Who is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin? | Hacker News Reader

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin?

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51 pointsRockyMcNuts55 comments

Satoshi could be sitting on a stash of roughly one million bitcoins, worth ~$120 million at today’s exchange rate.

I just love the idea of someone creating a crypto-currency in order to amass a fortune. That's higher-level entrepreneurship, for sure.

It's at least as clever as all the other questionable shit the finance guys do to make money nowadays (HFT, CDO, etc.) I would not be surprised at all if "Satoshi" is somebody on Wall Street. (Although (s)he seems to know a lot more about crypto than your average quant.)

To be fair to the quants, you need a serious knowledge of CS for some of the algos.

That probably speaks against the probability that Satoshi is a wall street guy, though, if his coding is amateur.

I don't think finance software is typically very polished. Deadlines are the enemy of quality code and finance has some of the hardest deadlines.

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

Potentially making a considerable amount of money was advertised as a feature of early adoption of bitcoin in all of the early videos or positive writes. It did not seem like much of a secret that this was possible intention, of course with several other benefits.

Breaking News: Former Facebook Employee had given himself 1 kajillion Facebook Credits, making him the wealthiest man in the world!

Sometimes I can't help but think that Dread Pirate Roberts is Satoshi. He would have created Bitcoin for the ultimate goal of enabling The Silk Road:

- Notice how Satoshi disappeared from the community in late 2010, saying he is "moving to other projects", and The Silk Road opened in February 2011, a surprisingly early Bitcoin adopter.

- DPR, like Satoshi, has a financial background and relates to Austrian economics: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/04/29/collect...

- Both DPR and Satoshi are known to prefer british spelling and expressions.

- Both DPR and Satoshi have technical/cryptographic skillsets: they use TOR, PGP, etc.

- One reason for Satoshi wanting to remain anonymous would be to hide his involvement with The Silk Road, as too much media attention on his life might uncover he is involved in an unknown/secret project.

> Both DPR and Satoshi have technical/cryptographic skillsets: they use TOR, PGP, etc.

That's like saying "both my grandmother and Michael Schumacher have automobile engineering backgrounds: They drive a car."

Using cryptography and understanding it are two veeeeeery different things. Understanding cryptography and successfully creating/implementing your own protocol are even differenter.

What, are you high? :)

In all seriousness, it's an intriguing idea, and you point out some interesting parallels, but the idea of the Silk Road seems really small for someone like Satoshi Nakamoto, given that BitCoin is a work of unusual genius that potentially has world-changing power, and the Silk Road is about trafficking narcotics. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I want to think the creator of BitCoin has larger, more expansive goals in mind than getting people high or even undermining the war on drugs.

Thinking that the creator of Silk Road is also the creator of BitCoin is like answering the question, "Why hasn't the miner of the first million BitCoins spent any of his currency?" by suggesting that Satoshi accidentally erased his wallet.

Which would be hilarious. 'Fuck me,' I would imagine him saying.

Read http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/04/29/collect... to understand the world-changing ambition that DPR has. The Silk Road is a lot more than trafficking narcotics for DPR. To the point that reading his thoughts in this Forbes article is what made me think he could be Satoshi.

His passion is admirable, but his vision for himself and his site seems a little grandiose. He might have world-changing ambition but Silk Road is not a world-changing idea. BitCoin attacks the status quo at its center - our entire system of finance, which forms the nucleus of a credit-driven economy, depends on having a currency that is issued and regulated from a central authority. BitCoin is a blow to state power at its core. Silk Road is just a store, or bazaar, that takes BitCoin.

> he would alternate between British and American spellings and colloquialisms, which could mean that he was trying to mask his nationality or that Satoshi is actually more than one person

Or he's Canadian :)

This. I sometimes alternate spellings in the same sentence accidentally.

Or really any other language - i'm German and sometime i alternate too, though i most of the time use the British spelling.

Perhaps the reasons he gave are genuine - he didn't want to get stuck in the 'maintainter' role a la Linus Torvalds. He created a practical implementation of his white paper, with resounding success, and that is the end of his interest in it.

What's interesting to me is why Satoshi chooses to be anonymous. Most people would want to take credit and get their turn under the spotlight.

Perhaps he can't take it because of repercussions in his physical life - perhaps he works for a central bank!

Or perhaps he's super humble and prefers to let the work speak for itself.

Once speculation has been that since he's likely to own a significant fraction of the existing bitcoins, he and his family may be threatened/kidnapped/etc if his identity becomes public.

There are many "rich people" around the world but their wealth isn't usually found in an untraceable, liquid form

It's worth noting that if speculation that they own 1million bitcoins is true, that's almost 5% of the total of 21million that will ever exist. That certainly seems like a good reason not to go public to me.

Bitcoin is not untraceable (far from it), but if I were him this would be my reason for staying anonymous. I would not trust my safety to other people not trusting mixers.

It's untraceable until he starts using it. Not bitcoin in general, but Satoshi's stash specificially.

Untraceable until the robber starts using it too. It is either useless to the robber, or traceable.

If someone steals Satoshi's bitcoins and leaves him in a ditch (so that he can't tell people they were stolen), as soon as that somebody starts spending them other people are going to start looking for him (mistaking the thief for Satoshi, at least until they connect an identity to the coins.)

