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Comment by klrr | Hacker News Reader

Sorry if this is a obvious question but I haven't read much about Bitcoin actually. This Satoshi Nakomoto, is he/them a company, person, community or even a government?

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Thats the million dollar question.

Satoshi invented Bitcoin and worked on it for 3 years. Sometime in 2010, just as Bitcoin was gaining traction, he* withdrew from the project and no one has been heard from him since.

There have been many attempts to discover the real identity of this person/group/company/government but to no avail.

I believe the focus of this new analysis technique, whilst interesting in its own right, was done for the primary purpose of trying to identify Satoshi. The analysis technique purports to show that certain bitcoins were generated by the same person/computer. This information may assist the tracing of historical bitcoin transactions to their original sources. At the top of the tree is the 'genesis' block - the source of the very first bitcoins. Its reasonable to think that Satoshi mined this block considering he invented the system.

There is a thread in the Bitcoin forums[1] discussing whether the initial blocks (up to around 50) were mined by an individual or a group. There is heated debate about what, if any, facts can be concluded by analysing the early blockchain events to discover how many (and what type) of CPUs were involved in this early stage.

Satoshi appears to have political motivations (he references distain for bailouts and fiat currency): https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto

The Bitcoin story would make a good movie script.

*he/she/they/...I

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175996.msg1843782#ms...

Thanks for summing up the story till now so succinctly.

What an incredible story. Money, technology, mystery, criminals. this would make a great book.

Satoshi's story is just the tip of the iceberg. In the last few years there have been many fascinating technical developments (CPU->GPU->FPGA->ASIC mining), grand heists, price manipulation schemes and even some unexplained events.*

I think the future analysis of the blockchain (all Bitcoin transactions are public record) will be a ripe area for economic research. Aside from the technical stuff, watching the growth and mistakes of the economic system is fascinating - like seeing 2000 years of banking/currency evolution packed into a few years. There is also the question of intrinsic worth and how to value a bitcoin - most online debates descend into chaos but the theoretical basis for projecting valuation is a real mind bender. There is no precedent.

I'm personally interested in what, if any, nation state involvment there has been with Bitcoin. Regardless of Bitcoin thriving or dying, the system has unequivocally demonstrated that cryptographic systems relying on decentralised trust can work. The theoretical underpinnings of Bitcoin solve the Byzantine's Generals' Problem. And it doesnt just apply to money, it can apply to anything. There is already a decentralised DNS (NameCoin) based on the same protocol.

I would have thought this type of system would be of keen interest to many nation states, as it could potentially undermine their own authority or be used as a weapon against other nation states.

So yeah, a book would be interesting :) I strongly believe the decentralisation technology underpinning Bitcoin will be a notable part of history.

*In 2011 a 'msytery miner' nearly doubled the total network's computing power for a short period only to disappear within a couple of days. The theories are this miner was a clever botnet utilising host GPUs,a supercomputer, or someone testing very early stage ASIC hardware, despite none of the known ASIC producers having working hardware at that point in time. http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mysteryminer.html

BTC doesn't solve Byzantine Generals, as it is trivially hackable by the 51% attack.

I strongly disagree.

Currently the bitcoin network is running around 70,000 Ghash/second. Are you aware of what kind of resources are required to perform this 'trivial' hack? If it was so trivial, why hasnt the 51% attack happened already? Its a $1B system - clearly the prize is worth the effort.

The beauty of Bitcoin is that if you somehow had access to such computing power to perform the attack, you'd probably be better off just being an honest node. You'd make a shiteload of legit money without all the hassle associated with splitting the block chain.

So yes, I'll stick with the argument that Bitcoin does solve the Byzantine Generals problem.

Theoretically speaking, even if the 51% attack did occur, it just reinforces that Bitcoin does solve the Byzantine Generals problem! If 51% of generals act in a certain manner in a decentralised network - you want this to be the truth! The decentralised network is correctly picking the majority vote!

So can you explain your reasoning? It seems by every criteria, Bitcoin meets the requirements of the BG problem.

Do we have enough writing from Satoshi to try to correlate language/linguistic patterns against known actors in the field of cryptography?

I'm not sure if a professional forensic study has been done but check out the bitcoin wiki page linked in my post. It contains links to his crypto mailing List posts and a couple of journalists who have tried tracking him down.

The original bitcoin pdf suggests a British education but some of his other writing uses American spelling. And he probably isn't Japanese. The plot thickens.

Yes; we have a number of emails from the p2presearch ML, the cryptography ML, the Bitcoin ML, his Bitcoin forum posts, his whitepaper, and source code revisions & comments. This amounts to easily 80k of text, which should be more than enough to run stylometric techniques on him.

The real trouble would actually be getting enough text from all the 'known actors' you might want to compare him against (for example, one Redditor thinks Satoshi is Mike Reiter, but almost all of Reiter's papers are co-authored and he doesn't seem to have any other online presence, so what would you use as your Reiter corpus?).

Regardless of the comparison with other actors, is it possible to run an analysis over Satoshi's corpus to determine if its internally consistent or likely written by multiple individuals?

I haven't actually seen any mentions of stylometric techniques or analyses which look into that question, although I'm sure it's been done. (The only example I can think of, the Federalist papers, was known to have been done by two people with large pre-existing corpuses to go on, and so the question was simply assigning responsibility.)

I actually have read a paper once on stylometric authorship attribution, part of which was oriented at detecting whether it was a single or multiple authors. I think "authorship attribution" were keywords in the title, but that's all I remember. So I don't have anything more to go on :)

From Wikipedia:

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto#Identity

PG himself posted a question on the origin of bitcoin. You can view the responses in the comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423

No person actually named Satoshi Nakomoto, apparently, exists. Beyond that, nobody knows.

Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto?

Who Is John Galt?

Considering the pseudonymous nature of Bitcoin, the people it attracts and who most likely funded the creation of it, this inevitable question and its alluding nature is a laugh riot.

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