I've read about Paul Le Roux before as he is likely the person behind Trucrypt.
While he's a criminal, if he really created Truecrypt and Bitcoin and also ran an international drug/gun running operation...I'm impressed. I think this dude's story could make a awesome book/movie some day...
Another is: Hunting LeRoux: The Inside Story of the DEA Takedown of a Criminal Genius and His Empire by Elaine Shannon.
Michael Mann has the rights to turn Hunting LeRoux into a film. He did Heat, Ali and Collateral (probably one of my favorite movies). Unfortunately, he also did Blackhat.
Thanks for the info!
2. 1Q2TWHE3GMdB6BZKafqwxXtWAWgFt5Jvm3 is Hal Finney's (Not Satoshi's) address.
3. Hal Finney passed away in 2014.
4. Some coins that belonged to that address were spent in 2017. [1]
It appears that someone else (definitely not Hal) has the private key to that address.
[1] https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/70ec308460a38f6de25f89c6ed...
All it means is multiple people have Hal's private key and somehow either Martin is one of them, or he was told to post this message.
So Paul le Roux, by the message?
> 1Q2TWHE3GMdB6BZKafqwxXtWAWgFt5Jvm3 is Hal Finney's (Not Satoshi's) address.
Where do you get this?
EDIT: I am proposing not that Paul LeRoux is Satoshi, but that he is in possession of Hal's key, and produced that signature as a troll.
All we have to go on right now is that someone knows the private key that corresponds to the 1Q2 address and used it sometime before the last hour to generate a hash of a message that says that Paul le Roux sent bitcoin to Hal Finney.
GMX, yandex, I’ve used them all without living in the countries they call home.
In the early 2000s I was probably the primary user of britneyspearsemail.com despite not caring about this celebrity at all.
The problem with absolute statements is that they always get it wrong.
You can just make one, right?
When is he getting out? I would sell my BTC before he can move all those coins.
It would be in the interest of the Bitcoin community to agree on a fork to start burning those large wallets that are know to belong to Satoshi ensuring future stability.
A cursory Google suggests that Satoshi's last communication was on April 26, 2011. Paul Le Roux was arrested on September 25th, 2012.
I see four possibilities:
* An absurdly elaborate conspiracy. (This is always a possibility.)
* Ghosts can do cryptography.
* ECDSA is cracked.
* Someone else has a copy Finney's key.
Occam's razor: spectral signatures!
I'll be more sober about it. A cryptographic hash is not proof that data was signed by a particular individual, unless you know for certain that individual is the only person who has the key. That is a hard standard to meet with a dead man when the key has demonstrably been used after his death. That transaction in 2017 means that someone besides Finney simply must know Finney's key. Anything signed by this key cannot be trusted to have come from Finney.
(1) who has Hal’s key
(2) where did Martin “find” this message to be able to decrypt it
There’s obviously some sort of agenda here involving multiple people, it’s just not clear at the moment what this particular agenda is.
someone who isnt paul le roux left their signature saying it was paul le roux, in case it ends up being read one day
1) Is there a place on a blockchain explorer somewhere where I could find the signature that Shkreli has posted? I tried looking up the wallet address and found the transaction from Jan 2009, but I don't see that signature anywhere.
2) The reason I ask the first question is that I believe that if the private key is compromised, then whoever has it could have generated a new signature corresponding to that wallet address and any arbitrary message, correct? So if Shkreli is in possession of the private key, he could just be banking on people not actually verifying that the signature he posted appears on the blockchain?
The signature in question was not posted to the Bitcoin network. It's almost exactly like signing an email with a PGP signature. The message/signature pair alone are proof that the message was signed by the key in question.
2) Yes. Anyone with the private key could sign a message. And for clarity, such things are not date-stamped in a secure way, so there's no way to know when it was signed.