However this does not afford you any protection from robbers that believe, mistakenly or otherwise, that they can clean the coins in a mixer.

I think it's partially to prove the philosophy of bitcoin--it can be a successful currency without any central authority. Even the original creator is eventually unnecessary and need not be known for the system to function.

Some possible reasons are:

- He's just too humble to want the fame. Gavin Andresen could then be a likely candidate.

- Scared, maybe by what happened to Julian Assange. However, unlike WikiLeaks, it's hard to imagine what law Bitcoin breaks.

- He wanted to make money off it and move on. That would suggest Jed McCaleb, who founded and then sold MtGox.

Other reasons?

- Scared, maybe by what happened to Julian Assange. However, unlike WikiLeaks, it's hard to imagine what law Bitcoin breaks.

A determined government could probably concoct something if it became determined to do so.

For a lot of people it's better to be just rich than famous and rich.

Remove bias from the system.

"He" might be a "they."

The article gives example of e-gold creators who were charged months before Bitcoin came out. Sounds like a good reason to stay anonymous.

This is not uncommon in crypto, Truecrypt devs are anonymous as well: "The developers of TrueCrypt have been only anonymously referred to on the site as “The TrueCrypt Foundation” since 2010,[44] though there are potentially good reasons related to privacy why they might have chosen to remain thus." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truecrypt

Anyone who is looking at mathematicians, cryptographers, or security experts is almost certainly looking in the wrong place. Everything about Bitcoin suggests the work of a cryptography amateur/enthusiast, not an expert. Perhaps a talented amateur, maybe a very smart amateur, but you are not going to find the creator of Bitcoin in a research lab (at least not circa 2008; maybe the reason he vanished off the face of the Earth was the beginning of a grad school career, which ate into his time).

Really though, it makes no difference who the creator of Bitcoin is, nor why he created it. All the matters is whether it lives up to its promises. It is secure against attacks? Do the economics make sense? Those are the questions that should be answered.

You're begging the question pretty hard here. Why are they looking in the wrong place?

I already gave the answer: Bitcoin has all the hallmarks of amateur cryptography, not the work of an expert, researcher, or professional.

What are some of the hallmarks you see?

No security definition, no threat model, a security analysis that only covers one specific attack strategy the author himself came up with, the "51% attack" being considered acceptable (despite being a polynomial time attack), no reference to the decades of related work in secure multiparty computation or digital cash, the blurred boundary between the protocol design and its implementation, etc. I discussed this in great detail a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5735993

Great, thanks for the reply. I'll take a look at your other comment as well.

I thought the latest consensus was that Satoshi was a group of people working together. It's much more likely than for it to be a single person.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto

I would think that it would be a lot less likely for a group of people to all stay silent on that matter though.

Seems like it would be trivial for the various admins of mailing lists, forums, newsgroups, etc.. to just see what IP "satoshin@gmx.com" posted under.

I am sure a select people know who/whom 'satoshi' is

I believe the reason for not wanting to be found out is 2 fold-

1: The answer could have a substantial effect on bitcoin prices, since such a large portion is held by one entity. If that entity is something other than a charismatic, reclusive japanese guy, could be weird. How would we feel if zynga == satoshi (obviously not likely)

2: Lottery syndrome. Not wanting to risk being kidnapped or begged for money from friends. If what is said is true, this guy is worth a serious amount of money now.

I would think a guy who developed an extremely forward-thinking semi-anonymous crypto-currency would know how to adequately obfuscate his identity.

I'm guessing he would have bounced these through various proxies, tor nodes,whathaveyou.

Totally possible- But theres always that chance he didnt, or that he also stayed logged into whatever vpn on another account at the same time, etc..

> But theres always that chance he didnt

Check the logs yourself. He was extremely careful about using tor.

http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/

More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733582

No one has run a search for "Satoshi Nakamoto" on all japanese goverment databases ? We might might get a subset that has some skill with math.

It's my understanding that "Satoshi Nakamoto" is pretty similar to a Japanese "John Smith".

It's just a pseudonym , possibly randomly generated.

I think the important question is: Why would we need to know, and why would we care. His/her work is done. Let Satoshi be.

Because it's a mystery involving a pseudonymous entity who might have engineered himself a fortune, which he can't cash in on without revealing his identity? Is the community being drawn into a long game at the benefit of a government or corporation? Is Satoshi someone we would otherwise know, or an otherwise unknown cypherpunk who wanted to undermine traditional economics, and whose idea just took off? Why keep his identity a secret? What's his agenda? What happens when we know?

I mean come on... this is practically a William Gibson novel already.

Does it matter? Clearly they prefer to stay anonymous, so how about respecting that?

Ok, so what is stopping someone from copying the bitcoin model?

There are many alternative crypto-coins (most notable are Litecoin and Namecoin). The main reasons that they don't get as much attention as Bitcoin are, IMO, the fact that Bitcoin was first, and the network effects of the number of people already using Bitcoin.

Satoshi is European, not Asian... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdrSP0V-KLg

Edmond Dantes

I am Satoshi!

Have you guys been born yesterday?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8h_v_our_Q

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