New theory on Satoshi Nakamoto | Hacker News Reader

New theory on Satoshi Nakamoto

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66 pointsbpierre38 comments

This is pretty thin. Some Japanese cryptography researchers happen to have some very common syllables in their surnames.

I still like Hal Finney as Nakamoto, just because those bitcoin have never moved, and his being dead is the best explanation for that.

I like the idea of Paul Le Roux, specifically because his name was redacted in the court docket but the government did the redacting in the PDF wrong

But I don’t find this thread to be very thin. Satoshi being a common name is going to always be an issue, but there are not that many cryptographers in the world.

I agree on the first point.

On the second point, no. I think we have a preponderance of evidence for Len Sassaman. He also explains why those bitcoin haven't moved, as well as many other peculiar things. This appears to be the most authoritative research that lays everything out: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.10257v14.pdf

If anyone actually reads that and comes to a different conclusion, I'd love to hear it and why.

The fact it was a whitepaper highly suggests a lifelong academic who has spent their careers publishing papers like these men, not a PHD student. Also, some of the word choices in the whitepaper and the initial reference to London banks being bailed out again suggest Satoshi is not a native American english speaker.

Who do you think writes most of the papers in the academic world? And what do you think PhD students spend most of their time doing?

Not PhD students. Anything else.

> just because those bitcoin have never moved

Satoshi might not have the keys to those earliest wallets. Perhaps they have decided that those coins should never be moved and erased the keys.

There are literally billions in those wallets. Unless "Satoshi" is independently wealthy, a nation state, or dead, you would expect that they would have at least taken out some money. I can't imagine that "Satoshi" would have lost all the keys to all of those wallets.

But it wasn't billions in the early days. They could have discarded the keys before it was billions.

And Satoshi was able to mine/buy plenty of newer bitcoins back in the early days.

The decision to erase the keys from those known wallets and make sure they never make a transaction would boost the value of their remaining coins.

They could have just mined very early on and made more then enough to be independently wealthy with that.

There are many, many ways to lose a cryptographic key. There are none to restore one.

There's also the idea that Satoshi thought he was doing something altruistic and purposely destroyed the keys so he wouldn't be tempted later on... which, if true, he might be regretting now.

Bletchley Park would like a word.

It's entirely feasible that the modern Nicolas Bourbaki that was Satoshi have lost a member, or can no longer reach a pooled key quorum.

The argument can be made that not releasing early blocks contributed greatly to the perception that lifted bitcoin and there was never the intent to release them, to which sufficient early members still hold fast.

Or not.

Many things are possible.

why not adam back? the evidence in favor of adam dwarfs other candidates.

honestly, i thought we settled on Adam Back as Satoshi:

  - adam was extremely active during the early cypherpunk days, when
  - he invented Hashcash, which bitcoin cites in its whitepaper and used as its PoW
  - he was the first to take Wei Dai's b-money proposal seriously and discusses combining it with hashcash (the 2 core elements of bitcoin)
  - he disappeared and reappeared professionally during the exact timeframe of bitcoin development
  - his writing closely matches satoshi's (british english + style/punctuation)
  - he had no public involvement with bitcoin until he joined Bitcointalk forums in 2013 and suddenly had intimate details of unknown bugs in bitcoin saying "I thought I'd fixed them".
  - he started Blockstream with the mission to ensure the survival of bitcoin (funded lighting, paid core devs, etc)
  - he recently helped nail the coffin on Craig Wright's case in court proving he was not satoshi, during which
  - he revealed the earliest known email correspondence with satoshi

watch the interview were he uncomfortably describes himself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=688J9UZJxKg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g

Hal Finney left his family broke in his wake, after spending the entirety of his bitcoin wealth on treatment and cryopreservation.

I really don't believe Finney would have had access to what would have been tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of bitcoin at the time and left his family in that position.

This is blatantly false (Hal Finney felt confident in that his family would be OK and they were technological savvy enough to work out access to their inheritance), but also, they became a target so I believe that their privacy should be respected.

