Another court case fails to unlock the mystery of Bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto | Hacker News Reader

Another court case fails to unlock the mystery of Bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto

theguardian.com

An article in The Economist was debated in this HN thread in May 2016 [0]. It was already completely obvious at the time (6 years ago!) that Craig Wright wasn't Satoshi, but was indeed a fraud, a liar and a conman.

The only person causing "serious harm to Wright’s reputation" is Craig Wright.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609611

> “Because he [Wright] advanced a deliberately false case and put forward deliberately false evidence until days before trial, he will recover only nominal damages,” wrote the judge.

He should be charged with perjury. Why are the courts letting him submit fraudulent evidence with no consequences?

Why are the courts letting him submit fraudulent evidence with no consequences?

In a U.S. case anyway the judge said he lied under oath but was not going to sanction him because he claims he has Asperger’s.

In fact, any bizarre behavior he gets caught with he throws up his hands and says, “Asperger’s!!!”

https://cointelegraph.com/news/judge-accepts-craig-wrights-a...

perjury charges are for poor people, even swine like Alex Jones are immune.

I saw one of the analysts of the Depp vs Heard trial explain why perjury is hard.

It requires you to prove deliberate intent. The bar is a lot higher to prevent punishing mistakes.

Don't see anything on HN mentioning Adam Back getting called out as being Satoshi and the massive campaign launched to disprove this. One of the only people who isn't attempting to capitalize on the claim, but who directly benefits from Bitcoin's flaws. In a case of a white knight turning to the dark side.

Part 3: https://youtu.be/XfcvX0P1b5g

The conspiracy YouTuber making the claim was attacked and slandered heavily after making the claim despite convincing evidence that wasn't disproven:

1 Same English typing mannerisms

2 Misspelling the same words

3 A conspicuous gap in his career while Bitcoin was being developed

4 entering the bitcoin scene in forums very early acting authoritative

Not to mention

5 A history of working on bitcoin-like technologies: "hashcash"

6 early involvement with the cypherpunks

I'm still convinced its him.

It's not Adam, there was another player that was linked to Craig that I'd have to look up but he got cancer and died around the time Satoshi exited.

Hence why his keys are lost, if Adam was Satoshi he could prove it quickly, it not him.

Also this doesn't make sense from a timeline and project view.

This guy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Kleiman

Yeah i do believe he may be Satoshi.

Nice, thank you I only caught the reference in a small article ages ago and couldn't remember his name.

It's, imo, why craig thought he could make his pitch that he was Satoshi, he probably did contribute to the discussion as he knew Dave but that is like me saying I invest amazing because I chatted with Bezos about marketplaces. It may also explain why he tried to do it to 'save' the OG vision...which current Bitcoin is not anymore.

Thank you, good find imo he lines up the best but I won't discount the romantic in me loving the story of genius and self sacrifice

While I agree he is by far the best candidate, I disagree with

> directly benefits from Bitcoin's flaws

Bitcoin's sole excuse for being supremely inefficient (participants needing to replay the entire history of all transactions ever) is that it's decentralized, with no need to trust any 3rd parties. Limiting the block size is necessary for keeping it decentralized. It's also necessary for developing a fee market, which is Bitcoin's only hope of staying secure in the coming decades when the block subsidy becomes insignificant.

Excerpt From: Kings of Crypto. (A book on Coinbase)

So who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

..there’s enough evidence to make a strong guess about who the white paper’s author really is. The signs point to an American polymath named Nick Szabo.

Szabo is a lawyer and sophisticated coder with deep ties to an online community, known as cypherpunks, that spent years experimenting with digital money. This community shares a love of cryptography and a deep distrust of government, which is reflected in Szabo’s Twitter feed and rare public appearances. While there are other cypherpunks closely associated with the first days of bitcoin—notably, the late programmer Hal Finney—some big clues point to Szabo as the paper’s author.

