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Comment by brador | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

> 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

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.

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