Imo this "secret" is known by many people as I have seen so many censorship and misdirection campaigns throughout the years if people mention Adam being the one.
Him being Satoshi also makes bitcoin core seem more legitimate. He can guide his creation without being formally known as satoshi.
It is obvious. Especially if you have ever been a solo dev for an extended period of time (like adam was)
There is a ton more evidence but seems like no one really wants to dig into Adam.
Adam literally stopped updating hash cash and a year later Bitcoin is released... check his website on archive.org.
Its ok. I like that there is still conversation as to who it is. It gives protection to him since there likely wont be anything concrete (if hopefully he was slick enough)
(1) It's not Peter Todd. Anyone who knows Peter Todd and/or was around in the early days, can clearly tell Satoshi and Peter are not the same person.
(2) No good comes from speculation over the identity of Satoshi. When someone living is named, their life becomes absolute hell and the security risk imposed on them is very real. When someone dead is proposed, that hellish experience is passed to their family and heirs.
(3) It's not Peter Todd.
Any bitcoin oldheads know it's not Peter Todd based on tons of behavioral, timestamped, and logistical evidence. The actual leading candidate is Len Sassaman if you look objectively at the evidence.
Am I misunderstanding something, or do you want to edit that?
I just can't imagine the real Satoshi saying something this stupid.
If you freeze-frame the film at the right point and actually read the full conversation, this is obvious. I don't have it handy. But some people posted screenshots on Twitter (which HBO may have taken down via DMCA... they were getting video clips taken down too).
These days some stuff actually uses proof-of-sacrifice in production. The best example I think being Joinmarket: https://github.com/JoinMarket-Org/joinmarket-clientserver/bl...
>In a statement to CNN, Todd denied that the post was supposed to be written by Satoshi, calling it “a coincidence.”
>“I was simply pointing out a minor correction to what Satoshi wrote,” Todd told CNN in a statement. “Note that the bitcointalk forum has the ability to edit posts, so it doesn’t even make that much sense that Satoshi would follow up with another message rather than just editing the original to correct the mistake.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/08/investing/satoshi-nakamot...
Indeed.
Cullen should know better: his previous project was a documentary on the QAnon conspiracies, which have managed to get people hurt due to crazies looking for these conspiracies. Cullen's evidence is hopelessly coincidence based... exactly the kind of shoddy evidence that fuels conspiracies like QAnon.
Personally I suspect he made the accusation against me simply to create media interest. In particular, by making an accusation against someone who wasn't a leading contender, myself. I haven't seen the film yet myself. But friends of mine have, and said that other than the Satoshi nonsense it was a reasonable documentary about Bitcoin. Problem is, it's hard to build interest in that.
Anyway, hopefully this just blows over. But we'll see. I already took some precautions re: security just in case...
Shouldn't you be able to sue HBO for forcing you to take unnecessary expenses?
Stop looking to them for credible analysis.
As Bitcoin gains market value the issue of Satoshi’s coins is becoming more and more serious.
It’s not wildly understood yet but Bitcoin will go fully dark in the future, how to do this, especially with help of L2 systems, is well known in the deep technical circles.
I think all libertarian capitalists believe money should be private. However Satoshi will eventually be the wealthiest human to ever exist and if that wealth is 100% dark it raises some tricky issues.
Not a good reason. The person who developed bitcoin is responsible for billions (maybe trillions) of dollars of fraud and crime. They are responsible for a ludicrous amount of waste and carbon output. They should be held to account by the public.
The key piece of evidence seems to be this comment from Peter Todd: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2181.msg28739#msg287...
It stands out to the producers because: 1) Peter makes it just after joining the form, so he is unlikely to have detailed knowledge of bitcoin. 2) He seems to be finishing Satoshi's thought, as though he returned to an earlier post forgetting which account he was signed into. 3) The post happens just before Satoshi disappears and Peter leaves for a few years.
The doc also features many scenes with Peter and Adam Back where their eyes kind of shift around and they laugh awkwardly when asked about certain things. Since the doc it seems that Peter has taken to twitter to say he was mislead about the purpose of the interviews.
I've always kind of thought that Satoshi was probably one person who built it all in isolation, and I never played much attention to theories that Satoshi was actually multiple people. After watching the doc it does seem like Adam and Peter know a good deal more than they are letting on, even if it wasn't them specifically, it seems likely that they have some idea who it was.
