How you will not uncover Satoshi
bitslog.wordpress.com
bitslog.wordpress.com
The state of user-user or user-corporation anonymity is good. If you want to stay anonymous from other users or a corporation then you can gain anonymity by spending a few hours reading tutorials/guides online and then installing Tails or Whonix (both which solve the metadata problem in OP and a variety of other attacks) or an alternative homebrew solution (machine isolation/snapshots) and apply a level of discipline to isolate your identity.
Last best OPSEC move Nakamoto made was to disappear - removes so many options in tracking him down. Hanging around and living off the credibility you've built with your anonymous persona is likely only going to breed complacency and the odds of slipping up increase each day (you see this in many cases)
I doubt he'll ever be tracked down. I doubt even a gov investigation starting today (for whatever reason) with all the power it has would achieve it (unless more than one person knows the secret, in which case a US investigation has a broad range of legal methods to compel testimony and reveal it).
I know a lot of people are sick of talking about Nakamoto and prefer to focus on what he produced (you can't even google his name anymore without 50% of the hits being about the Newsweek article), but being able to invent such an important piece of transformative technology and remain anonymous for so long, possible forever - is a brilliant accomplishment worthy of its own attention.
I was surprised the article claims he was using Windows XP. There's a surprising number of leaks when using Windows software. These leaks are functional and can provide cool features, sure, but they're leaks nonetheless.
For example, if you embed a file in a Powerpoint presentation, the PPTX file includes the original full path to the file. "C:\Users\JLewis\SecretWorkForTheNSA\FormattedForPublicRelease.txt". Obviously this isn't exclusive to Windows operating systems, but I feel other OS environments generally don't encourage oversharing like Windows does.
As much as members of the Bitcoin community like to think of themselves as agitators, there were very clearly no laws broken here.
Yeah, that's all clear now, but 4 years ago the legal situation was much murkier. This was all very new ground and we had no idea how the U.S. government would react, particularly given some of the other things going on at the time (particularly the prosecution of E-Gold, which was centralized but shared some features with Bitcoin).
Only if you believe that none of the identified candidates are him. Personally, I think not as much real effort has been spent as you think; I've found some pretty breathtaking stuff which no one has posted about publicly.
> Last best OPSEC move Nakamoto made was to disappear - removes so many options in tracking him down. Hanging around and living off the credibility you've built with your anonymous persona is likely only going to breed complacency and the odds of slipping up increase each day (you see this in many cases)
Yes, DPR comes to mind as an example of what happens when you don't know when to quit.
> I doubt even a gov investigation starting today (for whatever reason) with all the power it has would achieve it (unless more than one person knows the secret, in which case a US investigation has a broad range of legal methods to compel testimony and reveal it).
I disagree. Given what the Snowden leaks have revealed, I think the NSA, and possibly lower-level entities, could find him even now. They can attack gmx.com, AnonymousSpeech, Digirock, the Californian IP & Freenode, & the P2P Foundation looking for direct IP leaks or other information, either through penetration, legal demands, or their extensive databases of metadata; governments are the main sponsors of stylometric research (either code or writing), which are another excellent attack vector; and of course, they can simply do tailored attacks on major suspects, in the same way they've already individually gone after security researchers. For all we know, they've already done any of this - Snowden's info is dated.
If I need to publish something and have it remain completely anonymous, convert it to ASCII TEXT. That is one of the few formats I understand well enough to be CERTAIN that it is free of metadata.
Now all I have to worry about is how I can anonymously publish it, text style analysis, and how to include diagrams without resorting to ASCII drawings.
This is something you will hear from a lot of places, often from people who never were early adopters of neither mail, sms or skype etc.
The reason I made the comment is because it rubbed me the wrong way to cite 13-year-old girl talk as prototypical gibberish. Are 13-year-old girls generally excitable and potentially annoying? Yes. Do they talk in gibberish as a matter of course? No, that's a thoughtless sexist trope.
And I'll place a blind bet that they text faster than you.
Still think an average hn-er should be able to type faster and more correct on a normal keyboard than the average 13yo, regardless of gender.
I suspect that the actual writing style apart from the markup would provide some clues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SgAOcCm0I
One of the methods they mentioned is machine translation, but they found that it wasn't terribly useful. It's a really neat talk and I highly recommend it. They also wrote some software to anonymize texts (Anonymouth) and their stylometry software (JStylo) is also freely available:
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4781.en.h...
The Author/CreationDate/Creator/Producer/etc. fields are also completely optional despite, once again, the insistence of applications to put them in. There are "PDF anonymisers" out there, and I've written one myself too, but not all of them remove all this information.
Interestingly enough there's a PDF from the NSA about removing metadata, which itself has most of the metadata removed, but not the ID nor creation/modification dates:
Suppose that claim is not true, or that he was not fastidious in his use of Tor, it seems to me the email service provider would have logs on where his emails were originating from. From his original paper his email is satoshin@gmx.com
I'm not sure who owns gmx.com, but I think it likely that if a sovereign state went after them, they would probably divulge the information. Not that I want this to happen, of course. I hope he's never uncovered and his legend grows with the success of Bitcoin. I hope he did use Tor. I'm just not certain there is evidence for it.
Edit: I am not Satoshi Nakamoto, although I wish I was
This of course doesn't mean that Satoshi is a tor user, but a gmx account is consistent with typical tor behavior.
With that in mind, i think it is kind of stupid to look for Satoshi.
Now this comment is getting downvoted.
But I guess at least being downvoted means someone is reading it.
I think it's very unlikely anyone would threaten to murder or kidnap Satoshi.
The rest of your statement is an ad hominem argument. You state it is stupid to look for him because finding him would result in his death. That's a blaming statement of epic proportions, and is probably a result of your own emotions around Satoshi and Bitcoin, not a reality of this world. We don't know what we'd do if we found him.
The most high-profile speculation to date came in a March 6, 2014, article in the magazine Newsweek,[30] when journalist Leah McGrath Goodman identified Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a Japanese American man living in California, whose birth name is Satoshi Nakamoto.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto#Dorian_Nakamot...
- If Dorian was the real Satoshi, he would of course have used his 'real' account to try to disprove the claim.
- If not, the only to way to know for sure that he is not the guy is for the other 'real' Satoshi to prove that it couldn't be Dorian.
Simple as that. I agree that in the second case, the real Satoshi would not have a lot of incentive to prove the mistake. I'm not a conspiracy nut, I'm just saying that it has not been proven that Dorian is not the guy.
Not saying he would, just saying it would work.
I made a bunch of HN and reddit posts and even threads saying the Newsweek piece was very probably wrong, and was told to stop being a conspiracy nut. I even went into the official Bitcoin IRC to debate it with people, and found only 1 person agreeing with me and about 10 people against me.
It's scary to think that terrible journalism can be published and believed so easily.