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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Hal is the person I believe was Satoshi. All of the evidence points to him more than anyone else I have read about. But wanting to keep his identity secret makes perfect sense given what happened.

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I don't believe it at all and there's plenty of evidence to the contrary that people can find for themselves.

That's my honest opinion and you are entitled to yours, fairly sure no one will ever know for certain. There's a journalist that went deep diving on this and came out with the same conclusion, from timelines to stylometric analysis, it doesn't add up to being Hal. He's just that guy who actually listened on the mailing list rather than be the snarky one where everyone else nods in agreement congratulating themselves how smart they are.

In the last years of his abled life, the man was getting involved in whatever cutting edge technology he could find, most of this is documented, nearly all of them failed, except for twitter and bitcoin. He's now cryopreserved, something that has virtually no chance of ever succeeding in the next 1000 years, yet...

My guesstimate is Nick Szabo.

If you look at Szabo's twitter feed these days, I surely hope he isn't.

Luckily, there is not that much that points towards him being Satoshi:

https://archive.is/N3rYx

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/12/16/no-nick-szab...

His twitter feed is very libertarian and Austrian economics themed. That doesn’t surprise me at all, should it?

He says he hopes it isn't him, not that it lends evidence against it.

I understand but that’s a strange hope a bit based on his twitter bring too right-wing or libertarian than he would prefer, yet those beliefs are actually very consistent with a lot of Satoshi’s known leanings and beliefs. The block zero comment is pretty libertarian for example and many of his comments on email lists are also. So it’s a bit illogical for the OP to hope for otherwise.

I'm a libertarian Bitcoiner myself, and I hope it's not Szabo.

You can be right libertarian without being a xenophobe or an outright racist.

I guess I missed the xenophobia and racism in his twitter feed. That wouldn’t surprise me however I’m just not sure what you are referring to specifically.

you can also be right libertarian without demeaning others with modern-day heresy accusations

Expecting Satoshi not to be libertarian is like expecting Karl Marx not to be socialist. Satoshi devoted his life to creating uncensorable money outside of government control!

>Karl Marx not to be socialist

He was not a socialist, he was a Marxist. It's like expecting that Windows and Linux are Operating-systems and by that completely the same.

On what basis are you making this claim? Karl Marx often called himself a socialist but he explicitly denied being a Marxist.

Fascism != libertarianism

It mystifies me how /pol ideology gets called libertarian. I remember when words meant things.

Libertarian? He has the Blue Lives Matter flag as his header.

In the 1970s there were lots of libertarians that were marxists or socialists, they saw no conflict in the terms because libertarian is such a loosely defined term that it can encompass almost anything you care to stuff into it. Even today libertarianism has no strict prescription, the political movement takes all manner of refugee into it. In discussions I routinely run across libertarians that believe in fully functional centralized government judicial and policing systems; on the flip side, I also run across libertarians that are more of the anarchy wing and believe in private police systems.

What does liberty mean to you? That's all libertarianism actually is, and that has always plagued the movement.

If forcibly implemented marxism means liberty or freedom to you, good enough, you can call yourself a libertarian now if you see fit. The Hayek wing will always disagree with that, however their disagreement is also entirely irrelevant as they don't have much control over the term or the movement.

Well, that shouldn't be that surprising since the term was Socialist in its beginning before the current US right-wing tendencies co-opted it to mean Propertarianism.

> hope he isn't

You wish he was more like you?

This is a good reason why he hid his identity. Any real person would be more disappointing then the legend constructed in imagination.

Yes, there's not much that can destroy a legend easier than meeting them in person.

But it in this case, the legend was a rather nice person. Getting this aspect of his personality destroyed would be a shame.

Is he mean? Or do associate those views with mean people.

I just don't understand why everyone needs to be a PR polished suit. These people work on computers, not administer public policy. We can appreciate their contributions and ignore their quirks or the fact they don't have all the popular opinions.

It's the other way around. Just because somebody is good in one area that doesn't mean they have any authority in another, unrelated one.

Putting people on a podest and excusing untolerable behavior is plain toxic.

It is not wanting that everyone needs to be a PR polished suit, just wanting that people are decent human beings.

