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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

He's probably dead. My two top picks for who Satoshi might be are Len Sassaman (died 2011) and Hal Finney (died 2014)

There's little point in unmasking somebody who's already dead - their ability to influence future events is gone. So even if state intelligence surveys knew who it was, there'd be no benefit to unmasking it.

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Hal's final words to his family lead me to believe that he was not the creator of bitcoin.

Spare us a search please. The top results are final forum posts, not words with his family.

Looking again, he _mentions_ what he told his children, but it's written on Bitcoin Talk.

> "My bitcoins are stored in our safe deposit box, and my son and daughter are tech savvy. I think they're safe enough. I'm comfortable with my legacy." [0]

It doesn't invalidate that he created Bitcoin, but what he wrote over the years sounds much more like a devoted hobbyist who was far from extremely wealthy, for example taking a public bus to UC Santa Barbara to do his research [1]. Once afflicted with ALS, he became an avid ALS fundraiser. For someone in 2014 with 1,000,000+ BTC @ ~$500 per, and trying to be anonymous, I doubt whoever Satoshi is would have taken the path that Hal did.

[0] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0 [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130625223546/http://www.noozha...

Thank you!

I know a few people with net worths in the 100s of millions (largely early Google employees, or founders of tech companies), and that sounds exactly like them. Honestly that's exactly what a well-adjusted rich person sounds like - they are "comfortable", "safe enough", and make every effort to downplay their wealth. (In the Finneys' case, they have particular reason to be circumspect because they were swatted and extorted for Bitcoin.). Most wealthy people are very quiet about their wealth; the Trumps and Musks are exceptions that disproportionately impact peoples' perception of what a wealthy person seems like simply because they show up in the news all the time.

This would also neatly explain why the Satoshi coins have not moved.

Or why Hal Finney was cryopreserved. :-)

In the future someone steals his frozen head to scan it and try to recover the Satoshi wallet keys...

in the real real far future you don't need his head, but maybe a single hair or a bone? Assuming every DNA cell keeps all memories or perhaps like a chicken running with a cutoff head maybe if his hands to be reconstructed, given enough time over a keyboard he would finally "twich" a password? Just thinking out loud...

What.

I don’t see any reason to believe this is remotely feasible, ever?

You have played too much assassin's creed. DNA determinism has not been realistic ever.

Assassin's Creed thing is more like ancestral memory. DNA determinism is more of a Dune thing.

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

You need to read a middle school biology textbook

Are you sure he's not cryptopreserved?

He couldn't upload himself to the blockchain because Ordinals hadn't been invented yet.

Paul Le Roux also fits. He had the crypto knowledge and the coins haven't moved because he is in federal custody. He was also quite good at opsec.

I don't know his story, but I had a little chuckle at the juxtaposition of "quite good at opsec" with "in federal custody"

You can be good and yet the heavy hand of the law still gets you. They got Escobar and "El Chapo" Guzmán too. And his operation was smaller than either of those fine gentlemen's.

One probably has to be perfect - not just good with opsec - to maintain anonymity from the government. The FBI has multiple side-channels, such as agents physically tracking if you're home at your "super-secure" 7-VPN computer when your Internet persona is active online

You can be perfect 999 times and still get fucked by that 1 mistake.

999 people can have a little opsec error and 1 person can still have perfect opsec.

It's a riveting read https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind/

He created truecrypt for his, well buisness. But are there any other indications, he also did anything towards cryptocoins? This is the first time I heard of this theory and so far I really doubt it. Satoshi seems to have been one tinkering alone and in peace with his concepts. Le Roux seems to have been more involved in action, too busy to create bitcoin.

Aside from his background as someone actively promoting encryption, Satoshi stopped posting just before Le Roux was arrested.

Szabo is also a contender, apparently.

1. https://bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/nick-szabo 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37794025

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