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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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?

> 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

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