> Just because somebody is good in one area that doesn't mean they have any authority in another

Precisely what I am saying. We can applaud Nick for contributions to cryptography without importing his views of other things. We don't have to weigh his political opinions at all.

> just wanting that people are decent human beings.

This sounds to me like "having views I like, because only undecent people would think otherwise". Do you have an instance of Nick being nasty or indecent?

> This sounds to me like "having views I like, because only undecent people would think otherwise".

Yeah, that's a sentiment you hear a lot in political discourse these days. But if you follow cryptocurrencies, you wouldn't get far with this attitude. The combination of technological, financial, and political issues that make up this field draw a lot of different people to it. Including a lot of wackos, often even with a cult following. So you need to have a good filter to find the interesting stuff.

But I followed him long enough to notice that there is no interesting stuff anymore and some of his content was showing uncomfortable character traits to me, so I unfollowed.

> Do you have an instance of Nick being nasty or indecent?

This Twitter thread by somebody else is a good start.

https://twitter.com/OneAdamReese/status/1270108913111691264

The intent of that thread is to peer into his tweets to associate him with an untouchable "white supremacist", as opposed to any particular wrong doing. That's not even a description, it's just a reason to dehumanize someone.

> so I unfollowed.

I completely encourage that.

I'm not asking for his political views to be platformed, just that we treat them separately. In other words, it's not in bad taste to respect Nick for a Bitcoin opinion, even if what else he has going on we believe or even know to be incorrect.

Maybe it's to throw off people...

>If you look at Szabo's twitter feed these days, I surely hope he isn't.

I just glanced at it and it looks innocuously right wing. In the context of being contender for the creator of a decentralized currency I was expecting a "far-right" libertarian type.

Dunno about virtually no chance - we just need exponential improvements in scanning and computing to go on a while longer.

The fact he lived very close to Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto (2 blocks away) is the most damning evidence to me. Explains why he selected that name - he thought it was a good name and he noticed it! Secondly him being the first person to respond to Satoshi is highly suspect to me, he could have been responding to himself.

Huh, that's an interesting fact! I wonder what percentage of people outside of Japan live that close to someone named Satoshi Nakamoto?

That's a terrible reason!! Name your alias as Other Guy in My Town? What kind of idiot would do that? He's not collecting packages.

I mean, more likely to be primed by a name of a guy in the town then randomly selecting a low prevalence name that happens to ALSO be the name of the guy in the town.

It’s not that the marginal probability of using a known name is high, it’s that for a fact the name used IS a known name that makes it suspect.

People do choose aliases by odd relations like this.

Yes, but I'd expect the inventor of Bitcoin to be a little not-dumb about it.

Source?

Easily googled.

And article says Hal was "the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto." That is too coincidental. Probably he sent it to himself as a test and to start the ball rolling with more forum users sending coins.

Also the timing of his death and satoshi presence...

I'd take that as evidence that Hal was not Nakamoto. I didn't know Hal very [1], but I'm pretty sure he was smart enough to realize that if doing something under his real name might have negative consequences, doing it under someone else's real name might bring them negative consequences. I'm also pretty sure he would consider bringing such negative consequences down on someone without their permission unethical and not do it.

[1] He was a senior engineer at APh working on Intellivison and Atari VCS games [2], when I was a fresh out of college junior engineer there. (And he was amazing at it [3]).

[2] http://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/APh_Technological_Co...

[3] One of the big projects while I was there was the next generation Intellivision. It would have a significantly more powerful graphics processing chip than its predecessor. The prototypes for the new chip implemented via discrete logic on big wire wrapped card in a big card cage. We were all working hard to get some games working on the prototype, which was going to be shown in some closed demos at CES.

This was made difficult for most of us programmers because the hardware guys were still fiddling with the design. We'd work very late until we could not stay awake anymore, and go to sleep for a few hours. Then we'd wake up and head back to work...and many times we would then find a note on our development system that the hardware guys had made a revision, and replaced some of the boards with updated ones.

Those updates would often do things like change the function of control registers, or the number of sprites, or the way color worked. That sent most of us into at least a couple hours of changing our code to work with the new hardware. (This was all hand written assembly).

Not Hal.

