Why I Don't Think Craig Wright is Satoshi | Hacker News Reader

Why I Don't Think Craig Wright is Satoshi

danielmiessler.com

41 pointsdanielrm2657 comments

Hal Finney. Hal was a quiet, unassuming fellow who you had to get to know before you discovered he was incredibly smart.

Hal could never attend class, flip through a textbook on an unfamiliar subject, and then ace the final exam at Caltech. What would take me a solid 3 months of work.

The Satoshi thing is just the kind of prank Hal would have done.

You knew him personally? I've always suspected him of all the candidates.

My freshman year he was a sophomore in the next room in the hall. Hal would take us on midnight runs to Tommy's in his VW bug. We weren't buddies (I was an immature brat, some would say I still am) but Hal was always nice to me (as he was to everyone).

Perhaps he projected too much of his own intelligence onto his fake personality when Satoshi went from being unable to code at all to writing a full client, albeit with some help, in a few months. But Hal’s coins are known and locked up for his daughter. He would not have lost the rest. What would he have done with them?

I'm also voting for Hal. He was responsible for large parts of PGP and the extensible protocol design there largely reminded me of Bitcoin (coincidentally I studied technical intricacies of both).

Also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20372117

I could easily see an American programmer talented enough to create something like Bitcoin using a Japanese cover name as well.

Not to mention the writing times that would rather point to someone in America rather than Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto#Characteristi...

He has, to me, always seemed like Satoshi hiding in plain sight.

I always wondered if the style of writing and coding could lead to the identification of the real author.

Or was he also clever enough to change his way of writing to even hide that?

After they allegedly uncovered JK Rowling writing under the pen name Robert Galbraith, even an average Joe like me knows that writing style is identifying (at least that's when I first heard of it being effective). I've never tried as hard to be anonymous as Satoshi has, but this seems like something s/he could reasonably have done.

It can, it's called stylometry. There was a talk at CCC i remember. I think it was this one: https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6173_-_en_-_saal_g_-_201412291...

Iirc someone asked during Q&A if they tried to identify Satoshi Nakamoto like this and they said they think they know who it is but don't want to say.

I bet 'lettergram knows.

Crazy that I was just reading this last night. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bshZiaLefDejvPKuS/dying-outs...

Hal was one of the good guys.

> And I think he’s definitely brilliant enough to do the work.

It's part of the scam. Bamboozle the target with technobabble. Target lacks the skills to independently verify the claim or even recognize the vocabulary is just plain wrong.

The technical lack of understanding has been documented repeatedly and in depth. Still, people insist in heaping misplaced praise on this huckster's intellect.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/op-ed-how-many-wrongs-m...

Not only does Wright's temperament not match Satoshi's, but Satoshi actually knew what he was talking about.

"Bamboozle the target with technobabble. Target lacks the skills to independently verify the claim or even recognize the vocabulary is just plain wrong."

Ah yes, an adage of my old Staff Sergeant (who probably borrowed it himself) "if you can't convince them with brilliance, confuse them with bullshit".

The canonical wording of that phrase seems to be "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit." according to https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/W._C._Fields

A related quote is- "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

s/software design/piece of public technical writing/ and you have a pretty good match for Wright.

Exactly. I wrote this in another thread, applicable here too:

>Also, Craig Wright doesn't have the technical understanding to have written the Bitcoin implementation. Listen to him speak. If you're honest with yourself, and if you code, you'll realize that he's likely never written much running code at all, much less a full implementation of a complex cryptographic and network protocol.

This is an important observation. Craig gives himself away every time he presents at a conference. His talks just throw up a bunch impressive technical jargon and graphics, but then completely fail to weave it all together into a coherent whole, leaving only a disjointed mess.

It fools people who aren't watching closely and thinking critically. But Satoshi Nakamoto being possibly one of the greatest connectors and integrators of disparate technical ideas in our time, Craig Wright he is not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20372374

To me, the damning evidence is that Craig Wright tried to trick people into thinking he signed something with Satoshi's key when it turned out it was merely clever digital sleight of hand. Losing the key is possible, but employing a trick like that is a big warning sign that you're fake.