For me, one major incongruity is that, it is possible to post such data to the Bitcoin network. If you need a permanent record of when a key signed something, that's honestly about the only thing blockchains are good for! Hal Finney understood this very well. So when he allegedly signed that message 8+ years ago for future generations to finally know the truth, why didn't he take advantage of an architecture, that he helped create, that enables making such claims in a (more) verifiable manner?
Certainly if the message included a hash of the last Bitcoin block that'd be a very strong date-stamp.
If it appears somewhere associated with that transaction, that’s pretty strong evidence that Shkreli is correct.
If it does not appear on chain at all, then Shkreli is wrong and his post proves nothing about the identity of Satoshi.
On the other hand, if it does appear somewhere in the blockchain, it’s a pretty big scoop.
Convenient for the author to discover the link to Le Roux. Then talk about it on podcasts while promoting his book, and have articles written about him.
All Shkreli does is promote himself to get eyes on whatever he's doing next. You can't ignore the incentives. It's difficult to prove who Satoshi is or is not. Craig Wright made a succesful career out of it.
Also, Shkreli has been critical of Bitcoin. Picking Le Roux, a criminal, as Satoshi helps to paint Bitcoin in a bad light.
1Q2TWHE3GMdB6BZKafqwxXtWAWgFt5Jvm3
And the signature:
HM7vpPSUbNsfDHRX6gv8xxWcVNHEc/3pOk0YrVehaGoUdbWizznfzOdELkLd1EjSXsW1oE5vHAkNAPzrAVzhuoI=
how do we know that the two are connected? (I'm guessing one of them hashes to the other.)
- 1Q2TWHE3GMdB6BZKafqwxXtWAWgFt5Jvm3 is the wallet address but can also be thought of as a public key. The owner of the wallet also has a private key corresponding to that public key.
- HM7vpPSUbNsfDHRX6gv8xx...[etc] is a cryptographic signature generated by signing an arbitrary message using a private key. To generate the signature, you need the plain text of the message, and a private key. To "verify" the signature (i.e., confirm that it was generated by the private key you expect), you only need the message and the public key (or the wallet address, in this case).
- Shkreli claims (and it has indeed been confirmed) that the signature he posted is valid for the message and the wallet address. In other words, someone in possession of the private key for the wallet in question, has signed the message given using that private key.
What I don't understand is where the signature came from -- I do see a Jan 2009 transaction involving that address on various blockchain explorers, but that particular signature is nowhere to be found. This could absolutely just be me not understanding how all of this works, but in order for this to be "really big news" I think you'd have to show proof that the signature given was posted with the transaction back in 2009. Otherwise, it just means that Hal Finney's wallet is compromised and someone has been signing random messages with it.
This.
HM7vpPSUbNsfDHRX6gv8xxWcVNHEc/3pOk0YrVehaGoUdbWizznfzOdELkLd1EjSXsW1oE5vHAkNAPzrAVzhuoI=
... anywhere on the blockchain:
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/search?search=HM7vpPSUbN...
Why not?
Update: I get it now. It doesn't have to have been on the blockchain. It's just a message that was signed with a private key, and...., using Hal Finney's public key (wallet address), the message, and the message signature, we can confirm that it was signed by Hal Finney's private key.
For all the horrendous shit that this Shkreli guy is known for, I always think of his Microsoft Excel skills first.
I have seen many people in BI being much better. He just knows his shortcuts and pivot tables, this is standard stuff.
And the mayor discipline, if anything, are customized macros which run cross device for a whole department, like opening one reports, filtering the data, creating a new file with a date stamp etc and sending reports and stats.
> Le Roux was arrested on 26 September 2012 for conspiracy to import narcotics into the United States, and agreed to cooperate with authorities in exchange for a lesser sentence and immunity to any crimes he might admit to later. He subsequently admitted to arranging or participating in seven murders, carried out as part of an extensive illegal business empire.
> Le Roux was sentenced to 25 years in prison in June 2020.