Hal would spend just a few minutes, and his code worked again. Oh, and his code was also better performing than the rest of ours, and made better use of memory.

I worked at Aph for a while, and did one of the video games (Roulette).

Hal wrote a Basic interpreter to fit in 2K of ROM. To save bytes, it had only one error message:

EH?

Still my favorite error message.

Of course, all of us at Aph were idiots. We had everything needed to make a killer consumer microcomputer, did not, and missed out on being billionaires!

Another Hal anecdote: Caltech at one point had a contest against MIT about who could write a Gomoku program that could beat the other. On a lark, Hal decided to enter a program he wrote over the weekend. It beat MIT.

That was when I found out Hal was not your average bear. Usually, he was just the friendly fellow who was always up for taking as many students as would fit into his VW bug to Tommy's at 3AM. I was small enough at the time to fit in the luggage slot behind the back seat.

> ather than be the snarky one where everyone else nods in agreement

Satoshi's discussions on BitcoinTalk were definitely not snarky, but fairly well measured and objective.

There's zero good evidence it was him. There hasn't been good evidence for anyone named, so far. Him living kind of close to someone with the last name Nakamoto (it was actually more than two blocks away, I believe) is not good evidence whatsoever, and there's some specific circumstantial evidence to suggest they were different people. No, no smoking gun to disprove it, but no good case has ever been made.

Zero? Definitely more than zero. In fact you’ll find papers if you try that put the probability higher than anyone other than Nick S. But it doesn’t really matter in the end in my opinion. The whole point was to not have a godhead.

I've read those papers. There's ostensible evidence put forward, but I find zero of it to be good evidence, personally. Nick Szabo is definitely a more likely match, with better evidence, but I think there's almost no chance it's him, either.

>But it doesn’t really matter in the end in my opinion. The whole point was to not have a godhead.

Of course; but it's not about that. It's about the mystery, the challenge, the thrill of the adventure.

It's one of the absolute strangest and most enigmatic events in internet history - when else has some open source software blown up to even 0.0001% of this level with a 100% anonymous creator who no one's come close to identifying (that we know of)?

Would I reveal who Satoshi was if I found out? Probably not. Their life would probably undeservedly become much harder and much worse. But I still sure as hell would be interested to know who made this thing.

Also, if we know who it is, then we know who it isn't. Rumors over certain people being Satoshi can be very irresponsible.

If the creator of Bitcoin is in cryostasis, then I propose that we officially move all cyberpunk novels to the nonfiction section. All we are missing is Rastafarians in space.

Better to put anything as nonfiction as fiction at this rate!

I believe it was actually 3 people: Phil Wilson, Craig Wright and Dave Kleiman.

Phil left the project and deleted all evidence in 2011, when the FBI was getting involved. Dave died in 2013, and in 2015 Craig started to proclaim that he is Satoshi. The problem is, Craig is the least technical and least stable of the trio, so almost no one believes him.

The source for this info is actually Phil, who comes back in 2017 to tell his story at http://vu.hn/bitcoin%20origins.html#bitcoin-origins

Of course there is no hard evidence for this, so almost no one believes him as well. But I like the story, and matches some of my priors, so I'm sticking with it.

There is also the ongoing lawsuit of the Kleiman estate vs Craig, for the Tulip Trust, a large cache of bitcoins they mined together. The jury trial is scheduled for October 13, so that might also expand on the story when it's concluded: https://coingeek.com/kleiman-v-wright-trial-delayed-until-oc...

Please don't promote these despicable scammers.

one of my pet theories was driven by a language observation. look at these two names written out side by side:

  Nick Szabo
  Satoshi Nakamoto

the writer in me looks at those two names and sees a kind of echo/mirror/rearrangement pattern, as if someone was either trying to give a clue as to their real identity, or, to mislead in a playful way

not decisive obviously. and might have been a coincidence. but if so its a weird one

In japanese, the family name comes first so they actually line up naturally

  Nick     Szabo
  Nakamoto Satoshi

The same is true of Hungarian, which Szabo (“tailor”) comes from:

https://www.thoughtco.com/szabo-last-name-meaning-and-origin...

The only thing we know for sure is that Hal knew Satoshi in some capacity. Anything else is speculation and/or conjecture.

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