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Comment by bottlepalm | Hacker News Reader

Len was a Linux guy, Satoshi was not. There's even an email here that says just that, "technically much more linux capable than me."

https://mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/#email-241

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I think you’d have to factor in Satoshi’s opsec measures though vs taking them at their word at being bad at Linux, consider SN displayed very capable opsec in other forums.

Len had significant time and topic correlations to many/basically all iirc of the feeder research and projects that clearly fed into BTC. SN also went offline around the time Len passed. Those two factors plus the related details sealed it for me.

Edit - like if I was known to research under Szabo and Finney (iirc) right around the same time BTC launched, was known to advocate to peers to launch controversial open source under pseudonyms, and so on, I’d probably wrap my public persona under “BTC sucks” and my SN persona under “idk linux well,” and so on. Seems an obvious step to take.

Have you considered Le Roux? Someone who had a real motive to create Bitcoin, and who had actually written Windows based crypto software before.

Given his past it's hard to imagine Le Roux sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bitcoins, even from inside a federal prison.

Pretty good incentive to say nothing isn't it?

Not really. He's already in his fifties and faces 20 years in US prison, and then he will probably be deported to the Philippines to spend the rest of his life in prison. I imagine if he had access to billions he would he would be paying mercenaries to bust him out.

You think mercenaries can be bought to 'bust' someone out of an American prison? That is such a ridiculous statement in so so many ways.

ADX Florence? Probably not. Fort Dix? Almost certainly if the price is right. It's more like a glorified summer camp than a prison.

Given his past it is easy to imagine his keys got misplaced while on the run or met with some kind of "unfortunate accident".

I’ve read the various write ups, and iirc the New Yorker piece and who/the group they pointed and a write up on Len seemed to make the most sense. Fun area, been a while since I dug into it.

Very few projects are created truly anonymously. I believe the Bitcoin creator had a real motive to stay anonymous, and a practical use case that was driving him to make Bitcoin eg transferring large amounts of illegitimate wealth internationally and outside of the banking system.

there’s pretty clear documentation on the motivations for why it was made, but I suppose it could be duplicitous and hard to ever verify one way or the other unless SN wallets became active again.

Eh, you could say everyone involved with Bitcoin was 'duplicitous' then because everyone knew the potential criminal use cases from the beginning.

Interestingly, Le Roux added "Solotshi" to his name on his 2008 passport:

https://i.imgur.com/44I9wlL.jpeg

Solotshi/Satoshi.

Gotta love that the embassy stamp is in Comic Sans, it conveys a sense of true professionalism

But that just makes your theory unfalsifiable and uninteresting. For every contradiction you can just say "That's what he wanted you to think!"

Right, it obviously spirals into this issue and others like it.

I don't think you can fake being blind to unix style when writing c++. The c++ style that grew out of the windows world is kind of unique.

(Although I personally am both a longtime enthusiast of unix-like OSes and a former MS employee, so I am familiar with both ... But I find that to be kind of rare.)

I use almost same style for both.

>I think you’d have to factor in Satoshi’s opsec measures though

Lying about trivial and mundane stuff is a wildly hard thing to maintain over any period of time and, for long-term opsec, more likely to cause issues than not.

Being "linux capable" or not is mundane and vague enough (as well as applicable to enough people) that there isn't really any gain in lying about it but it adds risk in the case that you slip up in your maintaining of that lie 10 years down the road.

There are much more effective ways to resist being identified, which are also easier to maintain long-term.

Well, a lot of other effective things were done as well as you say.

For me, comes down to that I disagree that the creator of one of the most consequential tech break through that hits at the core of national sovereignty and control didn’t think of a lot of angles to this. Early Cypherpunks, of which SN was certainly one, were a pretty insane/intense crew in these areas.

And to your point about the difficulty of maintaining trivial deceptions long term, well Len passed pretty soon after the initial years.

>didn’t think of a lot of angles to this.

I'm not saying it wasn't thought about. If anything, I'm saying the opposite.

When you think about it long enough, you realize that many of the 'little lies' carry more risk than they are worth. Lying about being "linux capable" falls into that category.

>And to your point about the difficulty of maintaining trivial deceptions long term, well Len passed pretty soon after the initial years.

I was speaking more generally about opsec and lies which aren't worth the trouble and increased risk.

Specific to your comment: If Len knew they would die soon after, there is less incentive to lie about little things like linux capability. If they didn't know they would die soon after, they would care about the long-term opsec.

All interesting points. I think I disagree with the last part due to my original post - nobody knew how this would turn out, but those involved knew projects like this consistently attracted serious State attention.

B/t protect the protocol by trying every possible angle against this sort of “adversary” (which, here in 2024, seems to have worked), versus cutting corners, the comprehensive nature of SN’s opsec seems to imply it’d show up in a lot of small ways like lying about Linux. Analysis of the codebase also had similar findings about attention to detail (“thought of everything” sort of difficulty regarding appsec).

Overall, there’s a good write up on Len as SN worth digging into if the topic is interesting. I also think the ‘11 New Yorker piece got close to the truth.

