Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Birth of Bitcoin
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Also his blog: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/
Personally I do think the creator should be unmasked. This person stands to profit hugely from BitCoin's adoption and continued use. I want to know if they really are doing it for eventual personal financial gain or not. And what kind of person they are, how the massive amount of money they gain will be used. Maybe Satoshi was a secret CIA project all along and the government will use the huge BitCoin stash to fund black ops that we'd rather not have happen. Maybe it was similar but the KGB instead. Maybe it was some lone hacker or group of hackers like Mr. Szabo, and they threw away the keys. Or maybe they didn't throw away the keys but they will just eventually split it up and give the money to their children. There's lots of good and bad possibilities, none of which we know until the identity of Satoshi is revealed.
Personally, I have always been skeptical of BitCoin. There's no reason why it should be the crypto currency. If cryptocurrencies do take off as more than just a toy for libertarians and rich technophiles, then governments will start their own fork and decree that these are the official cryptocurrencies of their nations, and all others are junk. Over night the value of BitCoin will plummet, because the wider population will choose the government backed one.
It's hard to create and distribute a new currency, and convince people that it's worth something. Bitcoin has done that, and it will be hard for even governments to convince people that there's a better option.
I don't buy this premise. Lots of online games have also done this. They do this by finding a target audience and hooking them in, and then saying "If you want more you have to pay."
BitCoin just targeted libertarians. People have made other BitCoin forks for other audiences. Granted none of them took off like BitCoin, but that's because they were all pretty much jokes targeted at a small niche.
No one buys game currencies to hold. They buy them to spend. If you don't understand why people are excited about Bitcoin, you should go find out. It's a trustless database in the sky, and that sort of thing wasn't possible before 2009. New technologies make old analogies misleading.
Ironically, this means that the game currencies are much closer to functioning as an actual currency than bitcoin.
This is actually not true. But I'm not going to get into it since you don't think BitCoin's political alignments are relevant, and you are talking down to me at the same time.
(1) What difference does "direct lineage" have? They aren't gold, and they aren't backed by gold. Unless you arguing that they have sentimental value from a historical association that hasn't been real for generations, this is meaningless.
(2) Also, this is more true of silver than it is of gold. the gold standard was sort of a brief fad (in long-term historical terms) in the final centuries of commodity currency standards as the dominant model, while silver had dominated for a much longer time previously. Pretty much all of the extant currencies that have a "direct lineage from gold" also have a direct lineage from silver, and the ones that aren't themselves relatively new have a much longer history under silver.
[1] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/19418/bitcoin-friendly-bills-unv...
2. States don't have their own currencies, so other than the ease of use of US Dollars, they really wouldn't care what you pay your taxes in, so long as they can use it.
So yes, a government could set up an e-currency and make us use it, but there's no way a government could (intentionally) set up a currency like bitcoin. Truly algorithmic e-currency is fundamentally incompatible with the concept of governing. Anything by a government would allow reversals, currency injections, invisible transactions, etc.
Anyone know what 'temporal programming' refers to? Sounds intriguing.
Cash, laundering, shell corps; they have none of these properties.
See: parallel construction.
Bitcoin or not, if the technology existed to identify "darknet kingpins", the technique wouldn't show up on the open press.
As I already stated, parallel construction is completely unnecessary since everyone is already aware that the blockchain is a comprehensive public record of all bitcoin transactions. What secret technique could the government have that could give them more information than is already available for everyone to see? There isn't any more information beyond what's inside the ledger except for the link between wallet and bank account which everyone knows the government is capable of establishing.
As soon as Bitcoin became clearly successful, it also became inevitable that things like Monero or Zerocoin or Coinjoin would be invented. Once the genie of distributed e-cash has been let out of the bottle, it not merely can evolve but will evolve.
So in exchange for a brief period of visibility through Bitcoin, they would have permanently and irrevocably damaged their ability to spy via banks, Western Union, PayPal etc (entities which they pwn lock stock and barrel) as usage diverts to anonymous currencies (Bitcoin with extensions or mixes, or anonymous coins).
Assuming "much, much harder" isn't hyperbole, could you elaborate on this please? I'm interested in the tech aspect. The existing anonymous solutions I've looked at are all more complex and difficult to grasp than the simplicity of bitcoin's global ledger.