On 12 June 2020, Le Roux was sentenced to 25 years in prison. According to the presiding judge, Ronnie Abrams, "the scope and severity of Mr. Le Roux's criminal conduct is nothing short of breathtaking. I have before me a man who has engaged in conduct in keeping with the villain in a James Bond movie." However, she also added that the sentence reflected Le Roux's cooperation and the danger he faced.
Should I interpret this to mean that either bitcoin signatures can be attacked via hash collisions, or that they're not actually cryptographically secure, given enough time and computing resources? Either seems bad.
Use the Bitcoin-QT tab, and don't include the "---- BEGIN" and "---- END" comment lines. It checks out.
As in, how is it possible to decrypt an encrypted signature, and what does that mean for the security of cryptocurrency?
I used the Bitcoin-QT tab and filled out the three fields and got a green message at the top of the page that said "Message verified to be from 1Q2TWHE3GMdB6BZKafqwxXtWAWgFt5Jvm3"
Somebody knows his keys == nothing said to have been done by his key can be demonstrably proved to be him, even back to the beginning: how do we know when his private key was compromised?
> Craig Steven Wright (born October 1970)[1] is an Australian computer scientist and businessman. He has publicly claimed to be the main part of the team that created bitcoin, and the identity behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. These claims are regarded as false by much of the media and the cryptocurrency community.
It's impossible to brute-force "decrypt" this message, you need to know it before hand.
More technically: you need to generate a pre-image of the sha-256 hash.
> Paul Solotshi Calder Le Roux, backed with a Congolese diplomatic passport[4]
Interesting... Solotshi
This is a good read: https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-inte...
From https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/03/25/satosh...
"I received an email from an old cryptography community acquaintance of Finney's who has asked to remain anonymous. The email was titled "What are the odds?" It pointed out that Hal Finney had lived for almost a decade in Temple City, the same 36,000 person town where Newsweek found Dorian Nakamoto. Finney's address was only a few blocks away from the Nakamoto's family home."
1) The address that was used to send this message is not the first address that the genesis(the first "mined") block sent money to.
2) The "genesis"/Satoshi address has been used through the years a lot
3) The "Paul le Roux" address is far less active
4) this transaction was made 9 days after the first block was mined
My conclusion here is: Paul le Roux _MIGHT_ be Satoshi, but unlikely, more like very early adopter who either knew Finney, Satoshi or both. But neither can be said with 100% certainty.
> On December 13, 2022, Martin Shkreli alleged that a message connected to a January 12, 2009 transaction sent to the Bitcoin wallet belonging to Hal Finney, who received the first ever Bitcoin transfer, revealed Le Roux as being the sender.[44] This claim was debunked in short order by Bitcoin developers such as Peter Wuille[45], and Greg Maxwell[46]. These individuals, along with other less known pointed out the poster of the signed message was not even competent enough to spell Le Roux's name correctly. In addition, the signature does not appear in the public blockchain.
For those downplaying the claim based on the source, this is irrelevant. The signature and the public key are all that are needed. The author is irrelevant to verification, although he probably has an interesting story to tell about how he came about this message and signature.
The payment was locked to this address:
1Q2TWHE3GMdB6BZKafqwxXtWAWgFt5Jvm3
The first payment can be viewed here:
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/f4184fc596403b9d638783cf57...
You can see that this payment was included in block 170. The network produces ~144 blocks/day. So this transaction occurred almost at the launch of the network.
Hal Finney has claimed, without proof AFAIK, that this payment was made by Satoshi to him:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0
The implication is that a private key known by Finney signed the message claiming that Satoshi was Paul Le Roux. The latter was the subject of a piece speculating that he was Satsoshi:
https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-inte...
This doesn't necessarily mean that Finney was involved. You can browse the transaction history associated with the address here:
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1Q2TWHE3GMdB6BZKafqwx...
As you can see, a signed transaction was published as late as ~2018~ 2017. Finney died in 2014.
