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Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

I doubt the real identity of Satoshi will ever be revealed. Seriously, if the claims of Satoshi mining the first 20,000 Bitcoins is true (with a value of almost one billion), would he seriously want to be publicly known?

I would imagine the FBI amongst other Government organisations and figures would love nothing more than to pick Satoshi's brain (by force if need be) if his or her identity were to ever be truly revealed. We won't ever know who the real Satoshi is.

I can make baseless and factless accusations as to who I think Satoshi is as well. I think it's Al Gore, he invented the Internet after all.

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I think Satoshi is the NSA. This is 99% because it would be the most entertaining result, and 1% actual reasoning ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6206086 ).

Can we rule out the FBI?

Not smart enough?

I think so. Bitcoin is too global to be interesting to a domestic agency. It's more likely to be CIA.

If it's part of a policing effort, then it's obviously part of the UN, which according to Tim LeHaye, rules over the United States with an iron fist and is where the shadow government of totally-not-Jews would do exactly this kind of thing.

The only name I have for that is New World Order.

I would believe NSA before CIA. The FBI gets involved in the internet space, but it doesn't seem like the CIA does all that much.

You're not supposed to think the CIA does much. They're the actual spy agency; the whole "just a star on the wall at Langley" thing is CIA; you don't hear about their victories, and if you do, it's a failure of some kind. Stuxnet, for instance, was almost certainly CIA.

If Bitcoin is a targeted strike against China somehow (not completely impossible), then the CIA is the likeliest candidate. Otherwise, of the USGov national agencies, the NSA is most likely.

The FBI doesn't really get anything out of it. The only reason I can think of for the FBI to do it is for paying off informants anonymously. (And as I've pointed out before, if anyone's an expert on money laundering, it's the FBI.)

It would be entertaining if the NSA could use blockchain data as an aid to cracking systems which employ SHA-256. It would be doubly fun if bitcoin was originally some off-the-cuff gamification scheme to help generate lookup tables for the NSA.

Are there any papers about practical (slash nefarious) uses one could make from the work put into the blockchain? I had the same thoughts as you recently, but don't have the background to imagine what's possible.

Each miner includes their own address and a nonce value in the work they are doing. Most of the work that goes into mining is generating failed hashes and is discarded by the client. Assuming a lack of mathematical attacks on sha 256, there isn't really anything nefarious to do with the published blocks.

I want a universe to exist where the answer to every question is based on its entertainment value.

Where did you get that 20,000 Bitcoins are worth (even hypothetically) one billion? Even at $1,000 per BTC that's just $20M.

I think that's coming from the idea that the "ultimate value" of the BTC money supply should be ~$1 trillion (in order for it to replace real-world currencies in a significant fraction of transactions). 20,0000 Bitcoins is ~1/1000th of 21,000,000 potential Bitcoins.

The paper linked speculates that a small group of people mined the first 20,000 blocks of Bitcoin. 20,000 blocks (@50 coins each) is 1,000,000 bitcoins, which @ $1000 is $1 billion.

Ah, got it. Confused bitcoin with blocks. Thanks.

Some people estimate his net worth to have been not 20,000, but 1.6 million bitcoins. That adds to over a billion dollars.

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto-the...

But $1B in nominal marginal priced BTC is faaar less liquid (less order book depth) than most other assets.

Yeah, it's worth more like $50M if you place your sells across exchanges:

    1,600,000.00 bitcoins can be sold for 35,066,701.01 USD on Mt. Gox with a slippage of 1,544,789,298.99 USD (97.78%)
    222,043.14 bitcoins (insufficient bid volume) can be sold for 15,395,973.27 USD on Bitstamp with a slippage of 1,493,404,026.73 USD (98.98%)

> I doubt the real identity of Satoshi will ever be revealed.

They should include revelation in their will. For history's sake if nothing else.

It would be interesting if (inplementors of a majority of the client software installed base of) the community declared and anti-hoarders coup, and refused to verify transactions involving the low ID bitcoins.

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