Comment by frisco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frisco | Hacker News Reader

I personally like the theory that Satoshi is Nick Szabo and Hal Finney, with maybe one other. Nick Szabo was way ahead of the curve on the design of a proof-of-work based cryptocurrency. When Dan Kaminsky looked at the Bitcoin source early on, he reported that "entire classes of bugs are missing" [1] and that it was almost "preternaturally sound" [2] and Hal Finney is one of the the few people realistically capable of producing that kind of code. Hal Finney was the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction, and was active on the mailing list that Bitcoin was announced through. Further, a few months before the Bitcoin paper announcement, Nick Szabo put out a request for collaborators to try and prototype out the proof-of-work currency system he'd been thinking about [3], and he and Hal Finney were known to get in touch around that time.

I hope the identity of Satoshi is never confirmed. If it's them, good for them! If not, it doesn't matter!

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34458.0

[2] http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/05/lets-cut-through-the-bi...

[3] http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.ht...

The relationship between Szabo and Finney goes back way further than that. They were both on the cypherpunks list in the 90's. See this paranoid rant [0] from the 90's about Hal Finney, Szabo and others being fake personas invented by Tim May (author of the Cyphernomicon).

Additionally, Szabo was an employee of Agoric Systems, publisher of the Agoric Papers [1], a treatise on market based systems. He was also an employee of Digicash [2], a failed electronic money startup created by David Chaum.

However, Szabo has released a bit of code [3], which is very different than code I would expect Satoshi Nakamoto to have written.

That said, for someone who was a professor at GWU law school, there is a remarkably small amount of public information about Nick Szabo.

[0] - http://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/Folklore/Humor/squish.hoax

[1] - http://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.html

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash

[3] - https://github.com/nicksz/jTime

Similar to your {0} and even earlier:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.privacy.anon-ser...

One coincidence is that Finney was diagnosed with ALS around the same time Satoshi stopped posting. On the other hand, if Finney is Satoshi, he would probably like to use his bitcoins to fund ALS research.

I'm betting on Satoshi being Wei Dai.

My clues:

a) He lives in London. Satoshi's mining has been timezoned to indicate that he probably lived in the UK. The genesis block had a quote from The Times ("chancellor on brink of second bailout").

b) Wei is an expert C++ programmer, and the bitcoin client was written in C++

c) Wei created cryptopp, a C++ cryptographic library, so he definitely knew how to implement cryptographic features in C++. The bitcoin client heavily used the cryptopp library. The code seems similar too.

d) Wei Dai published 'b-money' system in 1998

e) 'British formatting in his written work implies Nakamoto is of British origin. However, he also sometimes used American spelling, which may indicate that he was intentionally trying (but failed) to mask his writing style, or that he is more than one person. ' - Bitcoin wiki

interesting. at what odds would you bet? I think the distribution is fairly flat, because it could be a random, unknown guy who just happen to work on it his whole life. it seems to me that satoshi had to be non-academic.

it seems unlikely that it was an unknown guy who threw out a workable solution on his first attempt. If it wasn't his first attempt, he must have left an internet footprint somewhere with prior ramblings.

Much like DPR and silkroad.

This looks interesting:

https://web.archive.org/web/20061202010422/http://www.weidai...

not so sure. the main ingredient is the torrent principle. incidentally that was also written by one guy in a basement. the risk of floating a half-baked proposals is too high, so it seems likely satoshi did it all in one go, or had very private discussions. question really if anonymity was on his mind from the beginning or not.

> a) He lives in London. Satoshi's mining has been timezoned to indicate that he probably lived in the UK. The genesis block had a quote from The Times ("chancellor on brink of second bailout").

Doesn't Dai live in Washington...?

> d) Wei Dai published 'b-money' system in 1998

And Szabo says he first wrote about Bitgold around then too, so? Lots of people have written about digital currency over the years.

First of all, I wouldn't be surprised if you had reasons to try to discredit my claims :).

>Doesn't Dai live in Washington...?

I don't know. His website says that he's a lecturer at 'Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus'. His current location is irrelevant though, it's only relevant where Wei lived around 2007-2010. Do you have information on that?

>And Szabo says he first wrote about Bitgold around then too, so?

b-money is quite similar to bitcoin. Satoshi would be familiar with electronic money schemes, maybe even a public author.

>Lots of people have written about digital currency over the years.

Yes, and? I'm not saying that being an author of a digital currency means the he or she is Satoshi. I'm saying that it's evidence that he or she may be Satoshi, because authors of digital currencies probably want to have said currencies implemented.

All the voices in people's heads agree: Gwern is Satoshi.

> First of all, I wouldn't be surprised if you had reasons to try to discredit my claims :).

Well, if I were Satoshi, wouldn't I be encouraging you to fixate on Wei Dai...?

> I don't know. His website says that he's a lecturer at 'Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus'.

It does? Are you sure you are looking at the right Wei Dai, the Wei Dai of http://www.weidai.com/ ? It's not a unique name. There's more than one of them.

> However, he also sometimes used American spelling, which may indicate that he was intentionally trying (but failed) to mask his writing style, or that he is more than one person.

Note, non-exhaustive hypotheses. I've lived in England my whole life, but I've done a lot of talking to Americans online. I don't think I'm consistent with my locale, because I don't care enough to pay attention. (Also I don't even remember which of -ise and -ize is which, despite occasionally looking it up.)

Not only that but programmers become used to using American spellings in identifiers. That can can come through in online communication simply through muscle memory. I even have problems typing 'with' without my fingers automatically making it 'width'.

>Satoshi's mining has been timezoned to indicate that he probably lived in the UK.

It's possible that 'Satoshi' deliberately scheduled things to give the appearance of living somewhere else.

And lots of computer people working on systems designed to span timezones prefer to just use GMT everywhere from the beginning. (My short foray into GPU mining used rigs on GMT, and all VMs or cloud systems for my web projects always exclusively use GMT.)

Satoshi also mined using a lab of computers so could have done it afterhours on a campus somewhere which explains the time difference.

Interesting. What bug classes would those be?

Well Satoshi and Hal definitely worked together in some fashion: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3;sa=show...

There were a lot of problems in the early bitcoin client Kaminsky saw the refined product after Gavin, Satoshi and many others contributed

Agreed. Most people don't realize that is was Gavin, along with the other early devs (including Satoshi), who took what was a brilliant prototype and turned it into a very solid, multiplatform piece of software.

For example, Bitcoin didn't even run on Linux at first -- it was developed by Satoshi on Windows and had a lot of Windows-specific code despite the use of wxwidgets for UI.

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