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Comment by polarix | Hacker News Reader

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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