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Comment by kaladin-jasnah | Hacker News Reader

> I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography.

> So does Bitcoin. A Bitcoin user has two keys: a public key, from which an address is derived that acts as a digital safe deposit box; and a private key, which is the secret combination used to unlock that box and spend the coins it contains.

> How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptographic technique that Satoshi had repurposed.

I read up to here, but I wasn't convinced that this is the revelation that the author claims. To my knowledge, asymmetric cryptography is widely used. I have no opinions on the rest of the article, though.

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>I read up to here, but I wasn't convinced that this is the revelation that the author claims

The rest of the arguments is as weak:

1) both released open-source software

2) both don't like spam

3) both like using pseudonyms online

4) both love freedom

5) both are anti-copyright

etc.

Basically, the author found that Adam Back used the same words on X as Satoshi did in some emails (including such rare words as "dang," "backup," and "abandonware") and then decided to find every possible "link" they could to build the case, even if most of the links are along the lines of "Both are humans! Coincidence? I think not."

I think this misses the point. The point is that interests and writing style matches, which means there's a higher chance they are the same person.

The more similarities you find, the closer the match. It's in no way proof, of course. But it does provide good reason to look closer

Only if those similarities are indicating more than 'generic internet hacker' for both of them. You only need 23 bits to identify a person but those are 23 uncorrelated bits, and all the 'similarities' presented here are extremely strongly correlated with themselves.

Where are you getting 23 from? That's only 8-ish million values max.

Suspect it's a typo. 33, not 23, gives ~8.6*10^9.

D'oh, yeah.

Probably used logn not log2.

   >>> math.log(8_000_000_000)
   22.80270737862625

Yeah, but as Wordle fans know, some clues yield more bits than others. The search space is not balanced.

The search space of hackers is a small subtree of all humans. So it's like a smaller tree of groups in Wordle that contains the letter "H".

However, in reality there is no binary "hacker" bit, so maybe we're back to the brute force 33-bit space. And then, you don't know Satoshi's unique signature, and it's worse if Satoshi is a group.

Come to think of it, do all hacker news posters even share a hacker bit?

I still rely on information-theoretic proofs at work, they just don't involve messy humans.

Similarities in style and word were common enough in small circles such as the cyphyrpunks that spawned those discussions.

Then there's not altogether unlikely chance that Satoshi is a nodding homage to Nicolas Bourbaki, each contributor holding part of a multiparty voting key.

The interests and writing style differentiate Mr. (Dr.?) Back from the general public, sure. But from what I’m reading, they don’t do a great job of distinguishing between 90s hackers.

“Get this, his PhD thesis dealt with a computer language called C++, just like Bitcoin papers used” seems both confused and impossibly lazy to me.

> “Scrap patents and copyright,” Mr. Back wrote in September 1997.

> Satoshi did a similar thing. He released the Bitcoin software under M.I.T.’s open-source license

Really?

Like saying “get this, his college-aged musical interests included the Urban American musical style known as ‘Hip Hop’; therefore Tupac didn’t really die and this is him.” Heavy on insinuation, light on seriousness. Strong “…you’re not from around here, are you?” vibes.

What does this kind of journalism hope to accomplish, anyway? Beyond bothering middle-aged nerds for gossip? And providing a frame for the author’s cute little sleuth jape?

“Good reason to look closer” assumes there’s good reason to pick through ancient rubble in the first place.

Did you read most of the article or what?

All 12,000 words. Kept expecting it to take a turn toward something beyond pre-judgment and insinuation. Instead it unfolded as a cautionary tale, of the power of a premature conclusion to close an investigator’s mind to reasonable alternative possibilities. About escalating commitment to an early hunch, even as it leads you down an investigative dead end.

For example it sure seems like his mountain of circumstantial evidence fits better with the theory that “Satoshi” could be a pen name for a small group of people—maybe even the small group whose history he traces and whose styles he has trouble teasing apart—rather than one “suspect” (as he calls it). But we don’t even really weigh that possibility seriously.

So, like—why are we coming at this one guy by name and spooky hacker photo in the New York Times, with the suggestion that he has $110 billion under his mattress? All these speculations and arguments have been done over and over—what does this reporting add that’s worth 12,000 words?

The colorful journey down a dead end, fine—but leave it at “My Quest,” don’t do the weasel subhed “the trail of clues […] led to Adam Back” to insinuate that it proved what it set out to prove. Or even added anything significant to the well-trodden record.

