In his last interview (when he could no longer speak) he was asked if he was Satoshi, and he just grinned.
As for where the missing bitcoins are, my bitcoin is placed on the wallet just being thrown out with an old computer, discarded on a floppy disk, etc.
Hal Finney's RPOW - professional UNIX-style C code, with code organized into client/server/common, clearly separated functions, etc.
Bitcoin 0.1: Win32 GUI C++ code, no separation between core and GUI. No CLI, no RPC API, only Windows GUI. No directories, just a bunch of files.
Do you think Hal Finney would unlearn everything he knew about code organization to develop his Magnum Opus? Something which should become world currency, runs only on Windows and cannot be automated?
Maybe Satoshi is a South African student in Glasgow, who moved back with his family to Germany and is shaking his head at BTC's evolution now that he grew up beyond "bruh banks bad" ?
He did an overly inefficient distributed linked list, which is replicated thousands of times by smaller projects to yield exactly the same value (the "bruh banks bad" value)
Using word frequency analysis to determine authorship goes back at least to the 1970s.
Of course one could argue that Satoshi is alive and choses to be silent on purpose, since being worth tens of billions of dollars might come with some strings attached, ie kidnappings, black mail, extortions etc.
But one would have to have a rather strong personality to not give in and become a public and admired figure.
Then again, cypherpunks might just be that breed...
So maybe someone hacked that account-- but then, why didn't we get any more Satoshi activity? Or maybe Len (who took his own life in 2011) isn't Satoshi after all!
[1] http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topic/listForContributor...
I think the consensus is that the statement wasn't real
Just because Satoshi went silent for a while doesn't mean that he/they are dead.
This is a very strong case for Len to be Satoshi.
But when you suddenly become a billionaire, what do you do? Ring up some private security company? You would need to trust them not to screw you over. It's kinda boils down to you not being able to trust anyone, not even governments that might consider you a criminal.
I think it's pretty likely that the person (or people) who went by Satoshi is dead, and probably died before their Bitcoin hoard was worth much.
If not, you'd have to explain why someone is giving up the opportunity to never have to work for someone else to support themselves ever again. And those are less believable to me: e.g. 1) already having so much FU money they're secure in their lifestyle w/o the Bitcoin, 2) being either extremely ascetic or happy to work for someone else to support themselves, 3) deliberately choosing to destroy it for some reason, 4) losing the all keys in an accident (more understandable for a rando playing around than the creator), etc.
https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/77358901774917632
> Right; why would they [mention Bitcoin in the cypherpunk panel on digital currencies], though? Bitcoin pretty much fails as a cypherpunk protocol.
https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/81121594373709825
> That only works if you want to leave the inflated value of Bitcoin on the table; otherwise you must cash out before the crash.
https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/80748374386679808
> Oh, where's #infoanarchy when you need it? I mean, we could do a serious take and do BitCoin right, you know. (P.S.: CloudCoin™)
Also, Len was a Unix guy, and whoever wrote Bitcoin was a Windows programmer, though not an incompetent one.
(And, as pointed out in other comments below, Satoshi came out of his seclusion in 02014, three years after Len killed himself, writing only one short email, to rebut Newsweek's article claiming he was Dorian Nakamoto.)
The Unix vs Windows argument is pretty silly. And as mentioned in other comments, the 2014 email is generally regarded as not legitimate.
> The Unix vs Windows argument is pretty silly.
That doesn't amount to a counterargument. POSIX C++ and Win32 C++ have very distinctly different styles, and Satoshi's Bitcoin codebase is a lot more similar to the latter.
Satoshi seemed to think BTC was getting too much attention too fast. They were unhappy about WikiLeaks accepting it thinking it was far too premature for that.
They also were clear that it did NOT yet provide full anonymity. The whitepaper admits that and Satoshi advised precautions like using Tor and not reusing wallets until there was better privacy. They never claimed it was mature for privacy use cases.
It's worth pointing out that code of the first version was organized in a ridiculous way, even pro Windows programmers do not dump everything into one directory. So a widespread opinion is that it was written by an amateur without professional programming experience, albeit extremely bright, as organization aside, code worked very well.
I also have a distinct memory that he had a very well decorated walking cane.
Edit: I do think that this post, while having valid circumstantial evidence, is at best circumstantial. And it’s more valuable to celebrate those who have passed by way of recognizing the achievements we can genuinely attribute to them
Edit edit: http://langsec.org/
1) "blockchain inventor David Chaum"
Chaum developed methods to do blinded ecash, there's nothing "blockchain" about a central database checking blinded signatures for double spends.
D. Bayer, S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, and N. Szabo were working on methods of how to distribute property titles and timestamp data to reduce trust requirements of the data through out time.
Chaum's design never solved the problem of how to create bits that people can inherently reason about how much they trust them as money/scarcity. He was ardent about turning fiat currencies into digital tokens -- drastically different than making bits into money.
2) Does it make much sense for Bitcoin's author to be, as the article claims, highly experienced with asymmetric cryptography but also soliciting advice from "real cryptographers" on the cryptography mailing list? Sassaman's archived site doesn't show much cryptography work (but much cypherpunk work)
3) "Len joined Network Associates to help develop the PGP encryption central to Bitcoin"
The curves used in bitcoin's -- and very limited amount of -- cryptography aren't used in PGP.
4) "the remailer technology that was a precursor to Bitcoin."
Much of this article seems to be straining to make connections. Remailers don't have anything to do with Bitcoin. If anything remailers are the precursors to Tor / i2P. Identification of bitcoin nodes in the early version of bitcoin code was as shockingly easy as... joining an IRC channel.
No, we're not. We can dismiss the fraudulent claims of Craig Wright without being "forced" to do anything else.
Furthermore, an investment in BSV isn't necessarily a validation of Craig Wright's claims.
Coding style and mannerism. Windows, Mac, Linux? IP addresses or user agent logged anywhere (mailing list)? Comment structure and style. Git / SVN commits. English writing style and mannerism. Digital fingerprints.
Surely there must be a technical trail to investigate.
The probably is, but I'm guessing the really definitive records would probably require a subpoena to obtain (e.g. business records of the domain registrar or hosting company).
I've always thought the best way to verify a Satoshi candidate would be to compare coding style. Presumably this guy has some open source code we can look at. Has anyone done a comparison?
"Some day, I will invent a machine that turns all marxists into ants. Then, we will all be happy."