Edit: sources are (1) a note about the Finney family being targeted in 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/12/finney-swat/ and (2) a message from his wife in 2022 https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ruaaur/a_message_f...

Sorry if I was incorrect, I was going off of what I heard. I heard he spent all his money towards the end of his life.

I'm not seeing anything in those links to suggest otherwise.

Are you suggesting they were left with a sizeable fortune?

So he googled a bunch of people at an academic cryptography conference and discovered that they wrote papers mentioning public/private keys?

Like sheesh... obviously academic cryptographers write papers involving public/private keys. That is basically their job.

I bet a lot of them used a computer too, just like satoshi did.

I believe the Reddit OP (and most people in that thread) doesn't even know what cryptography is at pop sci level and they just think anything related to "private key" must be about cryptocurrency.

Stupidest thing I've read for months, even for Reddit's standard.

I think it's a reasonable explanation for the name, but it almost completely rules out these three people as the author of Bitcoin. Using part of your actual name as part of your pseudonym would be incredibly stupid.

Chelsea Manning (nee Brad) was caught almost immediately because she leaked her documents through an account with the username "bmanningfm".

I think back to 2009 and think of the state of opsec back then and I think people could very much use ridiculously traceable names for something like Bitcoin.

Though I think bitcoin Satoshi made a reasonable effort to keep anonymous.

It was probably cunning to use the name of a real person, the Satoshi Nakamoto who lived a few blocks from Finney as it would confuse any legal efforts to go after the bitcoin creator Satoshi.

I mean in court it would be saying I accuse you Joe Bloggs of being Satoshi Nakamoto and Joe Bloggs would be saying no it's the guy in LA who is actually called that.

Good point.

It's awfully hard for 3 people to keep a secret when that much money could be on the line.

Money on the line in what way? If they started it, they have a stupid amount of money already. They could gain fame, but after so many years... they don't seem interested in that.

perhaps they collectively generated the private key in a way that gave none of them access to it.

Ben Franklin had the saying "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead"

My very own personal and totally unproven theory is that at a certain point in time Big Tech decide they can take over banks. See for instance

- https://web.archive.org/web/20240213185758/https://www.cimb....

- https://milkeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/reports-pdf/...

How? Well pushing what seems an alternative to a central bank and banks system, a fully open and still pure finance one. Since no one really trust such actors they choose the FLOSS path publishing a FLOSS project as a mysterious developer who seems to want fight the giants. "Hey, but cryptos are open!", really? Formally yes, while 99% who use them use them via some exchange, witch is de facto a kind of bank not under the national banks laws of course. When a blockchain grow enough essentially no little player can handle it entirely so again it's a big tech natural game, pretend to be open, friendly and innocent "do not be evil", while being of course the contrary.

Eventually banks react an reach some kind of agreement so now the trend is crypto but with a CBDC model, who solve some inter-central-banks problems, give a place under the Sun to big tech and keep essentially anything as usual.

Otherwise I see no reasons for someone to mask his/shes identity in a FLOSS project that's formally innocent and friendly.

I know it always gets shutdown, but I’m comfortable with it being done by the US/CIA[1], especially since Satoshi stopped sending emails once Gavin Andresen met with CIA and « took over » the project.

I anticipate it’ll be unclassified at some point, and then really take off, but not before the US exhausts the ability to try and trace malicious transactions they might be focused on. Also the US owning a bunch of the original bitcoins is in line with owning a bunch of the lower IPv4 addresses which haven’t seem much, if any, activity.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/mr780k/sato...

The fact that none of the original BTC has been transferred is more than enough proof that whoever Satoshi is is dead. There's no other explanation, especially after this generationally significant amount of money it's worth.

Either this or in the early days lost hard drive or corrupt hard drive.

Original text deleted, here's an archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240408132600/https://old.reddi...

I'm sorry for the dude. The mob has started tweeting at him. I hope doesn't have an app installed or has muted notifications.

Sounds very legit

The opsec of this guy nakamoto is just on another level.

If they're real, I get the feeling they'd be disgusted at what Bitcoin has become.

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