Hey, look at all this bad stuff! We need more money to fight it! Also, we can't tell you what we're doing to fight it, because then it wouldn't work, so just trust us, ok?
*Note: I don't actually believe this, and I don't own a tinfoil hat. Just an amusing thought.
“I’m not Satoshi, and I’m not a college professor.
In fact, I never was a college professor.”
>Furthermore, George Washington University says that despite widespread reports that Mr. Szabo worked as a law professor at the school, it has no records of his ever working there in that capacity. The university did confirm, though, that he received a law degree from the school in 2006.
Nobody writes a submarine piece and goes to bitcoin conferences.
Satoshi only started mining after releasing the client, so those coins are not really pre-mined.
http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2014/08/167-satoshis-hashra...
Certainly, it's a safe assumption. But we don't know that Satoshi ever mined a single main chain bitcoin.
I never said or implied that.
> isn't that a bit like mark Zuckerberg making a large fortune from creating Facebook?
Facebook is a company, Zuckerberg made a large fortune because investors and advertisers gave money directly to his company.
> And they were not zero cost, initially they would have expense to make something that had no value.
I said close to zero; the point being that pre-miners and Satoshi put in a negligible amount of computational effort relative to the payoff, especially when you consider the staggering sum of coins mined.
> he turned them off when there was a stable network that didn't need his mining power
I'm not trying to judge Satoshi's intentions or values, though it's pretty obvious that continuing to amass even larger sums of bitcoin wouldn't have made the community very comfortable. Still, 5% of the entire money supply seems pretty significant for a currency that's the ostensible future of money.
Yes but he put in a metric fuck ton of work imagining and coding bitcoin. Comparing bitcoin to a pre-mined alt-coin is disingenous. Bitcoin is different because it came first, it needed those coins to be mined for the network to exist. Alt-coins that were pre-mined were pre-mined specificaly to create an advantage for the author of the system after seein the success of bitcoin.
Satoshi cannot be said with having done this. He didnt know the success that would follow on from his experiment and he didnt pre-mine, he just made up a large part of the network in the early days.
If he/she/they won't do this or if PGP is broken by then we will never know for sure.
Unless they have already put encrypted messages into the existing blockchain using different algos with such a signed message- Then they could use another signature to prove they signed the message with PGP before PGP was broken.
Szabo wrote a little about gwern here: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-y...
I annotated with explanations of what I mean:
http://genius.it/unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-w...
Let people have their privacy.
I'm not to the details yet, but they're profiling a new man, Nick Szabo.
I just previously read the Wired piece that profiled the wrong man, and the ensuing discussion here.
Despite this, he has to this day remained an extraordinarily secretive individual, while being widely suspected to be the creator of BTC. Looks like all that practice (http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1993/10/msg00759.html) paid off.
>Mr. Szabo’s was unavailable for comment. Furthermore, George Washington University says that despite widespread reports that Mr. Szabo worked as a law professor at the school, it has no records of his ever working there in that capacity. The university did confirm, though, that he received a law degree from the school in 2006.
I always thought the biggest downside to dropping your life, changing your name, and trying to start over would be the inability to get a college-requiring job, but maybe it would be a possibility. (Like a witness protection program, without the federal support)
>An encouraging fact undocumented students should keep in mind when considering college: No federal law requires proof of citizenship to be admitted to U.S. colleges. Most institutions set their own admission policies.
You'd still need a high school diploma or equivalent to get into a good college, and those may require ID, or at least keeping up the fake since you were a teen. For Szabo, if he really is a fake name and got a high school diploma with it, I'd say he deserves us not knowing.
You could probably get the same kind of IDs that undocumented residents get in order to get a driver's license. So, no SSN, but a number for tax and identification purposes.
Another big problem I see with pseudonymous reputations is entry. If most people are blocking posts from new pseudonyms, how does one get a new reputation stablished? I've had several years to establish a net.reputation for "Nick Szabo", and it might take a long time for any of my pseudonyms to catch up.
He's right, he had to work all the way until around 2013 before a pseudonym finally caught up :-p
(Was originally Tweeted by Adrian Chen: https://twitter.com/AdrianChen/status/456922865992863744)
The sinister explanation is that they dug through my post history, saw that I'm trans (I'm very open about it, and in fact I've been discussing my name change in another thread this morning), and decided to misgender me either out of bigotry or just to be hurtful.
