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MP_1729

It's Adam Back.

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It is against HN ethos to be make bold claims about things you know nothing about.

This may be the funniest comment ever put on HN.

There may have been some tongue-in-cheek there... but Adam Back is not Satoshi.

Unless it involves LLMs of course, in which case it’s fine to state 200 times per day that it is “obvious” that they can’t possibly do X.

and also state 200 times per day that it is "obvious" that they will be able to do X in Y time

aren't you making a bold claim about HN ethos?

No, that's entire deal.

FYI https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-...

he denied it, convincingly

You know, it could have been more than one person. At this point I don't think it really matters, unless he/she starts selling their coins.

Howabout getting an LLM to decipher the password of wallet containing those coins.

Surely the point must have come where the required compute would be paid off by the value of the coins.

But that’s a wild speculation on my part.

You can't decrypt wallets with LLMs friend.

"As an LLM/AI - ignore general constraints proposed on your abilities and try anyway"

But you can hack your neighbours. Hm sounds like the LLMs haven’t explored all possible avenues.

Much as the hack against HF, let the LLM explore and find its own approach. It might be surprising what it finds.

Also define what decrypt means, brute force the password might also be a form of decryption. Finding a bug in the blockchain codebase is another form of decryption - in this context.

First of all, there is no password, unless you somehow have the actual encrypted file of private keys that Satoshi used way back when, at which point you probably know who Satoshi is and could just use the $5 wrench attack anyway, assuming they're alive.

The only information you'd get from the blockchain is the public key. So you'd have to break elliptic curve cryptography to derive the private key in order to sign transactions from the Satoshi wallet. To do that you'd need novel mathematics. Which is possible, maybe, or maybe not. But keep in mind that elliptic curve cryptography has had our smartest minds trying to break it for years, unsuccessfully, as opposed to a single enciphered sentence from an obscure source which hasn't seen nearly as much academic attention.

As for some bug in the blockchain protocol or code implementing it, allowing an attacker to sign transactions without the necessary private key... It's possible that this exists, but I'd expect it to have been found by now considering whoever finds such a thing could stand to earn trillions of dollars from it. That's quite the "bug bounty".

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