toby-

Bitcoin wasn't anything extraordinarily revolutionary; it built upon others' work over decades of collaborative progress, and introduced few truly novel ideas. Very impressive work by all means, but it didn't require genius-level skill or knowledge.

It's common for older writers to insert two spaces after a full-stop. In fact, go through the cypherpunk mailing list (and many others) and you'll see it was the norm. As for Satoshi being British, he used predominantly British English but occasionally used American spellings and terms; it easily could've been intentional misdirection.

Adam Back doesn't write at all like Satoshi. Back's writings are filled with grammatical errors and he often makes spelling mistakes, which Satoshi seldom did.

Reality is seldom as fun as people's theories.

We also "know" it's Hal Finney, James A. Donald, Elon Musk, Paul Le Roux, Adam Back, ...

Or he doesn't have the keys or never owned the wallets attributed to him.

People love a mystery. And people love to solve mysteries. Don't look for any deeper motivation than that.

The British English could be a misdirection. Satoshi was always quite inconsistent, sometimes using US spellings ('color', 'check', 'optimize'). One that always stood out to me was his use of 'gotten' – we don't typically use that word in British English, but an American English speaker attempting to disguise themselves as a Brit most likely wouldn't be aware of that fact.

The early Bitcoin client could send Bitcoins to an IP address. That's all he meant, no?

Or he just lost the keys. Or the analysis is wrong and those aren't his wallets; it was never definitive.

> Among people who try to guess Satoshi's identity, there is also a surprising bias toward fame or at least well-known people.

Very true. Every time I see people seriously propose Elon Musk or Paul Le Roux or some other flashy/cool celebrity figure, I'm reminded that people are just attracted to spectacular stories and theories. Similar to how every missing persons case eventually has "trafficked by millionaires for sick satanic rituals" proposed as a theory.

I think Satoshi was probably a regular, older IT professional who developed an interest in digital cash, did some research, and familiarised himself (somewhat) with earlier proposals and discussions. People suggest he was a seasoned cypherpunk, but when he first began posting about Bitcoin to mailing lists, I seem to recall someone having to correct his formatting (I don't remember the specifics, and I wish I could find it, but it stood out to me at the time as suggesting unfamiliarity with mailing lists generally).

The hyphenating patterns are particularly curious, to me.

Some supposed idiosyncrasies ('bugfix', for example) are just standard renderings amongst programmers/tech types; using those as evidence somewhat betrays the author's lack of familiarity with the field/community (as if the C++ and public-key cryptography 'evidence' didn't make that plain enough...).

> I wonder, based on the large number of distinct hyphenation errors, whether Satoshi is even from the UK or the US.

How many native English speakers are truly familiar with hyphenating compound nouns and adjectives? I'd say a majority don't know how to consistently hyphenate correctly.

My understanding is that a company's location is largely irrelevant; a company becomes subject to the GDPR when they handle EU citizens' data (or UK GDPR when it's UK citizens), and the EU/UK will still try to fine companies that aren't resident in the EU/UK - enforceability is a different question, although non-payment of fines opens the door to other remedies e.g. blocking access, seizing assets, etc.

Agreed – you can never truly be completely "safe", but Tor remains the most privacy-preserving tool we've got.

When people say they're distrustful of Tor (for various reasons) to the extent they refuse to use it, they seldom suggest alternative tools/measures that provide anywhere near the level of safety offered by Tor.

Fair enough. Was just curious. :)

It's true that a majority is from the US government through various funding schemes and grants. They're very transparent about their funding and ongoing efforts to diversify. But a little over half coming from US government sources isn't the same as their devs literally being on the gov't payroll; people often talk about Tor as if the developers themselves earn a government salary.

(Funnily, Signal also received major funding from US government sources but very few people seem to question that when lauding Signal.)

Wait until you learn about the creation of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Better disconnect.

So was the Internet at DARPA (or its modern foundation). And the WWW at CERN.

Tor's development team aren't on the payroll of the US gov't, and their funding comes from many sources.

If having received funding from a government agency is enough to earn your distrust, you'd quickly become a paranoid schizophrenic.

Timing attacks are a well-known weakness. There's a lot of research into timing attacks and proposed countermeasures.

Also, it's just Tor – not 'TOR'.

>Note: even though it originally came from an acronym, Tor is not spelled "TOR". Only the first letter is capitalized. In fact, we can usually spot people who haven't read any of our website (and have instead learned everything they know about Tor from news articles) by the fact that they spell it wrong.

https://support.torproject.org/about/why-is-it-called-tor/

We have a rough timeframe: "To the best of our knowledge, the attacks happened between 2019–2021."

The hidden service targeted[0] had completely ceased to exist by April 2021, so that time range makes sense.

[0]: https://www.ndr.de/fernsehen/sendungen/panorama/aktuell/Inve...

Why wouldn't you trust Tor? Do you mean you wouldn't trust it at all, or wouldn't trust it completely?

Yes. Why wouldn't it be?

The fact that adversaries need to rely on zero-days, or people running massively outdated and unsupported software, strongly suggests the network is safe and robust.

It isn't a self-signed cert.

>More than 1/3 of the Tor servers are run by US Federal Govt

Source? People repeat this claim and nobody every provides evidence.

They may not have heard of Gnutella, the network, but they may be familiar with some of the software that supports it: LimeWire, Shareaza, BearShare, WireShare, FrostWire, iMesh, and probably others I'm forgetting.

The article does mention Knuth, the author of three of the books you mention.

It at least gives you an idea of where might be fruitful to begin your investigation...

Where are you that it's "next to impossible"? That really surprises me.

I'm in the UK, and you can walk into any Post Office, WHSmith, bookshop, most newsagents, etc., and pick up maps of the local area or country, usually Ordnance Survey[0] maps.

And (at least when I was in secondary school, about a decade ago) map reading was still taught as a valuable skill, using OS maps.

[0]: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk

Eminently.

I believe they meant SSI, which is Spectral Similarity Index.

https://www.oscars.org/science-technology/projects/spectral-...