>For example it sure seems like his mountain of circumstantial evidence fits better with the theory that “Satoshi” could be a pen name for a small group of people—maybe even the small group whose history he traces and whose styles he has trouble teasing apart—rather than one “suspect” (as he calls it). But we don’t even really weigh that possibility seriously.

Does it? I didn't come to that conclusion. Do share!

>So, like—why are we coming at this one guy by name and spooky hacker photo in the New York Times, with the suggestion that he has $110 billion under his mattress? All these speculations and arguments have been done over and over—what does this reporting add that’s worth 12,000 words?

Well, they identified this guy and the reporting here is better than the others I've seen in the past. This article obviously has nothing to do with what past writers wrote, so I don't really get the point of pretending like it all comes from one place.

>The colorful journey down a dead end, fine—but leave it at “My Quest,” don’t do the weasel subhed “the trail of clues […] led to Adam Back” to insinuate that it proved what it set out to prove. Or even added anything significant to the well-trodden record.

Yawn

It's weird they spent so much time on the written word similarities, when the biggest reveal here is that Back disappears off the email lists (on a topic he is VERY interested in and has historically corresponded on) when Nakamoto appears, and then comes back when Nakamoto disappears.

Befitting a writer, though.

This is one of the few real clues in this article, I would say.

I use "dang" as a nod to Gary Larson.

Yep, As fans of Larson's The Far Side, probably every American and Americo-phile computer geek and cypherpunk used 'dang'

Same goes for the rest of your list.

TIL I am Satoshi.

I don't blame you for this initial reaction, which would have been mine too had I not known who the author was. I don't mean that I automatically trust anything published by the reporter who busted Theranos (and won two Pulitzers for other major investigations). But I do mean that if John Carreyrou and his editors decided to publish something this long, that means they (and they're lawyers) are willing to die on this hill, no matter how meandering the first paragraphs of his 1st-person narrative.

Since the story doesn't end with: "And then Adam Back bowed his head and said, 'You have found me, Satoshi'", I'm guessing they preferred to go for the softer "how we did this story" first-person narrative. There is no explicit smoking gun, like an official document or eyewitness who asserts Satoshi's identity. But the circumstantial and technical evidence is quite thorough, to the point where the most likeliest conclusions are:

1. Adam Back is Satoshi

2. Satoshi is someone who is either a close friend or frenemy of Back, and deliberately chose to leave a obfuscated trail that correlates with Back's persona and personal timeline.

wrt (2) that is if satoshi had the foresight btc would ever blow up in the way it did. obviously, he had some intuition, remaining anonymous, but deliberately creating a fake trail does not seem super plausible to me

If Mr Carreyrou is such a good writer then he should be embarrassed to publish trash:

> In keeping with this belief, Mr. Back made his Hashcash spam-throttling software open source.

> Satoshi did a similar thing. He released the Bitcoin software under M.I.T.’s open-source license, which allowed anyone to use, modify and distribute it without restrictions.

The numerous observations such as this only seem impressive to people who don't know anything at all about the subject. Occam's Razor suggests that the reason that such irrelevant observations were included is because Carreyrou doesn't know anything at all about the subject.

> When we compared those errors with the writings of our hundreds of suspects, Mr. Back was a clear outlier. He shared 67 of Satoshi’s exact hyphenation errors. The person with the second-most matches had 38.

The article does not improve.

You’re talking about “Occam’s razor” while noticing things in an article that may not be relevant while informing huge swathes of the article.

Occam’s razor suggests you’re doing this because you want the article to be wrong and want to pretend to be a genius, not because you actually think it is

I neither want the article to be wrong nor right. I don't care who Satoshi is.

The article is written as if it's by some crazed conspiracy theorist. It's dripping with confirmation bias at every turn. Tiny coincidences are seized upon to confirm the author's suspicions whereas other explanations are minimized.

This kind of one-track reasoning almost always turns out to be wrong. Did the author accidentally stumble upon the truth? It's possible. Back has all the right qualifications to be Satoshi. But so do many other people.

I got about two sentences further, it turns out another smoking gun is Mr. Back using c++ in his graduate studies, just like the original bitcoin implementation.

Yeah, based on the list of interests, I guess I've been Satoshi all this time and didn't know it. A shame my memory must have been wiped as I'd quite like all of those bitcoins.

All of us "olds" had this as a hobby. Or used it regularly.

Just a bunch of weird stuff in this article.

I quit here too. This article is an embarrassment that should never have passed the editorial process.

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