These include anecdotes, set out by New York Times reporter and Digital Gold author Nathaniel Popper, that put Szabo at the center of early development of bitcoin. Additionally, linguists have compared the white paper and Satoshi’s emails with writing samples from Szabo, Finney, and other possible candidates.

Szabo is far and away the closest match. Satoshi Nakamoto’s initials are also the inverse of Nick Szabo’s. It could be a coincidence. All of it could be a coincidence. But if you subscribe to the philosophical principle known as Occam’s Razor, which holds that simpler solutions are more likely to be correct than complex ones, it makes far more sense to accept that Szabo is the author than to insist it’s either someone else or a mystery incapable of being unraveled.

In fact, most longtime bitcoin owners will concede quietly in a one-on-one conversation that they, too, accept Szabo as Satoshi. Just don’t ask them to do it publicly.

It’s unlikely to be Szabo. He has already publicly denied it numerous times.

That's exactly what the real Satoshi Nakamoto would say!

It's not in their interest to confirm if they are indeed Satoshi. Pretty sure their wallet is worth over a billion USD, and irrespective of whether they have access to it anymore, someone will probably want to try and extract that from them forcibly.

If you win the lottery, the smartest thing you can do is to not tell anyone.

If you toiled relentlessly to hid your identity and have done an extremely good job of it, why would you throw all of it away and say "okay, you got me"

so you can watch yourself and your family be relentlessly attacked for the rest of your life? so you can have your life threatened on a regular basis? so you can watch your greatest creation, something that was meant to be decentralized, come back to being something centralized under you?

the only people that would think this is a good idea are people who are short-sighted or narcissists.

It’s not the confession of lottery that gives people away, but rather the use of funds. It’s one thing to not advertise and quite another to not touch your winnings at all. I’m sure there’s a clear dollar figure for most people beyond which provacy is worth selling.

Here we are talking about billions of dollars. To be worth billions and not use a penny of it to make your life better, on the basis of protecting privacy, that’s a supreme exertion of willpower on a daily basis, and we’re talking over years. Bears repeating that it’s years since a transaction was made against those wallets. One has to be a saint to not succumb once over the years, and while certainly possible, it’s the least likely outcome. Rather the lack of movement suggests that either Nakamoto is dead or Nakamoto is an org, presumably an org that doesn’t care about billions (I won’t name names but there are only a handful of orgs that possess crypto expertise and would not care about billions).

How much was taken from it? Maybe it was enough for him not to need to take any more? And how do you know Satoshi's wallet? Also, if it's an organisation, it doesn't mean that it's not Szabo.

Honestly, I see this kind of thing written for every person someone thinks is Satoshi Nakamoto. There are so many vagueries and a, "They think so too, but they'll lie if you ask them," comment at the end is just laughable. "Hey, we've got anecdotes! And inverse initials! Other proof? Nah."

And I say this with no opinion about who he is.

Edit: I also don't understand the speculation at this point. Bitcoin is out there, has been for a while, and it's not going away. I'd wager the original coins will never be touched. Figuring out who it is won't really change anything at this point, and it's clear that whoever it is doesn't want people to know (assuming they're alive) - why can't "we" generally respect that?

I assume most people are like me and they'd probably like to ask Nakamoto a few clarifying questions regarding his intentions for the project and how he feels about how things have evolved over the last decade and a half.

The creator of Bitcoin probably never intended for things to play out this way, it's hard to see into the future when a new form of technology is shared with the world.

> But if you subscribe to the philosophical principle known as Occam’s Razor, which holds that simpler solutions are more likely to be correct than complex ones

It's hard to take analysis seriously when it gets this wrong. Occam doesn't say what's likely, he says it's preferable to prefer simpler answers until more complex ones are required.

It's also just... not any simpler to say "he picked a pseudonym that used his initials, reversed" than "he picked a pseudonym at random"

Craig Wright has now been called out as dishonest by multiple judges from multiple cases.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/judge-slams-craig-wright-for-...

Look up the history of the 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF wallet that Craig claimed in court documents to own but actually contains coins stolen from Mt Gox.

https://mylegacykit.medium.com/the-faketoshi-tale-of-1feex-5...