I'm not sure which one to believe.
your comment was stupid,I didn't check your comments, just copy-pasted your name, and really.
anyway believe what you want, I don't need any "charitable" explanations
You can cut and past the name from the header of a post without reading it, and without typing it out.
> And yeah, defaulting to 'his' is exactly sexist (it's a rather mild form of it, but still).
Adherence to the English convention of using the masculine grammatical gender for subjects of unknown sex/gender identity might bother some readers, but is only "sexist" by an understanding of sexism that trivializes the term and robs it of substantial meaning.
Oh really. We are talking about four words here. So are we squinting or something, because you have to be illiterate to not read that incidentally.
> Adherence to the English convention of using the masculine grammatical gender for subjects of unknown sex/gender identity might bother some readers, but is only "sexist" by an understanding of sexism that trivializes the term and robs it of substantial meaning.
Oh brother. Nope, you're the one redefining. See the myriad examples of "avoiding sexist language" style guides. Just because someone isn't getting raped doesn't mean there's no sexism.
>Oh brother. Nope, you're the one redefining. See the myriad examples of "avoiding sexist language" style guides.
do you whitch hunt everyine that use the wrong word? get a grip
when I talk to people on the phone they always get my gender wrong, I don't correct them because I really couldn't care less,
seriously don't you think all this is too much, just because i used a "his" and not reading a username? I admit that I shouldn't have call you idiot, I just get annoyed by the way you expressed your opinion.
Take the Amtrak engineer in the recent Philadelphia crash...as far as I can tell, he most definitely would like to remain out of the spotlight. Yet, because he happened to be the engineer at the time of the crash -- whether or not we know that he directly or even indirectly contributed to the crash -- news orgs have some legal protection in scrutinizing his life, including where he went to school, his job history, and any public social media postings.
Sometimes privacy is accorded out of tradition or convention...for example, the identity of a rape victim who is testifying in a court case is public information, though it is rarely reported except under special circumstances. But in this case, the victim did not intentionally put themselves in this position of public interest, but because court cases are considered to be important for the public to know about, the victim's identity is considered public information.
It should be said that nothing is completely cut and dry, there's always a tension between the public's right to know and privacy. But the right of privacy is usually afforded to victims and for people whom public exposure would cause greater harm than censorship -- i.e. the identity of witnesses in a state case. Bitcoin's creator does not seem to fall into this category.
Except there isn't evidence that this guy is Satoshi. So there isn't evidence that he is a public figure.
Also, choosing not to reveal someone's identity is not censorship.
On the other hand, as long as Satoshi remains unknown and doesn't spend his coins, his wealth will not grant him power.
I hope will sue their asses.
The world is filled with millionaires and billionaires who are publicly known and yet perfectly safe, even though the vast majority of them don't have security guards or anything like that.
Why do you think things would be different for the creator of Bitcoin? The reality is that very few criminals are of the take-hostages-and-murder type in the first place and murdering or stealing from a semi-famous rich person is a surefire way to get caught, especially when Bitcoins are traceable in a way that cash is not. You might as well break in and steal a Picasso painting from some other millionaire.
There are lots of people who want to remain private and unknown; the best (though not guaranteed) way is to not do anything worthy of the public notice. If you do, you should expect some scrutiny. So while I sympathize with Szabo, I don't feel very sorry for him. He pursued his dream of working on cryptocurrency (whether or not he is Satoshi) and this is a perfectly reasonable and predictable consequence of that dream.
as if.
There are certainly exceptions, for the super-rich and some kinds of celebrities, but it's not very common.
Neither does Szabo. What Bitcoins he has are traceable and they are not just sitting around. The usual imagination is that someone would threat/torture and kill him and his family to get his keys, but that's extremely high profile and risky and works just as well for normally wealthy people. (Send your wife to take out one million dollars cash from the bank or I'll kill your children!)
> Satoshi, whoever he is, does have a large pile of what may be untraceable money though.
How would it be untraceable? Bitcoin, unlike cash, is very traceable.
Szabo's situation is not at all different from anybody else who is wealthy.
I'm sure Szabo will be fine.
People on those lists do sue the papers sometimes, but not usually for having their wealth overestimated - http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/07/us-britain-saudi-b...