Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

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> Though if this is your first real crazy caller I could understand where the fascination came from.

You know, thinking about it, I think Jack is the first crazy person I have seriously dealt with at length on the Internet. Oh, I've seen plenty of crazy people online - I've laughed at Timecube, I've looked over HN's own resident Losethos (with a sense of 'there but for the grace of god'), I've watched other people argue with crazy people - but I think I've either never actually dealt with them or quickly flipped the bozo bit on them and disengaged. Under normal situations, on normal topics, I have no reason to talk with them at length and grandiloquence is unjustified....

At least part of the problem here is that in the crazy mirror land of the blackmarkets and Bitcoin in general, sanity is hard to distinguish from insanity, there really are key bits of information random parties can have, not everyone talks straight, blackmail does payoff, and there really are hidden millionaires & billionaires walking around in plain sight. (As an example of the mirrors of insanity, I invite anyone to read the Silk Road 2 forums and parse the SSBD/Inigo/Libertas, the DPR2 key rotation, the Cirrus announcement, Raoul's quoted message from DPR2, the posts by Defcon, the 'accidental' access to the admin forum, Ormsby's comments, Oracle's insinuations, the Tormarket quote from the vendor forum, etc etc etc, and parse it into a single coherent sane narrative. And consider what Satoshi's estimated fortune is at any moment.)

I wish we could do something for losethos. "There but for the grace of god" captures it perfectly.

As I recall, losethos's situation is that he's already on disability, diagnosed, and part of a national health system (isn't he British or something?); it's just that his meds either aren't working or he isn't taking them. What can be done for him has been done.

I did some minor whois snooping into templos.org; I seem to remember something about Sunnyvale, CA. I live in the Bay Area...

You ask "Who is Sunny". I believe they refer to "Sunny King", author of Peercoin and Primecoin. Some people seem to think Sunny is Satoshi.

Yes, that's the suggestion on Reddit too. It would make sense given his other allusions.

I suspect that 'Jack' might be a non-native speaker of English. I get the feeling that the first language of 'Jack' is probably highly idiomatic and frequently uses allusion and/or euphamisms. Also using the threat of the government power, rather than direct force (mafia et alia who more frequently carry out blackmail), while simultaneously engaging in clearly illegal behaviour. I would suspect this means this person's origins would be a country with high levels of government corruption and/or dictatorship. All together I would hedge that this person came from China (linguistical match, corruption match, huge population, national interest in Bitcoin), Vietnam, or maybe Laos or Cambodia. Obviously this is all conjecture of the highest order.

> I suspect that 'Jack' might be a non-native speaker of English.

If he is, he's done a hell of a job learning English. I think I'm a very good writer, but in some respects I don't match Jack, which is impressive for a native but astounding if he's ESL. Plus he makes references to US things like referring to MA as being 'east', which suggests he's physically located i the US, which is more likely if he's a native speaker.

The reason I think he isn't a native speaker is that the nuance of his words miss the mark way too often (hence the purple prose); almost like he is choosing words from a thesaurus rather than from his day to day repertoire.

I say this from the background of having attended a number of international schools around the globe as a teenager.

The pattern of his errors suggests a native English speaker to me.

Y'know, I completely understand your want to get the information out, to solve the puzzle, to unlock the mystery of why this guy thinks whatever it is he thinks. I don't have a moral, ethical, or any other kind of problem with that, nor do I think that any reasonable court would hold you accountable for anything of the sort (that said, courts are seldom reasonable, so beware)... what I do worry about though, is the idea that by even vaguely admitting anything even remotely of the sort that you might be Satoshi could get you implicated in something else.

This line, for example

> I think that you do not have a solid case that I am Satoshi, and that you are hoping I will pay you a large sum

I read it how you meant to say it, but thinking through every episode of Law & Order, Matlock, et al that I can remember, the guy who says "Oh yeah? Prove it. You got nothing on me copper" is always the guilty party. In the absence of anybody knowing who the real Satoshi Nakamoto is, let's say the feds decide to arrest somebody, and this happens into their field of view, so they settle on you, and you find yourself in front of a jury of your peers with a document that, if read the right way by the prosecutor, makes you sound like Bugsy Malone.

I'm sure it's a remote possibility, and I'm sure that there are plenty of other happenings in your life to provide you ample alibi -- or at least, I hope there are. As a telecommuter that lives in the suburbs, I probably get out less than I should... I don't know how well that represents you, but I can imagine a scenario in which my alibi is the ever-faithful "I was at home. Yeah, my wife was there the whole time".

I'm sure things'll be fine, but be careful. Innocent people do go to prison all the time, especially in America. We damn near pride ourselves on that fact.

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