It's 100% not Craig Wright, that man is a habitual liar.

Lots of speculation about who Satoshi was; some code wasn't so brilliant, the idea was, etc. looking at the question today the smartest action he took was maintaining anonymity (no small task then) and the second smartest was bailing out before the predators began to use his work.

I am convinced (with no evidence to offer others) that there are several people who know how the original bitcoin work came together and became public; probably not all of them were involved. Those who were not involved directly have Snowden as an example of "why we don't talk about that."

There's nothing whatsoever about the code released for Bitcoin which is "not brilliant". It is concise, it escapes all of the normal vulnerabilities you would expect to find in code that has extensive network access, and absolutely anybody can jump into the repository and get a very solid understanding of what is going on for what was then a completely novel and unheard of system. It is tightly integrated for its purpose, but there was no necessity for it be anything else, and it enabled the code to be released when it was.

"Satoshi was a bad coder" has absolutely no basis in reality.

From http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bi...

> It turns out that actually using the Bitcoin protocol is harder than I expected. As you will see, the protocol is a bit of a jumble: it uses big-endian numbers, little-endian numbers, fixed-length numbers, variable-length numbers, custom encodings, DER encoding, and a variety of cryptographic algorithms, seemingly arbitrarily. As a result, there's a lot of annoying manipulation to get data into the right format.

At least s/he should have made everything big-endian or little-endian.

Satoshi assembled something that works out of the primitives available, and that is party of the reason that it was able to be produced to begin with. Taken in isolation it is already of mind boggling complexity, and it had to be presented to people who didn't have any clue what a distributed consensus is even shaped like. Some hashes being in the wrong endianness, serializations being a bit funky are irrelevant in the larger picture.

Knowing that it isn't the place to make your own serialization for ECDSA signatures and just using what was available in OpenSSL is the hallmark of a great coder, else the project might never have been realized in the first place.

That's largely a result of relying on OpenSSL to build your shit.

Honestly does it matter who is Satoshi? What's the point of all this?

Humans are literally addicted to narratives.

It doesn't matter, but "x did y to z" is critically important to many people's monkey brains, and so the referent for the first term matters more than anything else to most people.

We as humans tend to ask WHO MADE IT first and then the next question about a new product/invention and then move forward being oblivious to the fact that every invention from agriculture to insulin wasn't made by a single person. Even things like a voltaic cell and an incandescent bulb was not invented by a single person. Humans are social creatures so human inventions also have to be made by a group of people. I don't know if me transitioning into being an adult and learning that adults aren't as perfect as I thought them to be when I was 12-13 makes me feel kinda negative about Homo sapiens as a whole.

Edit : looks like I just went off-topic down a rabbit hole lol

And addicted to idols. CEOs, presidents, etc. Which is self-fulfilling prophecy.

Steve Jobs. Gates. Musk. Satoshi. Vitalik Buterin. You name it.

I think people are annoyed that they don't know who the real person behind Satoshi is, because they can't idolize them, or talk about "how they grew up" or "what they said"

I think the most interesting part is how many people seem to automatically assume “Satoshi Nakamoto” is a single person.

What if Satoshi is actually a three letter US org? what if it's a secret Chinese experiment? why do we just assume Satoshi is a single human male west coast American person with WASP ethnicity.

Who assumed that? I don't think I have seen many assumptions on who they are. Only some people claiming they are them.

Or even more, can’t use them to advance their own agenda a la “Elon musk thinks pronouns are exhausting too!”

The people most likely to deduce Nakamoto's identity are the least likely to want to divulge it.

no mention of Len Sassaman ?

https://news.bitcoin.com/the-many-facts-pointing-to-cypherpu...

Pretty much all of Lens close friends reckon it ain't him.

Len Sassaman or/and Adam Back. Hal Finney managed hostings, etc.

Does anyone actually for one second think that CW is Satoshi?

