The Satoshi Affair

It's also really interesting to contrast this story with the recent piece in The Atlantic about the provenance of a papyrus that mentions Jesus had a wife:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-unbe...

The reporter does outside research, solicits opposing points of view, and generally is very diligent about trying not to be snowed. And, tellingly, he doesn't use unfamiliarity with the field as an excuse not to investigate Compare with this article: "From time to time during those months, I wondered what if, in some brutally postmodern way, the true identity of Satoshi could never be fully ascertained? What if Wright had every single element necessary to prove himself, but somehow couldn’t? Anonymity – or at least pseudonymity – is an essential part of the cryptographic world."

A nice way to transfer money to clandestine operations world-wide, risk-free, for example.

For example, to fund a spy in China, you'd need to pay him in Yuan but the Yuan is a highly controlled currency... and guess what e-currency is highly popular in China? Bitcoin.

Just transfer your spy a couple of btc and have him trade the btc for local currency, in an eyeblink. Prior to btc, e.g. the CIA and other spy agencies had to fly in (and hand over!) literal bags of cash.

Guess this is why the Chinese government tried to crack down on BTC so hard, aside from the fact that BTC allows bypassing their currency controls and an outflow of money.

To add to the list -- another user already mentioned funding foreign clandestine organizations. The modern day equivalents of Iran-Contra -- another theory is a government or organization that wants to undermine central banking, or global reserve currencies.

Bitcoin is very well designed, so it's not unreasonable to think that a brilliant mind or a team is behind it. Governments employ lots of mathematicians, computer scientists, and cryptography experts who would possess the the skills and man-hours necessary to devote to such an endeavor; whereas a lone hobbyist would have had to get the design right the first time the scheme became public.

It's not even that much money to spend, relatively speaking. A state-level agency from any of the highest military spending countries [1] possesses well in excess of the computational power required to mine coins. In this case, they released it into to the community and now it's a fixture most use but never seriously question.

The UK's GCHQ invented RSA 4 years earlier than Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman [2], but this fact was classified for 24 years. I think this is a very plausible theory that explains why Satoshi has stayed silent, and why Bitcoin was invented in the first place: not for personal gain or pride, but national interests by a well-equipped state.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks

I also don't see how Satoshi's opinion can change anything with regards to the dilemma of the technical limitations people have been debating about. Unless Satoshi would come up with a solution nobody thought of yet. Why should their opinion weigh more than others' and it's unlikely to prevent a split.

I imagine Satoshi is out there keeping a close eye on the cryptocurrency scene. Maybe one day if action is needed (funding infrastructure, adoption of a bitcoin successor, destroying bitcoin??) he will put the early blocks into motion.

The appraiser did not do his work properly - after all, anyone can place a sticker on a Strad, but that doesn't make it any less of a Strad. It's also a poor analogy to use in the current situation. Multiple people did appraisals of Wright's claims and his show with Gavin Anderson, and found it lacking. They also noted the "Made in China" stamps - all the gotchas along the way - but they were only part of the analysis.

I'm going to use that quote.

You are correct, LRB is generally not easily fooled into writing puff pieces; O'Hagen is a very sharp writer (check out his masterly analysis of Assange who is much more capable of blowing smoke than Wright).

My prediction is that this will be looked upon more as a an essay about digital con men, and this is why M-K Willmers allowed it to be published.

FWIW, I say Neal Stephenson is Satoshi :)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/05/...

And for anybody having doubts about Wright:

https://dankaminsky.com/2016/05/03/the-cryptographically-pro...

https://www.nikcub.com/posts/craig-wright-is-not-satoshi-nak...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge

I remember watching this happen as a teenager via two sources of information: BBSes and the early Internet, and the mainstream media.

The mainstream media told me Weaver was a child abusing neo-Nazi cult leader who was stockpiling weapons to conduct terrorist attacks or overthrow the government or something.

The non-mainstream media told me he was a reclusive survivalist eccentric that may or may not have harbored some white supremacist beliefs (goofy or offensive beliefs are not a crime) who was being taken down dramatically in a frantic attempt by said government officials to cover their rear ends for a botched entrapment attempt.

History proved the former to be all lies and the latter to be largely the truth.

I never really trusted the news again. Stuff like this just proves my teenaged loss of faith was right. Newspapers and TV media are just "some guy's blog."

