Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
That being said, it's important for two reasons:
1.) the paper gets published tomorrow, which will lead to a round of negative press, regardless of the claims' merit.
2.) More significant: it highlights what I see as an existential threat to the Bitcoin experiment: a.) the poor distribution of early wealth and b.) the possibility that a great percentage of all Bitcoins are currently held by bad actors (criminals, anarchists, use your imagination).
A few things to consider: 1. A list of richest Bitcoin addresses is not a good representation of the concentration of wealth. A single person can have x wallets, just like this Ulbricht character. 2. Bitcoin wealth is often used to reinvest in mining equipment, which furthers one's wealth to a greater extent. Rinse/repeat.
Several of the oldest wallets have been dormant for years, which means that this is not hypothetical -- that wealth has not circulated.
edit made to be clear about "bad actors":
"Bad actors" meaning: unpredictable and possibly having malicious intent.
If Bitcoin becomes a more important part of our daily lives, handling commerce ubiquitously, etc.--a single individual with ~10+% of said Bitcoin has enormous disruptive potential. I'm not referring to what said person could purchase with that wealth, but one's ability to manipulate markets.
This has never been a big issue, as far as the growth in value of the currency. However, I think this kind of uncertainty could freak out potential institutional investors.
Altcoins like Litecoin, PPC, Namecoin, etc - do not suffer as much from this issue because their exposure was far greater than Bitcoin ca. 2009, and the mining competition was greater on the respective debut-dates by several orders of magnitude.
Satoshi seemed to be very aware of the power of gov agencies both in UK and US and the risks he was taking creating Bitcoin, a good example was his response to people back in 2010 who were calling for Wikileaks to accept Bitcoin donations. Ulbricht on the other hand foolishly underestimated them and would've cheered Wikileaks adoption. I don't recall Satoshi ever granting interviews and was hesitant to even reply to PMs on bitcointalk. He also didn't discuss politics, though you could infer from his hatred of central banking what his politics were he never spelled them out like Ulbricht did on a regular basis.
Not the same people
[1]: Which isn't to say "definitely" but it'd be quite a lot of misleading going on to no obvious end - better covering up "created something fascinating" than "sold drugs and hired hitmen"?
This way if X actually is Y they can say they called it, but if X is not Y, then they weren't incorrect
That's a bit of revisionism. It turned out that he made mistakes, which in hindsight now make his identity seem 'obvious', but it took some time for his identity to become known, despite DPR & SR being very high-profile targets for many different people.
If he really had been rubbish at this, his identity would have been known so much sooner.
Additionally he baited and trolled the mainstream press. The US government & US prosecutors do not react well to criminals who attempt to repeatedly publicly humiliate their failure to catch them.
My honest opinion was this guy was a fucking idiot.
Successfully hiding your identity is an all-or-nothing measure; either you are outed, or you stay anonymous. So the only remaining way to gauge how well someone hid before the final reveal is to look at how long it took people to find them and how much effort likely went in to finding them.
DPR ran Silk Road for some time before being discovered. In that time, countless law agencies sought him, he was a massive target for online fraud, blackmail, vigilanteism or even simple crime.
Just imagine if you tracked him down; a quick break-in and some force and you could escape with a laptop worth tens/hundreds of millions of dollars, none of which would be reported to the police!
By the same token, we might just not have found Satoshi's stupid mistakes yet. Still, I think dobbsbob's point stands at least as weak evidence of Satoshi and DPR being different people.
DPR just does not fit the Satoshi profile in anyway. Satoshi was very humble even, DPR has never shown humility and his journal showed evidence he was power obsessed.
Or her.
I don't care if Satoshi is he/she/it (well the "it" case could be interesting) but having to add " or she " to every sentence sounds tiring.
It's not pedantry - it's helping yourself think clearly.
Like an IPO? [1]
> b.) the possibility that a great percentage of Bitcoin are currently held by bad actors (criminals, anarchists, use your imagination).
I know you are probably using the term anarchist in the colloquial sense (meaning those black bloc anarchists who smash things and want revolution) conjuring images of a Mad Max like dystopia, but would you consider Noam Chomsky a bad actor? People of that ilk just consider a different structure to organizing society, or as he puts it "a kind of voluntary socialism, that is, as libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist or communist anarchist, in the tradition of, say, Bakunin and Kropotkin and others."[1]
Sometimes its tempting to paint pictures with broad strokes but as someone who can appreciate many different political viewpoints (as long as they are peaceful and productive), it doesn't seem to make your image any more accurate.
bitcoin.it has a page on some myths you should read.[3]
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Early_adopters_are_unfairly...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky%27s_political_vie...