Not paywalled: https://archive.ph/frTnK

I believe Satoshi is Hal Finney. The 2 damning reasons are

1) Dorian Satoshi Nakomoto (someone Newsweek claimed was Satoshi incorrectly) lived very close to Hal. I believe Hal either knew of him or saw his name somewhere.

2) Satoshi disappeared at the same time when Hal’s ALS made him unable to work anymore. Hal’s death and Satoshi’s silence are at the same time.

Plus Hal was the first person to communicate with Satoshi publicly. All signs point to Hal and only a dead man could keep a secret like this for so long. RIP

Yes this could be plausible, also his -very- mysterious death must be mentioned.

Anyway I couldn’t figure out why the story of Bitcoin isn’t already a movie/TV serie! It’s really fascinating.

I am still wondering why Satoshi used a GMX.com address in the beginning. This address is from a German email service. Addresses with gmx.com domain were only available for paying customers. So at least there might be some trace there.

Uhm, gmx.com was a free email provider probably in the 90s already. I still have an address with them, though I don't use it at all.

FWIW, it was much better email service than the other email services from that era.

My guess:

Satoshi doesn't exist, it's a code name, and it's a CIA/FED project to test digital currencies, we all know the digital USD / EUR are coming, what better way to test the security and get ideas/suggestions? Releasing it in the wild is perfect for that

Why do i believe this?

No western government wanted to ban or regulate them despite massive adoption, money laundering risks, scams, ponzi schemes, insider trading and all the nice stuff that comes with it

Bonus: https://whoissatoshi.wordpress.com/2016/02/20/satoshi-in-cal...

Just like with DDG, what a surprise :D ;)

Why would they ban it when they can tax it instead and benefit from it?

Because it is used to circumvent international trade sanctions, and for illegal activities (drugs, weapons and dark sexual activities)

You can't tax a transaction in cryptocurrency

0.5% of Bitcoin's volume is illegal activity. [1]

11%-12% of the USA's economy is illegal activity. [2]

If you wanted to commit a crime or evade taxes, probably the dumbest thing you could do is record permanent evidence on a public, immutable ledger.

[1]: https://ciphertrace.com/2020-year-end-cryptocurrency-crime-a...

> Cash—anonymous and liquid—has long served as a tool for criminals. Cryptocurrency, with its similar characteristics, may likewise struggle to ever completely shake its bad reputation, despite illicit transactions making up less than 0.5% of Bitcoin’s yearly volume in 2020.

[2]: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/032916/how-big...

> Estimates vary widely, but some put the underground economy at 11% to 12% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP).

That's a good point indeed, so the illegal activity is not that great of an argument

It still is something that facilitates it

And is the reason why some countries banned the use of cash after a certain amount

Wich again validates my argument about lack of regulation, or lack of actions from governments (ban), if we follow the logic for any other kind of currencies, including local/regional ones, specially the ones that are supposed to be competitive

I'm not aware of where large cash transactions are banned, but if they are surely it's because cash is largely untraceable. Meanwhile bitcoin is easily traceable, and the IRS is not afraid to crawl the blockchain to piece together what you don't tell them[1]. Putting my tinfoil hat on, I wonder if governments are helping spread this myth that crypto is untraceable because it makes it easier to catch criminals.

[1]: https://www.taxlitigator.com/the-irs-confirms-its-great-eye-...

I think most countries that are worried about traceability (of cash) would simply require proof of origin: eg. bank withdrawal even if from 20 years ago; or house sale or... whatever that provides the proof that the cash in question could have originated from a legal, taxed source.

The second link refers to the "black economy", which includes, for example, a housekeeper getting paid in cash without reporting it to tax authorities. The first link also includes "using cryptocurrency to hide financial activity, such as evading taxes or operating an unregistered MSB", but I doubt many housekeepers are using Bitcoin for that. In my opinion, it would be more interesting to compare the statistics on payments for activity that is itself illegal (regardless of whether it's taxed or not).

