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Comment by gjm11 | Hacker News Reader

General consensus seems to be that Ron&Shamir's publications on this topic are extraordinarily weak given how stellar a record Shamir, in particular, has.

The conclusion seems obvious: It's a misdirection. Adi Shamir is Satoshi Nakamoto.

(Note: No, I do not in fact believe this.)

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I think it's important to note that this paper was a research paid by the Citi foundation, which belongs to Citi Group, a financial services corporation formed following the merger of banking giant Citicorp and financial conglomerate Travelers Group.

Why exactly is that important? Because it suggests that Citi is involved in hiding the identity of Satoshi and that implies their involvement in setting up Bitcoin?

Or am I missing an angle here?

I think the claim made is that the powers that be are actively working against Bitcoin, here by tarnishing its reputation with sensationalist research.

This sounds like a fairly typical case of an advisor giving a student free reign. Most professors do not invest the time to understand their students' work as much as you might think.

As your comment is 3rd from the top of page:

You could investigate that with a few minutes of googling - the 'student' has been writing CS papers since the mid '80s [0]

This reminds me of when someone on HN described both the authors as 'some Israeli CS students' [1]

Whatever you think about this particular paper, the authors are experienced researchers.

[0] http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~dron/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5209356

So what we are saying here is that in the "did a bit of preliminary googling before writing something foolish" department, they did about as well as a HN commenter.

Seriously, the slight difference here makes your comparison less than flattering. This seems like some form of "damning with faint praise".

And as Adi Shamir could have found out with a little more Googling, the address belonged to Trammell, not Satoshi.

It takes a bad Googler to know a bad Googler.

I guess we're all just bad Googlers.

We should really brush up on our Googling.

I stand corrected and I apologize to Dr. Ron. I am still not sure how much Shamir is responsible for the flaws in this research given that he's not the first author.

I'm not sure about this particular paper, but in most theoretical fields the authors are listed alphabetically by last name (the assumption being that each of them made a contribution without which the paper wouldn't exist - so ranking them is not important).

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