That is not to say I trust the "alt" media either. It's media too and over time I've seen it become more and more full of crap as money has come into the equation. Now it seems like mostly a sales channel for dodgy "natural" pharmaceuticals and populist political propaganda.

As Mulder would say: "trust no one." :)

I can't be the only person who has surmised this. So if you are a con man and you also have this idea, what you start doing is pushing the boundaries a bit and testing to see if you get any push back. If not, push farther. You won't get ridiculous press until you publicly say "I am Satoshi" and until that point, you can always back away and say, "Oh it's all just a bad joke. Sorry!"

As soon as you say "I am Satoshi and I have access to these BTC. Lend me money." and you get no argument, you know you are golden. The keys are gone. It's a risk, but a slight one if he had been pushing here and there to try and provoke a response.

The one issue I'm interested in is the PGP signed email stating that the other Satoshi (Dorian) is not the Bitcoin Satoshi. I'd really like to understand what key was used for that. Imagine if that message were actually a fake... it would have made a great test to see if the real Satoshi would respond.

So if he had some access to the keys does that make him Satoshi or part of a Satoshi team? Personally I think the real Satoshi was happy to use him and sign some messages for him but baulked at signing public proof. It's pretty similar in outcome to having a trust that cooperated with him and then didn't but much simpler.

The sense I get of Wright, and other fraudsters, is that they gamble on outcomes. If the lie works out, they proceed to the next step. If it fails a truth test he falls back on one of:

1. The person with this information is deceased

2. The information sits with an opaque trust that I can't tell you about

3. I am eccentric and can't deal with this

4. I'll distract you by talking endlessly about something i'm more comfortable with

A further technique is that Wright never tells the complete story, he doesn't fill in the gaps - but rather he sets up the outline and then allows those around him to fill in the pieces.

Re: the specific case of how Wright would deal with the real Satoshi coming out, I think he intentionally built up the story piece by piece so that he could counter this possibility at any time.

We know that Wright began suggesting he was involved in the creation of Bitcoin very early on. He never said he did it alone, and he never told the full story from the outset but rather built it up piecemeal over time and tested the limits of how far he could go.

He would have noticed that the real Satoshi has never conclusively debunked previous Satoshi suspects. Every one of them could be dismissed as (ironically) not being cryptographically strong proof of the real Satoshi.

So if real Satoshi comes out with a comment similar to what happen when Dorian Nakamoto was profiled in Newsweek, Craig could say it's an imposter. Even in the worst case scenario - the real Satoshi comes out, he signs a message that says "Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto" and it is verified Wright still has options of where to go (as he has done)

He can say technically it's correct, that Nakamoto was a team. He can say that his keys were stolen. He can say that someone must have found Kleiman's disk drive.

Or he can do what has been common in this case: nothing, and allow others to make arguments for him based on hints he drops. For example advocates on his behalf could argue that he intentionally sabotaged himself in order to protect himself from legal liability, or because he wants to remove himself from the spotlight, or because he isn't comfortable with taking credit, or for some other reason (this scenario isn't absurd, it has happen with Wright)

Fraudsters always find a way, and more often than not it is other people doing the arguing for them and trying to fit it around the narrative where the assumption is provided by him.

A lot of it works because of confirmation bias, and you end up in a frustrating situation where nothing can be proven or disproven beyond doubt because the story can be molded to suit what is known and unknown.

The Craig Wright myth consumes the gaps in what we know and do not know about the real Satoshi. The myth is built up by people biased to believe it using small pieces of information provided by Wright.

The author does this in the article - he starts off with:

> "he appeared, from the initial evidence, to have a better claim to being Satoshi Nakamoto than anyone else"

and from there it's just a long loop of Wright dropping hints and the author struggling to piece it all together into that narrative

The author provides no believable reason why the scammer won't prove it. They're not interesting/layered reasons. He simply regurgitates the delusions of the scammer.

The author is credulous, and clearly had a wordcount to fill.

I'm not sure how that's a vulnerability, since the leftover balance is paid to a new address, and I was under the impression that early bicoins were paid to public address, and pay-to-hash-of-public-address was added later.

I'd love for someone to enlighten this. (I got out of bitcoin when TradeHill was still running).