Tax evasion is no less real of a crime than other financial crimes. And in any case the parent post mentions taxes, so I think the numbers are still relevant without excluding it.

Do people still think it's some kind of magic untraceable money?

Unless all your financial activity completes within crypto transactions, you'll want to convert that to fiat one way or another and there's usually a KYC applied to it.

The narrative that it's untraceable was pushed far and wide within popular culture around it's inception. I would expect lay people, and even HN users who aren't heavily involved in that space, to retain that perception.

"Why would they ban drugs if they could tax them instead and benefit from it?"

Thibgs on practice get much more complex easily.

The USG can print money, more or less, so it has no need of tax revenue from Bitcoin. Federal taxes exist mainly to balance out (most of) the enormous amounts spent by the federal government and, to a lesser extent, to (dis)incentivize various things.

I disagree with this:

1. Idea of a digital currency was in the minds of crypto anarchists for a long time before BTC was released. I think digital currencies were mentioned in the "Assassination Politics" essay in 1995, which actually landed the author to jail. So somebody was eventually going to build a digital currency with or without government intervention.

2. The typical Western elite or leader has a background in law or finance, and is generally not very technically savvy. This lack of understanding and interest in digital currencies meant that Bitcoin was largely ignored by them when it first appeared.

3. Large crypto institutions were well aware of the need to engage in lobbying very early. So long as these institutions keep on lobbying, there will be some protection against cryptocurrency bans.

4. Government is not all-powerful, and citizens are often the source of new and innovative ideas. Last time you visited a government service, were you impressed with their capability? Why do you think that those in upper echelons of government are more capable than lower ranks? While government may have an advantage when it comes to projects that require a lot of capital, for software projects this is not the case. Why do you think Google pays huge amounts to their software engineers? It is just to prevent them from creating competing software.

At least officially, Jim Bell (author of the Assassination Politics essay) was not imprisoned for writing that essay, he was sentenced for tax evasion and using fraudulent SSNs. I'm sure they investigated him after publishing the essay, and charged him with what they could, but his 1A rights weren't violated.

In general you're not allowed to advocate for violent overthrow of the US government, but I think decentralized prediction markets are abstract enough a concept (no material actions/threats against individuals) that it'd still be protected speech.

Bitcoin is too stupid for a government research project to have devised, and Congress is too stupid to regulate it.

I expect someone at those agencies ask the questions like. So how many users did we actually want? And I think there would be lot more backdoors.

I have no real reason to believe this is true but it would be a brilliant honeypot to set up a parallel dark money economy and wait to reveal you had a backdoor all along when enough players have migrated.

what do you mean about DDG ?

DDG, Signal and others

People choosing to live on donation in the most expensive state doing basically free work

Something sounds off

DuckDuckGo is a for-profit (so no, they don't accept donations) and very profitable since 2014. They sell non-tracking ads and affiliate links related to search queries. They also have various investors.

Most interestingly they donate every year (last round was $1M in 2021) to orgs that work to improve privacy.

DuckDuckGo refused every independent audits

DuckDuckGo android app leaks your identity and websites you visit to them [1], issue they closed with a surprising reply

Issue happened again years later [2]

DuckDuckGo got caught with their shady terms with Microsoft (bing tracker drama)

They estimate 70M-100M users [3], you don't make 100M a year with that amount of users, either Microsoft overpaid them for the tracker, or they are hiding something

It's impossible to find their detailed earning reports, so nobody can confirm their claims, and yet it's being promoted as a privacy focused search by the media all around the world, why? despite these major flaws? i don't know

So who knows what they do else?

[1] - https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527

[2] - https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/2004

[3] - https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/16/on-a-growth-tear-duckduckg...

Cmon. We all know it's Szabo

IMVHO instead of trying to know "details" I'll prefer focus on a wide thing: my theory is simple, big tech at a certain point in time feel big&powerful enough to try substitute banks. Perpetrating an even better classic scam. That's the probable genesis of cryptocurrencies, not a nerd project, just a small coup in the financial world...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com