Comment by dobbsbob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dobbsbob | Hacker News Reader

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There's no way in hell Satoshi is anywhere connected to "DPR". Look at the OPSEC between the two. Satoshi carefully concealed his identity even in the early crypto mailing list days of Bitcoin. Ross Ulbricht failed at this completely throughout his underground career. Satoshi was a pretty good developer, Ulbricht posted to Stackexchange the most basic of php questions.

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

Since when does "person X is connected to person Y" mean "person X is person Y"? They're "obviously"[1] not the same people. That by no means shows there is no connection.

[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"?

X is connected to Y is the sneaky way that headlines say "X is Y" without technically saying X is Y

This way if X actually is Y they can say they called it, but if X is not Y, then they weren't incorrect

I see that it could be used that way, I guess, but I don't think it's an appropriate interpretation. If X actually is Y then there is a connection, and they deserve some credit, just less than if they'd said "X is Y". If X is not Y then they "weren't incorrect" because they weren't incorrect, so parent is incorrect to label them as such. If X is not Y and there is some other interesting connection, they were correct and deserve just as much credit as if the two wind up shown to be the same person.

Ross Ulbricht failed at this completely throughout his underground career.

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.

Mistakes which included publicly posting an email address with his full legal name on a bitcoin forum while using that same nickname to post on a drug forum, all in the same time period.

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.

Idiot or not, his identity took some time to be discovered. People are oh-so-wise after the fact about DPR's dumb mistakes but can't tell the difference between their perceived brilliance and hindsight.

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!

What makes you think that the authorities had no motivation to leave him in play for a while before busting him?

Nothing at all. But they certainly weren't able to hold back the other potential discoverers of his identity that I listed.

And he dealt with those other threats by attempting to issue hits on them.

Isn't there a huge component of luck in staying anonymous? A needle can remain in a haystack for a long time without requiring any skill, either of it's own or of someone who hid or accidentally dropped it there. If time spent anonymous is "only remaining way to gauge how well someone hid", it's a pretty crummy one. I think it makes sense to take into account the kind of mistakes that brought someone out.

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.

Those points are the first things that come to my mind.

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.

Sounds just like Dread Pirate Roberts. You could say that his defining feature is that he is NOT the same people.

Satoshi carefully concealed his identity

Or her.

Is this level of pedantry really necessary? According to Wikipedia, the name is generally given to males.

Against the rules I guess, but thank you.

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.

Or "they" which has a good probability (at least, much better than 'it')

Then phrase it another way, without the pronoun. The whole point of this discussion is that we don't know who Satoshi is/are, so don't bake assumptions into your thoughts and writing on the topic.

It's not pedantry - it's helping yourself think clearly.

Care to make a wager? I'll lay 2:1.

Are you assuming it is one single person behind the pseudonym?

If you want to read more information about Satoshi you can take a look at this researched blog post: A new mystery about Satoshi hidden in the Bitcoin block-chain http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/new-mystery-about-sa...

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