> he’s definitely brilliant enough to do the work

That was not the impression I got from him.

He did a cheap trick (on his own computer!) that would make a novice think he is Satoshi (he called a variable and then misspelt it deliberately to deceive the observer). Maybe I just don't like the word brilliant.

Satoshi wrote the bitcoin whitepaper, a nine-page document:

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

can't you test Wright's claim by just saying "walk us through how you wrote this paper. the thought process, how it came to fruition. what was on your mind. you included a number of references, where did you get these? just, the whole process, etc."

presumably wright would hem and haw and not say anything.

EDIT: I'm puzzled by the downvotes. I've been accused of not writing something myself, and it's easy to defend by just showing my work, drafts, etc. anyone who's ever written anything can speak really easily, maybe after a quick glance to look at it again. talking about the creative process is a pretty solid defense of authorship in my opinion.

You can test Wright just by going through his Twitter account (now suspended) and seeing his incompetence in plain sight.

Or go through Satoshi's old mailing list posts to see how reasonable, humble, technical, and well-spoken he was. And then read anything Wright has ever written.

you're right, but it's not "hard" evidence. asking someone to work you through the process of a technical paper they had written is more of a technical question.

Sounds like something Wright could bullshit on the spot. He's had years of practice basically doing what you suggest. You're just asking for yet more theatrics, not anything technical.

He would likely technobabble his way through. It's a ten-year old document; that's enough time for anyone to construct a reasonable narrative.

In my opinion it is easy to tell that. In any 9-page paper (very short) of such magnitude, there is a lot he would have left out at the time, but can still easily remember today.

you can't really reconstruct that.

More importantly, how can an attorney/judge make the same deductions?

okay, you've got me. They can't.

But this is a blog post "I don't think craig wright is satoshi" based on circumstantial evidence, and I don't really like using circumstantial evidence like this. People's writing styles could be totally different in two different contexts.

so I proposed a "hard" test, like a technical interview type of test. (Walk us how you wrote this). That is a good way to weed out bullshitters who are passing off someone else's work as their own, in a technical interview for example.

I would agree. Craig would never agree to such a test. He, and his followers, cling to the copyright granted on the whitepaper as some kind of established proof (which even the copyright office has said it isn't)

If you think a false Satoshi would hem and haw and not say anything, you don't know how con artists work. Some people have the skill of lying fluently. If Wright isn't Satoshi, then clearly he is one of those people. Therefore this test would not distinguish anything.

I mean not say anything substantial. It's a "hard" technical question, in that it's quite a technical paper. 9 pages is quite short, so there is a lot he would have left out, for example, though it was on his mind. The real Satoshi could talk about these easily.

The lack of humming and hawwing isn't nearly as convincing as the lack of demonstrable knowledge that should be expected of the real Satoshi.

Well, of course. Can we stop giving him attention, please?

I have to agree. The media and everyone is taking his bait and giving him undue attention. Nobody thinks Craig is Satoshi. Nobody!

Why do we think Satoshi is a singular person?

My pet theory is "Satoshi" was multiple people.

IIRC there was even speculation about one programmer who sadly passed away shortly after Bitcoin's launch.

If someone(s) used some variation of Shamir's Secret Sharing to lock up the credentials the death of one could have made them inaccessible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing

I thought everything pointed to Paul Le Roux being Satoshi?

I'd bet $1 in Nick Szabo.

My money has always been on Hal Finney. Timing of his death and Satoshi's silence seems too coincidental, to say nothing of the fact that the first p2p transfer was between Hal and Satoshi, and Hal's credentials. Also can't ignore that the person who was falsely portrayed to be Satoshi due to his name (Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto) lived 2 blocks from Hal.

The work was probably done by Finney and Szabo together. As Satoshi is a fictional entity it could represent either or both of them. Though I think the writing under the name Satoshi was probably mostly Szabo.

