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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin was not created by a government. There are two groups that are on the suspects list for having engendered bitcoin, one group centers around Trinity College, another is a bunch of loosely affiliated international collaborators. Both groups are on the record with precursors to bitcoin (papers, software), neither has admitted openly that they were the ones.

If you read their papers in the run-up to bitcoin then there is no doubt that either group had the technical ability and the means to execute on the idea.

To posit that a government did this would need to come with some proof that is stronger than the proof pointing at these two non governmental groups.

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Setting aside whether the two groups you name are likely suspects, the fact that both public identities and open institutional affiliations does not contradict the hypothesis that a government did it.

For historic precedents, see for example Wikipedia on "Project MKUltra", or the book "Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power" by Seth Rosenfeld.

PG remarks that there were probably peer reviewers but none has stepped forward. Either of the two examples I gave illustrates how long and how tightly private-sector collaborators with secret government projects can keep their mouths shut.

Well, time will tell, eventually. Secrets have a habit of coming out over time there are enough hints and bits of fact here that eventually the people behind bitcoin will not be able to deny their involvement and this will likely happen while they are still alive.

Any fact to back that up? Any economical analysis? I fail to see how it answers the question so I downvoted (bad me)

Taking a similar example, in 2010 it was unlikely Stuxnet was government made - people talked about the black market and high school students from Panama http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#History

Yet now, it seems to be.

I share part of your opinion, as in "unlikely to be from a government" but I would NOT jump to conclusions and exclude this possibility.

I've spent more time on ID'ing the character(s) known as 'Satoshi' than is good for me and think I have a fair idea who they are, but it isn't bullet-proof. Even if I had it I would not publish their names here. HN'ers are smart enough to do their own work without having it done for them, and clearly those people prefer to be anonymous, so if you do figure it out better keep it to yourself.

The section on Satoshi's identity found in the Wikipedia article [1] for Bitcoin seems rather persuasive:

Investigations into the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto have been attempted by The New Yorker and Fast Company. Fast Company's investigation brought up circumstantial evidence that indicated a link between an encryption patent application filed by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry on 15 August 2008, and the bitcoin.org domain name which was registered 72 hours later. The patent application (#20100042841) contained networking and encryption technologies similar to bitcoin's. After textual analysis, the phrase "...computationally impractical to reverse" was found in both the patent application and bitcoin's whitepaper. All three inventors explicitly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Identity

Did any, or all three, of those individuals all of a sudden become wealthy over the past couple years? I imagine whoever created BTC is a multi-millionaire now due to having all the initial mined coins.

If they were smart enough to stay anonymous this long, they are smart enough to not suddenly park a bentley in their parking spot at the office.

Those initial coins have mostly not been used. You can verify that for yourself.

This is actually one of the strangest things about it tbh. How can there be over 1 million unsold early adopter bitcoins? They can't all be lost and the people who held on to them through the $250 peak have some serious self-restraint

>"the people who held on to them" //

Or person presumably?

Maybe they're (a) not particularly interested in money and/or (b) waiting to see how the legal situation for Ⓑ turns out in another decade or so.

Why is this strange? The early clients did mining by default in the background, and per-block difficulty was very slow. It does not take very many people playing with it for a few weeks and throwing away wallets to get to 1 million lost bitcoins

I read on bitcointalk.org (so take with a grain of salt) that a new wallet was used for the initial blocks, so there are 50 coins in each of ~40k wallets.

It's entirely possible that early on they used throw away wallets while testing and the alleged $100m in "early coins" are all inaccessible.

The client uses a new address for each block.

To be fair, only braindead or highly misinformed people thought Stuxnet could have been high school students. No one who looked at it thought that.

Care to speculate on their motivation for remaining anonymous?

As an alternative currency, Bitcoin is very, very illegal in various countries. For example, I believe the Federal Reserve Act in the US outlaws all non-Reserve currency.

you are two or three years out of the loop, buddy

That's not how FinCEN treated it. In the guidance[1] they released there's almost a tacit approval, as long as exchanges are properly registered, keep proper records, and report.

1. http://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G...

Scrip

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip

It does not; Bitcoin is currently legal in the US. In what countries is it illegal?

Bitcoin has the potential to upset a lot of applecarts depending on how successful it eventually will turn out to be.

Consider me amazed at how far it's already gone, if it goes much further it may very well be extremely wise to not be known as one of its creators.

Not clear how the creators would, or could, be blamed for any perceived misuse of the currency. Publishing some software and specs isn't illegal, and if the creators have any further control over the bitcoin trade, that in itself is a dealbreaker for bitcoins-as-currency.

A culture of anonymity and unaccountability may be a good thing with respect to the users of a currency, but not for its creators and backers, IMHO.

Are you familiar with the pesecution of Phil Zimmerman?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann

This is probably going to end a lot worse:

(1) bitcoin survives, lots of parties angry

(2) bitcoin is broken, a fatal flaw is detected, lots of people lose money, lots of parties angry

In either scenario there will be a lot of parties pissed off at bitcoins creators. Anonimity seems to be a smart move, just like many other pre-emptive strikes that are embedded in bitcoin.

Phil Z.'s problems are part of the distant past, at this point. Going forward, nobody is ever going to catch that much grief for releasing encryption software. You might as well refrain from publishing role-playing game manuals about bitcoins for fear you'll be targeted by the Secret Service, a la Steve Jackson.

Trust me, no governmental entity gives a hoot about who created the bitcoin standard. They probably will give a hoot about how it's used.

There are plenty of examples of more recent vintage.

Better safe than sorry seems to be a good strategy in cases like this, if there is no upside to claiming credit, why would you claim credit?

There are plenty of examples of more recent vintage.

Not really. All of the ones I'm aware of involve DMCA pissing matches, which aren't relevant here.

