in trouble and too many and you're in trouble. Especially since a copy that was found without your knowledge could ruin things before you knew.

In your head. Or rather, you encrypt all your super secret private data with a good password that you never write down, and copy the encrypted archive everywhere.

And then promptly forget it when restoring from backup in ten years.

This assumes your encryption scheme is perfect and will be for the life of the secret. With 500MM it would take you a minute to move or spend it so you have to protect against someone getting the secret and being able to break it in 10 years or whatever.

Its an interesting problem. Paper wallets can be encrypted with a password, which is one step. Using multi-sig is another. Having canary addresses is yet another way. Of course in this case not all of those are an option since the goal seems to be to not move them at all.

You split it with Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme, print the pieces on multiple sheets of paper and store them in various bank vaults around the world.

But have too few redundant copies and you lost access to it forever. Or travel to various countries opening bank vault accounts is sure to put you on CIA/NSA/othersuchagencies' radar. $500M is interesting enough for them to poke around I bet.

Or of you loose access to a country for some other reason you're screwed as well. Also, if you're otherwise not well of spending 10+ thousand to land the secrets in several countries is not an option either

I agree. Once he said "In the next few days i will move a coin," he told every savvy crook in Australia "follow me around for the next few days"

EDIT: this is presupposing he's not a con-artist, which is still my hypothesis

Yes, certainly we should sympathize with this person who is behaving in a confusing way.

Even if he made a calculated decision to manipulate the news media here, the blame must be shared by the journalists who promoted the story, and to an extent, the portion of the audience that was simply looking for an easy answer and a satisfying resolution.

At the end of the day, the whole lot of us should be responsible for being skeptical enough to prevent a destructive person from turning their personal issues into a global crisis.

Many people stepped up to debunk this story quite readily. It was the mainstream media that was really exacerbating the situation.

Someone should check on him out of an abundance of caution, but his note is laughably melodramatic.

Sometime between this being posted and now he has changed the homepage from an image to HTML, so I'm betting he's alive.

He realized the image wouldn't be indexed by Google, I'd imagine.

As the author of one of those jaded comments, I'm worried about this possibility now.

I believe someone (healthy) close to him should take some care of him for a while. Regardless of his online identity.

I understand this, but there's also the dimension where his actions, whether true or not, are also damaging other people (Gavin's reputation is on the line).

We'd all be more worried for him if he wasn't so blatantly causing harm to other people's reputation.

Obviously he could suffer from severe mental illness, which combines elements of harming others and self harm, but as a society I think we should worry more about the person being harmed (ex. Gavin).

No, that's a horrible thought. If he truly is suicidal we should be doing what we can to make sure he is cared for.

@bwilliams, yep, and that's why I said "I understand this". We should help him. But we should also help, if not more, Gavin and the others who's reputation is on the line without much fault of their own.

Why not handle the the thing that seems to be pretty pressing right now instead? Reputation can wait until someone can confirm one thing or another. It's just kind of calloused otherwise and I'm sure someone whose reputation on the line would agree.

Andresen (and Matonis) themselves should be considered responsible for the harm to their own reputations no?

If someone gets scammed by a con-artist, would you blame the victim there too?

In this case yes, because they are influencers of the community and were not being responsible in ensuring the proof was rigorous enough

Gavin said that he expected Wright to immediately post public proof equivalent to what he'd seen in private. When that didn't happen, he started expressing doubts. I don't think he ever intended his post alone to be treated as authoritative proof.

Yeah he made a mistake. But smart, even skeptical people get conned into making those kind of mistakes all the time. In the end, it's a lot of drama with no real harm done.

Gavin's reputation is on the line because he is a security researcher, and he was duped by a not-very-convincing crypto scam. It's not a big deal to me; I wouldn't hold it against him much in, say, hiring. But whatever damage done to Gavin was done by his own choices. I'm not going to rush to feel sorry for him, either.

Thank you for posting this <3

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