That was my thinking at first as well. When I heard the name and that it was a pseudonym I thought of two things:

* a shadowy genius from a Dan Brown novel (like Ensei Tankado from Digital Fortress)

* Nicolas Bourbaki (who was a group of people)

But Le Roux is as smart as a group of mathematicians, and is much more the sort of person who would come up with ultralibertarian solutions like Bitcoin (being, you know, a criminal mastermind and all).

>Timing of his death and Satoshi's silence seems too coincidental

But does that mean he singularly created, or that some secret sharing scheme won't unlock the credentials without all inventors?

If you're referring to the coins in The Tulip Trust, I don't know that there was ever a claim that only the inventors were involved.

No, there's no guarantee that Bitcoin was singularly invented. I'm not even convinced Craig wasn't part of that team. I'm just convinced he's not the singular inventor.

Yes. Becomes more and more likely.

I mean, this is really amazing. This guy would have won the noble price in economics by now.

> I thought everything pointed to Paul Le Roux being Satoshi?

I guess if a criminal is going to write their own encryption software (Truecrypt) it's not out of the realm of possibility they'd also create their own currency...

I recently worked with a nutcase in Toronto who repeatedly tried to convince me that he invented bitcoin, but it was stolen by an East European fellow he mistakenly shared the info with.

He got rather pissy with me when I didn't share his enthusiasm for that version of the story, and told him I'm pretty sure Le Roux is the droid he was looking for.

Crazy loons in failing fantasy quantum startups... I feel sorry for anyone who is stuck trying to separate the reality from the fiction with such people.

Setting aside the footnote about his private key, I find the logic annoying even if the conclusion is correct, because it's purely begging the question, IMO.

It reminds me of the argument that the moon landings were faked because the astronauts would have been killed by the Van Allen radiation belts. The only real answer to that is, well, they tried it and they weren't. But that doesn't resolve anything for doubters.

Maybe it's just me, but who cares who Satoshi is? Knowing wouldn't change anything.

Just because it isn't an interesting mystery to you, doesn't mean it isn't (or shouldn't be) an interesting mystery to anyone else.

That's a completely fair point.

Once upon a time this was true. However, many parties have placed stakes in the ground regarding the identity claim. Here's a non-exhaustive list of a few.

- Calvin Ayre - billionaire (mostly from online gambling sites) who has backed Wright and BSV (Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision), who along with holders of BSV, would lose big if Wright's Satoshi's claims come unwound

- US Copyright office - if veracity of Wright's Satoshi claims are disproven, they would revoke his copyright grant

- the entire cryptocurrency market - Wright claims he will sell off his (Satoshi's) mined coins when the trust allegedly releases them to him in about a year. We're talking over 1 million BTC (+ forked coins, like BCH, BTG, and BSV). For years the movement of those coins has been watched; the second they start moving, the market will panic. Billions of dollars in value will be destroyed overnight.

- Australian Tax Office - Wright has been in hot-water with them before; his possession of a $10B asset would be very interesting to them.

Well, for one reason, if Satoshi is alive; he can easily crash the entire bitcoin market if his wallets start selling currency.

If he's dead, (which is the case if he's Finney), then that is a not a risk.

If he is alive, then the likelyhood of him cashing out at some point is pretty high. He may be only be waiting for the moment when there is enough liquidity in the market for him to dump it all at once - and we're probably not quite there yet, he's said to have just under 1M BTC.

I am wondering if we can find his c/c++ code from 2008/2009 and compare with bitcoin early releases - that would clarify a few doubts...

Ah ok, looks like there is no code that he wrote, that is pretty much enough to know :)

https://www.stopcraigwright.com/screenshots

"Tonight I am downloading Java Security courses" - haha, that's epic...

I think I am quite sure who Satoshi is. Paul Le Roux.

Correct, Wright is not Satoshi.

Because Satoshi is a project, not a person.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com