[3] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#The_Bitcoin_community_consi...
That's the game, and you and I didn't win this round.
Once the Bitcoin generation rate falls to a level where the miners' primary incentive is transaction fees I expect we'll see an aggregation around a handful of big collectives, which will be the Bitcoin equivalent of Visa and Mastercard.
And what will they say?
Want your transaction processed? No matter if you're Satoshi himself, pay the fee.
If you are looking for examples of other currencies you could have made money with due to appreciation (if you got in early), then simply look at the developing countries with appreciating currencies, countries who peg their values to a currency basket that includes a rising commodity (like oil). Money is made (and lost) on speculating on forex markets everyday. The Kuwait Dinar springs to mind.
Personally I think its better to compare BitCoin to a commodity that has scarcity and solves the coincidence of wants problem and so it can be used to exchange value for goods or services, like gold, silver, perhaps oil (to a lesser extent).
Due to your link also using an IPO as an example, I was wondering if there are any currencies which have operated in such a manner, namely rewarding first adopters. This question arose because, as you astutely point out in your second paragraph, most new currencies are pegged to either their replacement or alternatively to a basket of commodities or external currencies. I don't believe that there are any currencies, which when launched, were purely floating without any bands or a peg.
Continuing the question, are there any currencies that are pegged to a basket which includes commodities? I'm not sure if you were referencing the Kuwaiti Dinar as one of those, or if you meant that people make and lose money speculating on it but in either case, it appears to only be tied to a basket of currencies.
Very sorry if my English was not clear enough to express my question in the initial format. In the future I'll be sure to elucidate the question better rather then assuming the reader is able to follow along with the simile from the parent comment.
First off, apologies if you took that as an insult, it wasn't meant that way, I just didn't want my words to be twisted and lose the original meaning that I was making a comparison to a value increase of a given stock or commodity, using an IPO as an example.
> I don't believe that there are any currencies, which when launched, were purely floating without any bands or a peg.
I understand the point and I believe it to be correct, but only to a point (national currencies, BitCoin is not one of those). This is why I was mentioning commodity currencies. See gold isn't backed by anything, we use it because of historical significance. I understand you may say, it has value because of its conductive properties and use in chips but originally we actually used it as a currency because it a) was useless to make tools out of as it is a soft metal b) did not oxidise like other metals at the time c) was scarce.
Once we abstracted value to gold (or other precious metals), we used it to solve the coincidence of wants problem and that is what a currency does. Obviously I know you know about the gold standard that followed and how it was subsequently abandoned but it is important to note that I can still a) store value in gold b) exchange gold for goods and services.
Take South Africa (where a third of the gold ever mined comes from). They mint KrugerRands (gold) and they mint their national currency (Rands). Rands might depreciate in value due to low international demand and KrugerRands might appreciate in value due to high international demand (for gold) but both are a currency and South Africans can pay their taxes with those KrugerRands (using the spot price of the gold value converted to Rands). The same applies to Federally minted gold coins, they have value all over the world as a medium of exchange (based on the gold value) and I can pay taxes in the US with them as they are legal tender.
There is no peg for these gold coins, they are worth what the market says they are worth. Should you have gotten in on the ground floor with gold, you would have been a very rich man using something that was considered interesting but ultimately useless some time before. Obviously that wasn't really an option as this story unfolded over a very long time, but we know that is no longer the case in an ever connected world. Changes that once took centuries can happen inside of a decade now (interestingly enough, although valuable at the time, the fortune gained by Mayer Amschel Rothschild with gold in the late 18th century was not the largest fortune ever gained, once the gold standard was adopted in the 19th century, it was probably the largest fortune in the modern world, by far. Something his descendants still benefit from to this day).
> Continuing the question, are there any currencies that are pegged to a basket which includes commodities?
Yes. I think we are confusing currency with national currency though and I have beaten that dead horse already.
> I'm not sure if you were referencing the Kuwaiti Dinar as one of those.
I was referring to the Kuwaiti Dinar being a success in terms of value fluctuation. I used it as an example because I made money with it once and it is regarded as the strongest national currency (although not a major currency). It was pegged to the pound originally and the pound devalued 6 years after. The value appreciation is nothing like BitCoin but to me, BitCoin is closer to gold than a national currency, as I said.
> Very sorry if my English was not clear enough to express my question in the initial format. In the future I'll be sure to elucidate the question better rather then assuming the reader is able to follow along with the simile from the parent comment.
