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Comment by dist-epoch | Hacker News Reader

That would be exactly the kind of thing to do to obfuscate your identity.

You guys are overthinking or just having fun claiming such stuff. Satoshi covered his tracks at communication and distribution layer e.g. using fake name, using TOR, using anon email, anon host etc.

I'm almost certain from everything I've seen about Bitcoin over the years that he wasn't a Linux developer who learnt Windows and C++ just to "obfuscate" his identity, he wasn't a non-native English speaker who learnt perfect English just to "obfuscate" his origin. He wasn't a professional cryptographer or even up to date with the latest cryptographic research according to Gavin Andresen[0]. It's most likely that he was indeed a native English speaker and a C++ Windows programmer who happened to be very passionate about digital cash payment solutions.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uWigVKslYg

You're right. I am just wondering about the satoshin@gmx.com email. Anyways, he must have it all covered.

Gmx.com addresses (assuming no use of VPN or Tor exit node) excluded people in Germany, Austria and Switzerland at the time. You would always have been redirected to the country TLD options. GMX.com was a new spin off around 2009. There’s an interesting archived page here that discussed exactly this:

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=57794

Gmx is popular in Germany but I think it was always a bit niche outside Germany speaking countries it was relatively unheard of at the time.

Notably, you might of heard of GMX when visiting Germany for the CCC convention. Both Len Sassaman and Dan Kaminsky presented at CCC in the same year (2007) at 24C3 for example. Dan presented for several years in a row and fiercely opposed Craig Wright’s claims to be Satoshi.

Kaminsky, Finney and Sassaman all died rather young.

>Gmx is popular in Germany but I think it was always a bit niche outside Germany speaking countries it was relatively unheard of at the time.

He also used upload.ae to share draft of Bitcoin whitepaper[0] and upload.ae was literally unheard of. I didn't see anybody saying they used it or knowing who owned it. My assumption is that it was run by Satoshi's friend or somebody that he trusted.

[0] https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/wei-dai/1/

He always used TOR but he also used anon emails like satoshi@anonymousspeech.com and satoshi@vistomail.com.

And maybe he didn't cover all tracks....how did he purchase bitcoin.org domain in August of 2008? Some say via cash in mail but I'm not so sure.

Opsec is never perfect. Let's leave it at that

That would be done because the user base of windows at the time dwarfed that of Linux. There are other better ways to cover your identity.

That seems possible. But this kind of explanation is also indistinguishable from “it’s just part of the conspiracy” type of logical track.

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