So there are a few possibilities for what's going on, including:
1. Finney is not dead.
2. Finney's private key was leaked to someone who signed the message.
3. secp256k1 cryptography (the kind used for Bitcoin signatures) is now broken.
4. Finney signed the message sometime before he died.
Given that few outside of Bitcoin know about Finney's legendary status, (3) seems unlikely because the attacker could have just signed with the private key for the genesis block.
This leaves (1) and (2), and (4). I'm doubtful about (1). Finney suffered from a horrible, fatal disease and it was obvious in the interviews he gave.
The most likely explanations are (2) and (4) IMO. The presence of the transactions signed after Finney's death is consistent with (2).
When a Bitcoin payment is spent, the private key often has little monetary value (but a lot of privacy value). So the cryptographic material encoding it might be treated in ways allowing it to be used by others.
Then again, it's possible that Finney signed the message, later died, and his private key was leaked.
However, you slice it, this is not clear cut. There are various kinds of evidence that would make it more so, but AFAICT, they have not yet surfaced.
Edit: Maybe Finney signed the 2017 transaction before he died and then it was later published. This kind of thing might be done for estate planning (although not a good idea). The transaction:
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/70ec308460a38f6de25f89c6ed...
spends three coins locked to the 1Q2 address and is dated 2017-09-05. However, one of the coins was only appeared in 2017. This raises the question of where that coin came from and whether it could have been minted before Finney's death.
From Gregory Maxwell (Bitcoin developer) on the OP comments:
> That signature type didn't exist until after Hal's was out of comission, so it was presumably created by someone who obtained hal's private keys after his death FWIW. You can see that address was actively sending transactions long after hal's death so unambiguously someone else has control of the key.
> The signature you posted isn't compatible with the Bitcoin blockchain, it's a new signature type we introduced specifically for message signing which was first released in Bitcoin 0.5.0 on November 1st 2011. But the specific format that it's in is an electrum style which wasn't even proposed until mid 2013 -- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=218471.0 I'm not sure when it was first implemented. By the time signmessage was created in late 2011 Hal was profoundly disabled and only able to use a computer with someone elses help, it wasn't widely used until years after. Other commenters have pointed out that this address was active in 2017 so that gives an obvious explanation: The message wasn't signed by Hal but whomever is using his keys now.
However, I do think Nick Szabo is the mysterious "Nicolas van Saberhagen" creator of Monero. Besides, Monero aligns more with his ideology. Bitcoin is supremely traceable and a handy tool for government. Monero, not so much.
Paul Le Roux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25177556 - Nov 2020 (2 comments)
New Evidence Suggests Satoshi Nakamoto Is Paul Le Roux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20115607 - June 2019 (146 comments)
The Mastermind: The Next Big Deal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11594606 - April 2016 (6 comments)
The Mastermind, Episode 7: The Next Big Deal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11591274 - April 2016 (12 comments)
Eyes Everywhere: Encryption programmer Paul Le Roux and his commando kill squad - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11541971 - April 2016 (58 comments)
He Got Greedy: How the U.S. Government Hunted Encryption Programmer Paul Le Roux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11496782 - April 2016 (115 comments)
The Strange Origins of TrueCrypt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11395220 - March 2016 (10 comments)
He Always Had a Dark Side - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11381625 - March 2016 (351 comments)
2. Hal died 2014, that address last sent btc in 2017, so someone else (estate?) had access to the private key. I wouldn't be surprised if the private key got leaked (maybe even sold), so it's entirely possible that someone else signed that message (and recently at that).
3. Not sure if there's evidence that Hal even knew who satoshi was
But yeah, crazy... I verified the message too, I just don't think it's conclusive evidence of who satoshi is/was
Interesting and important note from playerTwo in the comments.
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/12cbQLTFMXRnSzktFkuoG... See for yourself. We are not uncertain & our source is very reliable.
[1] https://chainbulletin.com/the-unmasking-satoshi-aftermath
The signatures were made long after Hal's death, and there is ample evidence which demonstrates this.