I think you mean "than" :p (just kidding, don't get offended).
All jokes aside, I think one thing that is missing from all these discussions is that the value of BitCoin (at least as it seems to me) isn't that you use it as a primary national currency (although I suppose it could serve that purpose in some places), but rather that it might be a contender for an international currency that mitigates inflation risks (which in recent years is what China[1][2] and Russia[3] have been pushing for, since 2009, year of BitCoin's inception) because right now the USD as a reserve currency seems a bit unfair to people outside of the US (and a few other nations). Say I want to buy barrels of oil, most of the world oil is denominated in USD. That is great for Americans because it keeps the dollar strong but if I am in say, Indonesia, it ultimately decreases demand for my currency, putting me at a disadvantage just to keep my economy running.
All that is not to say I believe the success of BitCoin is guaranteed (far from it), or that this is the role BitCoin will take, but key players have suggested it has been China's intention all along (by buying more gold than any other country on the planet), to create (or at least push) a new supranational currency. This century is almost certain to have a supranational currency adopted as a standard (SDR's don't really satisfy that niche).
[1] http://www.bis.org/review/r090402c.pdf
[2] http://www.vancouversun.com/Business/asia-pacific/China+yuan...
[3] http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/06/16/bric-medvedev-curr...
Where do you get off calling anarchists "bad actors"??? Personally I find this highly offensive and insulting. Just because I believe people should be free, and not subjects of some "state", I am the "bad actor"? F@%@ that...
I share your concerns, and thank you as I've never been able to sum it up as well as you.
Part (b) is more interesting - the danger as I see it is that Bitcoin is entering legal-issues territory. For example, a legal crackdown on ownership of Bitcoin identified with illegal activity would likely provide an economic shock to the whole network.
Totally! All we need is an "affordable bitcoin act" and the problem is solved.
Without being snarky: I just dislike when people tie political ideology into their evaluation of new technology.
Tying political ideology to the evaluation of new technology is the MO of Bitcoin's supporters. If you wanted to focus strictly on technology, Bitcoin would never have gotten off the ground. No security definition, design documents spread across human language and source code, no attention given to the various ways distributed systems can be attacked or can fail, etc. The only reason Bitcoin became popular in the first place is that people with a particular political ideology saw a chance to realize their dreams.
But if one of the early adopters busts out a billion dollars worth of bitcoins and demands massive amounts of real world wealth in exchange, people may just decide he does not deserve it and stop buying bitcoins. Then the bitcoin will be worth nothing again.
I've often read that in the US (as an example, but I'm sure it applies elsewhere) poorer people are likely to vote against their best interest because they have a belief that one day they will be rich. That sort of scenario makes more sense to me, people will just worry about themselves than burning their own value for some collective 'good'.
I understand that the point of this exponential decay was to that, after the currency was bootstrapped, there would be a constant supply. However, couldn't this be accomplished with a constant, or increasing, rate of production in the beginning, then let the rate decline at the end?
Obviously I don't know DPR or SN, but I really doubt that DPR is SN or even communicated with him. The reasons are entirely circumstantial but from what I've read of both of them:
- DPR is arrogant.
- DPR makes stupid mistakes.
- SN is fairly humble.
- SN is smarter than DPR.
- SN doesn't make mistakes.
Is it possible that DPR himself was an early adopter of BitCoins, and mined those early coins himself - giving him the occasion to later transfer them to himself? He might have had to become acquainted with the BitCoin crypto-currrency scheme for some time before he was confident enough in it to use it to protect his own identity, which means he may have been in the first couple of groups of people to download and use the software.
You are talking about some one or group who took great care (including in all their dealings with other early bitcoin users) to maintain their anonymity - which is really hard to do, in the face of the sort of scrutiny that SN has had.
Its at least plausible that, along with the name, other aspects of the SN persona were explicitly constructed.
There's all this myth around who SN is. A lot of people seem to believe SN is a benevolent crypto researcher working in their bedroom, for the benefit of humanity, with no profit motive in sight. I mean, sure, I hope that's the case too, but we should remember that we don't actually know very much at all.
Being a braggart seems fundamentally incompatible with "not bragging", for years on end, about your greatest accomplishment (and barring the possibility that SN is somebody very famous, say, Putin, it is almost certain that bitcoin is the most famous thing that SN has done). Not in a "Scottish, but doesn't wear a kilt" way, but in a "Scottish, but does not live and was not born in Scotland" kind of way.