>versus cutting corners, the comprehensive nature of SN’s opsec seems to imply it’d show up in a lot of small ways like lying about Linux.

I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself poorly, or if we're maybe just speaking past each other, or I'm not understanding you.

You're saying that not lying about linux capability would be "cutting corners".

I'm saying that not lying (in this specific situation) would be the better opsec, and that anyone serious about opsec against government-level adversaries would not bother lying about such a mundane detail because it is all risk with no benefit to opsec. This concept was taught to me at a previous job where the adversaries were of the same magnitude as governments, and I'm confident that anyone seriously into the opsec/prviacy "scene" would concur.

Satoshi was, obviously, careful about opsec. Therefor I do not think they would lie about such a trivial and vague detail such as saying someone else is more linux capable than they are, because it would be a risk to lie about it compared to not lying.

I presume you won't say, but now I'm wondering about who has similar intelligence capabilities to governments...

I know it sounds utterly morbid, but has anyone proposed the conspiracy that Len was "suicided" after his identity was identified by a very shady -- possibly state-backed -- actors . This guy was a walking bag of cash at that point and people have been killed for far less.

yup, agree, also looking how Len writes, he is definitely not Satoshi. You can see on his twitter(Len) - https://twitter.com/lensassaman that he is quite punctual, ie. sentences end with periods, quotation is accurate. What gives it away is every sentence he writes on twitter is one space after the period, Satoshi is 2 spaces every single time. Also seeing the same thing for Hal Finney(https://twitter.com/halfin), so my deduction is neither of them is Satoshi.

Hal's personal site has two spaces after a period.

I see one space - https://web.archive.org/web/20140403012916/http://www.finney...

EDIT - really interesting, could very well be Hal, every sentence after a period ends with 2 spaces - view-source:https://web.archive.org/web/20140403012916/http://www.finney...

View source.

Wait, what causes this kind of replacement ??

HTML considers whitespace insignificant.

Well, repeating whitespace. Single whitespace still has significance. If you have two display: inline-block <div> elements, it will make a difference if you add a space (or three million spaces) in between.

PINE (the mail client) had a ^J keyboard shortcut to justify the lines. It's been a long time since I used it, but I seem to recall that it would insert double space after period when you hit that key. It might even have been possible to set it up to auto justify on save/send. I suspect that's why a lot of old (plain text) email had the double space after period and perhaps still does in OSS circles.

I think the default vim justification worked that way too. Around this time I went through a phase of bloody-mindedly using Mail/mailx and vi on OpenBSD while still sending mail through my ISP's SMTP and using fetchmail to grab it through POP3. I would not at all be surprised if cypherpunk types were doing the same thing, even if their main desktop or laptop was Windows and they used single space after period for non-email communication.

Edit to add: I just looked up fmt(1) manpage[0] and it specifically mentions using it to format mails, and that the default is two space after period.

[0] https://man.openbsd.org/fmt.1

The bitcoin whitepaper was written in OpenOffice and it also has double spaces after periods, which doesn't fit your theory.

I don't really have a theory, just sharing my experience growing up being taught to use two spaces, then in the early 2000s consciously adjusting my writing style back to one space, then having my plaintext emails still end up with two spaces anyway.

It's interesting that a document written in a WYSIWYG word processor would have two spaces because I think what originally got me to switch to one was word processor auto corrects removing the extra space, or at least putting blue squigglies in during the grammar check.

I guess my feeling is that although this might be an indicator of authorship, it's not necessarily a smoking gun one way or the other.

There’s a great write up on Len that digs into this style of analysis and others, and that’s what sold me. Worth reading if it the topic interests you, it’s linked elsewhere here I think! Lots of fun spacing, timezone to forum posts analysis, who worked and researched with who…

Len was a Macbook user, but he would not have done Bitcoin on his personal laptop. It's much more likely he used available PCs in a computer lab on the campus he studied/worked at, which were likely Windows machines.

It's also been shown Satoshi (and Len's) activities aligned and they overlapped with a school/academic year.

Here's Len's macbook as proof:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/enochsmiles/449655745/

Fun fact, he was experimenting with email based image uploads on flickr. That was around the time Satoshi suggested they build an image hosting site that accepts Bitcoin.

It's not a leap to assume Len's brain made the following cypherpunk leaps:

remailer (anonymous email) -> image upload by email -> pay via semi-anonymous crypto currency

Len's own bio says, "I have a very strong interest in the real-world applicability of my work."

Also, see https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/77358901774917632 where Len doesn't seem to be a fan of Bitcoin. Not sure what he means by that though.

Satoshi stepped away from Bitcoin in 2010 and handed over the project to the maintainers.

Len started posting about Bitcoin in 2010 (post Satoshi handing the project over).

It seems to me, if Len was Satoshi, he grew distant from the project. Maybe it wasn't the cypherpunk utopia he envisioned. Maybe the wikileaks and silkroad issues weren't what he wanted to enable. Perhaps he wanted to distance himself further from the project.

He was also depressed at that time.

My understanding is around the time SN left correlated to around the time Len’s mental health escalated. That noted, RIP/don’t mean to crassly speculate about what sounded like a talented and difficult life.

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