You say that there's no upside to claiming credit, whereas it seems to me you could comfortably retire to the lecture circuit, or enjoy sinecure directorships on just about any business that was heavily dependent on crypto, or get tenure in the university of one's choice, or...

>Going forward, nobody is ever going to catch that much grief for releasing encryption software.

Citation needed.

>Trust me, no governmental entity gives a hoot about who created the bitcoin standard.

Are you talking of the same government agencies that had 10,000 page files on people such as John Lennon and such?

No, that was a long time ago. Everybody who maintained those files on John Lennon is either retired or dead.

Also, I don't think John Lennon would have turned down his opportunity for celebrity if he'd known that J. Edgar Hoover was going to open a file with his name on it. He might have thought twice if someone had told him about that Chapman fellow, though.

>No, that was a long time ago. Everybody who maintained those files on John Lennon is either retired or dead.

The people die, the practices do not.

Government agencies have Harry Potter long files on all kinds of peaceful activists, from tree-huggers to EFF members, to authors and free press writers, and such. Even more so than back in the day, because they can get tons more info through electronic means.

>Also, I don't think John Lennon would have turned down his opportunity for celebrity if he'd known that J. Edgar Hoover was going to open a file with his name on it.

Lennon might not, other people that would only get the negatives without any benefits of that celebrity, would not.

Yeah, cypherpunks were worried about being extrajudicially killed in the 90s just for developing the code for something better than btc.

Far worse to be an operator than a software developer.

Also some people are at more risk, even if they wouldn't be killed or even arrested for creating ecash. If you were at all legally questionable for drugs, taxes, politics, or had a day job with a clearance, a company with pr exposure, etc....

>Consider me amazed at how far it's already gone

Not very far, in the grand scheme of things.

The whole amount of money involved is less than what some LOCAL restaurant chains make in a year.

There have been more widespread regional alternative currencies in the past. Given that this one also has all those internet-technology advantages to spread, it's surprisingly minuscule and insignificant.

Yeah ok but this is not regional, this is global. It has done quite well so far and I can't think of a better global currency with no one controlling it and with the same utility as today.

Maybe gold a long time ago but still doesn't fully compare

>It has done quite well so far and I can't think of a better global currency with no one controlling it and with the same utility as today.

Well, how about gold?

>Maybe gold a long time ago but still doesn't fully compare

Why not? In addition you have:

a) no logs b) no reason to trust some advanced crypto stuff (that might collapse 10 years from now due to some hole/collision/whatever discovered in the algorithms). c) acceptable everywhere already

Oh, and it doesn't lose 70% of it's value in 2 days, like BitCoin has done in the past (from what I read).

Gold is heavy, easy to counterfeit with (cheap) tungsten, difficult to take across borders, easy to steal, etc.

Bitcoin won't be so volatile after it has been more widely adopted.

And the "advanced crypto stuff" of Bitcoin can never collapse. It is already partially post-quantum and was designed to be easily upgradeable to fully post-quantum algorithm set.

You would do yourself some good if you took a minute to learn some things about crypto.

Could be the ultimate scam, maybe they're waiting to sell the coins they mined in the beginning? Could be they were afraid it would work (and therefore possibly make them a lot of powerful enemies), and didn't want to be known to be responsible?

The creators of Bitcoin were very critical of central governments. The entire project rests on the notion that fiat money is a bad idea.

Like a lot of libertarian activists, or indeed activists in general, they may have overestimated how much governments would feel threatened by their actions. Or, maybe they were prescient. Hard to say right now.

Well, considering what was happening to the founders of e-gold[0] at the time of Bitcon's creation, remaining anonymous was a very rational choice on the part of Satoshi. It now seems like the US Gov has accepted Bitcoin as a proper currency, but that outcome was never certain, and the potential legal implications of a negative outcome were very clear after the e-gold fiasco. 0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold

If BitCoin 'wins' and becomes very popular, these early adopters are sitting on massive amounts of bitcoins. That's a very tempting target for robbery (& more).

It's easy to envision that the creators are making lots of money off the bubble and that one wouldn't want to be linked to a ponzu scheme.

Tax evasion.

Mind sharing any links / citations?

You're going to have to do your own homework on this one, I got burned once before on HN for id'ing someone that preferred to stay anonymous and clearly these people don't want to be out in the open with what they built.

But I can tell you my starting points: there are few threads on bitcointalk that try to ID satoshi, start with those, then read a bunch of papers, figure out who the co-authors are and sooner or later you'll end up with the same set of names. The interesting bit to me is that those two groups are both roughly equally likely but I can't find any clear signs of collaboration between the two.

Assuming all this stuff (the original research) was published, perhaps it was a third party that just connected the dots?

It is definitely true that all the pieces were already there, and that bitcoin is more of an integration effort than a from-scratch design. And yet, there is a lot of subtlety going on there, more than I would credit an integrator with. This was no accidental affair.

If I email you, will you tell me in private?

If PG emailed you, would you tell him in private?

All you need is in the GP, expect to spend about a week, maybe two. And it will be a useful way to spend your time, you'll learn more than you ever will otherwise about digital currencies. One thing that came out of this research is that digicash could have easily succeeded more than a decade earlier with significant backing if only mr. Chaum had been a bit more steadfast. I know some people that worked there and I knew there were funny things going on there but never realized how close they got to success.

This is a pretty good starting point:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5951.0

Thanks

Out of curiosity, how much did they personally sock away from BitCoin?

Was this done out of some ideological commitment, or just to get rich as the first movers?

Yesterday there was created topic questioning the initial amount mined by the founder, so see yourself, its not perfectly clear. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175996.0

Same with the reason behind creating this particular crypto-currency. Since the creator is not known to public we can only assume.

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