Regarding his immense Bitcoin wealth, he has anonymised himself but not his Bitcoins. 99.9% of the Bitcoins he mined lay exactly where they were mined and he has made no attempt to move them or anonymise those coins. He might in the future but who knows.
In addition he made the first block unspendable so that the only block he had to mine himself to start the network would never contribute to his wealth.
But of course you are right - until we know who SN is, we can only speculate.
What's the chances that they took so much care to obscure their identity in every other way, but decided to use their genuine personality? Doesn't that seem improbable, too?
I accept the argument about it being hard to maintain two personas - but what is enormous cognitive effort for you and me might be basic operational security for someone else.
Bitcoin is very interesting, but I'd like if there was more caution about SN, given it has has potentially endowed them with vast resources.
So, yes, SN is smarter than DPR, and vastly more capable as a software engineer.
And, Satoshi wouldn't need Silk Road to be fantastically rich in Bitcoins. As far as we know, he's got a vast swath of the first mined Bitcoins, even if he gave away most of it. (Which is possibly how Satoshi's identity will be revealed...if suddenly there's a new trillionaire in the world in five years...well, might be Satoshi.)
Out of interest, aren't Satoshi's coins all held in a small number of wallets, so people will immediately see if anyone tries to use them? Presumably, this would provoke a crash in bitcoin prices.
As other people started running the clients, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell Satoshi from any other miner.
So though Satoshi may never have spent the bitcoins mined when she was the only miner, she could still have mined and spent many coins once there were a few hundred other miners.
[1] http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fo...
It's pretty likely a fair number of coins belong to Satoshi, as mining must have been pretty easy in the days when people paid 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas.
It is also possible that DPR is more than one person.
Thanks for the info.
A: Advertise his willingness to sell out.
B: Perhaps toss a bit of confusion onto anyone following him.
- the bitcoin wallet, although said to be associated with SN, has changed ownership since its creation in 2009
- SN purchased something from DPR, perhaps something DPR himself was selling on SR, either a legitimate buy or for some other purposes; SN was just a regular customer in this case
In the meantime, I'm eagerly awaiting their paper. Ron and Shamir have previously co-authored another bitcoin related paper titled 'Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph'. There's a very interested overview of it in this Gist: https://gist.github.com/jgarzik/3901921 It appears to have some flaws.
I don't know how accurate this statistic is, but the last Gist comment mentions that 22% of bitcoins are held in reused addresses.
According to Bitcoin developers Satoshi hasn't moved any of the coins they know he is/was in control of. Amateur sleuths trying to unmask Satoshi have gone through every piece of public writing and paper he's done, picked out unique phrases and words and tried to match them up to existing mailing list posts, forum posts and white papers with no success. Satoshi slipped in and out of British slang as well, either on purpose for distraction from his real identity or they were 2 people using the same account. He also referenced the Times when mining the first block as proof he had not premined a bunch of coins to run a ponzi/scam further indicating he may of been from the UK.
Either way he certainly is content with avoiding the spotlight while Ulbricht loved the fame that came with being DPR.
Let's say I'm an expert killer who has assassinated dozens of people without being caught. Do I camouflage myself by doing a shitty job and getting sent to jail? Of course not, I keep doing an expert job because I'd rather not be in jail.
There is nothing inherently illegal about creating BitCoin but there is something very illegal about facilitating drug trafficking. If they were the same person, wouldn't you practise good OPSEC to keep you out of prison? What is the value of keeping your identity as BitCoin creator a secret when you are in prison?
If they were one and the same, it seems to me, you would just practise good OPSEC across the board or, if need be, make "mistakes" that reveal you as BitCoin creator (and take the credit) and keep your identity as SilkRoad founder a secret.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1785445/bitcoin-crypto-currency-m...
Only yen could be worked around through a prepaid card, stolen card number, gratis account, and probably other methods I'm not aware of.
Lack of English support doesn't necessarily make the person Japanese. Westerners can learn Japanese or use translation tools.
The point of the test is to quickly asses whether the person trying to dox Satoshi has done even their basic homework and realized that it's an issue for their theory? If they haven't even looked at the Bitcoin.org WHOIS history, that says something important about the depth of their research into the question.
The NSA is SN.
Crypto knowledge? Check.
Ability to hide identity? Check.
Cultural expertise? Check.
Everything else that could possibly be needed? Check!
EDIT I am referring to the article not the yet to be published material
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EDIT: Won't out the author's identity, but parent post explained that he had only skimmed the article. The original post was asking who the computer scientists were and why this wasn't just link bait.