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Comment by djao | Hacker News Reader

The refusal to provide email metadata is the most damning evidence. Adam Back clearly has the emails; he is the one who provided them in the first place during the previous court case. Everyone knows he has the emails. If Adam Back and Satoshi are two different people, the metadata should be exculpatory, and easy to share. There's literally no reason whatsoever to hide the metadata unless he is the one.

In a court of law, self-disclosure of inculpatory information cannot be compelled, so this analysis does not pass muster in a court of law. The court of public opinion, however, is quite different.

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The thing is, most of the people heavily involved in early Bitcoin are fairly characterized as cryptoanarchists, a group strongly devoted to the principle of privacy and liberty effected through technological means.

The refusal to provide personal communications metadata by such a person is evidence of nothing but their steadfast commitment to the philosophy that presented them with the opportunity to be part of those email conversations in the first place.

Then again, if I weren't Satoshi, but people suspected that I was, I'd be willing to do just about anything to prove that it's not me. No one in their right mind would want that kind of target on their back.

Satoshi is either dead, or he lost his keys and probably wishes he were.

Supposing it is Adam Back, and supposing he lost his keys, he's still worth at least nine figures and is one of the most influential figures in the field he’s devoted his life to. Why would he wish he was dead?

"Nine figures isn't cool. You know what's cool? Eleven figures."

That aside, I don't agree with the premise. Back might be Satoshi, but there's nowhere near enough evidence in Carreyrou's article to reach that conclusion. He should have run it by some other veteran figures in the crypto community, so they could point out how quotidian some of the language and tropes being cited really are.

it’s simply that Back has nothing to gain to claim to be Satoshi. It would make bitcoin a lot more volatile. He even said just now

> I also don't know who satoshi is, and i think it is good for bitcoin that this is the case, as it helps bitcoin be viewed a new asset class, the mathematically scarce digital commodity.

That’s as close to admitting it as you can get

Point being, he has a lot to lose if people think he IS Satoshi.

I would be coughing up those email headers if I were him. Or forging some, if necessary.

if he has the key he could buy security (move the money to a multisig, etc)

if he doesn't have the key then of course he's motivated to make sure bad people don't think otherwise (but the usual thing about bad people is they don't really have a habit of giving up without a fight, so if someone really thinks he has the keys he cannot do shit to convince them otherwise, so he's again back to hiring security)

Handing over email metadata, or whatever your interrogator wants from you, will only cause them to shift the goalposts, or find something they want to find in the metadata even if it exonerates you.

There is no reason to cooperate with journalists with a slant.

I tend to agree with you, to be honest. Seems fairly clear that Carreyrou was going to conclude that Back is Satoshi, come hell or high water.

Kind of a disappointing piece of work from the guy who took down Theranos. His journalistic talents are sorely needed elsewhere right now.

it seems he pursued Theranos when it was hot, but he had not much to do with the background work

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47698933

Or he cares more about promulgating the philosophy of cryptoanarchism than he does about his personal enrichment or safety.

Most attempts to analyze what Satoshi would do suffer from a serious theory of mind blindspot. Just a failure to imagine someone who's motivated by significantly different things than the average person. It's the same failure as when people marvel at billionaire CEOs who continue to work despite having more than enough money to satisfy their every material whim.

Yes, if I were Satoshi or Bezos I'd have fucked off to a private island long ago. But they're not like me.

His abrupt silence mid-conversation with a handful of people via email and on the main Bitcoin forum also leads me to believe he's no longer with us. Code is often written like speech where one can decipher different voices in its writing, and I have heard some suggest the beginning code did look like more than one person's writing. There's likely a few people who know/knew him personally and know what happened, but I'm fine with the desired anonymity to continue.

The author didn't make a serious effort to obtain the email metadata. The email w/ metadata has previously been part of litigation, -- if it indicated that Adam was Satoshi it would have come up.

Adam has no reason to further fuck up Satoshi's privacy by sharing private information. But I can get how people who see no issue invading Adam's and Satoshi's privacy would have no concept as to why someone wouldn't publish it.

>There's literally no reason whatsoever to hide the metadata unless he is the one.

privacy?

Time? He´s busy starting a company, taking the time to drag out decade old emails and digging out the meta data for a journalist who is borderline stalking (assuming he even has them somewhere). I wouldn´t give that the time of day either.

not saying you’re wrong or right here, but you’re the type to believe that a girl’s not responding to you because she’s “busy”

If privacy were such a big concern, then why did he release the messages (without metadata) in the first place? Wouldn't it be more appropriate to keep the messages completely private?

What would it show? If he logged in to Santoshi's email account and sent an email to his personal account, the metadata would be in order, and we would learn little from it.

You have it backwards. The fact that he doesn't release the metadata is interesting. If he had released the metadata, it would be wholly uninteresting.

I don't think the emails exist. What was published in court records, lacking metadata, could easily be forged. The metadata is harder to forge. Not impossible, but harder, especially long after the fact.

They exist, they were examined in an adversarial process in court. I carefully examined them. Stop demanding access to other people's private data-- it's gross and abusive.

Demand? Excuse me? There is no demand. He is free to disclose or not, his choice. I am then free to believe him or not, my choice.

The metadata was produced for trial.

The emails would not have been published in public except my opponent had an established track-record of abusing non-public communication that had been provided in response to subponea in order to further his con-- he did so with both emails produced by Gavin and emails produced by Martii.

On that basis, I encouraged Adam to agree to publish the message content-- which itself was not very interesting and matched what Adam had indirectly said for years as this would undermine our opponent's ability to abuse knowledge of that content for further fraud. The same argument didn't apply for the metadata: it has less to no abuse potential that we could come up with, publishing the email content also makes it clear to everyone that Wright had access to the material ... but there was always a risk that it exposed something less obvious about Satoshi or Adam that should be kept confidential.

Or he wants you to believe he is Satoshi, without being a complete moron, like Craig Wright. Back stands to benefit from this, because he still has money on Bitcoin ventures (Blockstream). If people believe that he is Satoshi, he would still find investors backing him.

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