The fact that the inputs, outputs, and fee of a transaction must add up isn't exactly "detailed knowledge" :) I don't think it took me all that long to figure that out when I first tried understanding how Bitcoin worked.
And frankly, the core of Bitcoin really isn't all that complex! You can have a very good understanding of all the parts after just a few days carefully studying it. Which is exactly what I did: I sat down with the Bitcoin Core codebase and figured out what all the code did. Especially at the time, it really wasn't that big of a codebase.
> After watching the doc it does seem like Adam and Peter know a good deal more than they are letting on, even if it wasn't them specifically, it seems likely that they have some idea who it was.
I can't speak for Adam. But I have no idea who Satoshi is. If anything, I think it could be literally hundreds or even thousands of potential people. Bitcoin is something so simple that you didn't need to be a super-genius to come up with it. You just needed to understand some relatively high-level, basic, cryptography and have a brilliant flash of inspiration. Satoshi was a very competent C++ programmer (it's a myth that his code was bad). But there's lots and lots of very competent C++ programmers out there.
It seems unlikely to me that it could be thousands of people, given the correspondence had with various people it seems likely to me that a few people have information that could lead in the correct direction. But I guess we'll never know.
They don't have to! (re: txid 5d80a29be1609db91658b401f85921a86ab4755969729b65257651bb9fd2c10d)
Can you prove what you were doing on 2009-01-10?
I find it interesting you have a curious prior interest in that IP leak and your spin on it.
If you are Satoshi then you should think carefully if you have any other OPSEC slip ups and then if you think there might be more … It’s better to confess and handle the issue of your coins.
Your safety should be priority number one.
It’s not bad for Bitcoin or you if it is you. Whomever Satoshi is they gifted the world with something incredible and it’s bigger than them now. The problem is the coins and the uncertainty around the intentions of them.
Destroying the evidence, I’m guessing smashed and/or magnets on drives, that one is Satoshi probably seemed like the best idea at the time. Perhaps burning the coins wasn’t given enough consideration. It means there is a dilemma. What in the game is the best move next?
Investigators who work in the real world have intuitive skills and will find the connections if they exist. Those of us who live in computers and data and math can sometimes underestimate the human pattern finding capabilities. They might be able to see and prove clearly who is Satoshi even if Satoshi thinks well all the data is gone, wiped, they “can’t” prove it, but that doesn’t mean that’s how the rest of society sees “proof” they might be able to “tell”.
Can you? it was more than 15 years ago.
His wallet would be worth around $70 billion dollars today and he hasn't touched it in over a decade.
Either he is A) dead, B) lost the wallet and wishes he were dead, or C) has achieved such spiritual enlightenment that has no interest in the personal or societal impact that $70 billion dollars could have.
He is not coming back folks, and even if we figure out who he was, that $70 billion is gone.
At least it's a good tax write-off. (Well… $3000 a year for life in the US iirc.)
Do you think the world really has $70B in cash to blow on bitcoin right now? Big players mine the stuff, they don't buy it.
To my reading, the bitcointalk reply only makes sense as a snarky comment (ie Todd isn't Satoshi). and the fact it was 1.5 hours after the Satoshi post also suggests it wasn't the same person making a quick correction.
In my mind all anyone has to do to prove they aren’t Satoshi is prove what they were doing on 2009-01-10 and had no possibility of using an IP from somewhere around Van Nuys California.
https://whoissatoshi.wordpress.com/2016/02/20/satoshi-in-cal...
(49 points, 5 days ago, 48 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732985
(52 points, 4 days ago, 62 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41749352
The key piece of evidence seems to be this comment from Peter Todd: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2181.msg28739#msg287...
It stands out to the producers because: 1) Peter makes it just after joining the form, so he is unlikely to have detailed knowledge of bitcoin. 2) He seems to be finishing Satoshi's thought, as though he returned to an earlier post forgetting which account he was signed into. 3) The post happens just before Satoshi disappears and Peter leaves for a few years.
The doc also features many scenes with Peter and Adam Back where their eyes kind of shift around and they laugh awkwardly when asked about certain things. Since the doc it seems that Peter has taken to twitter to say he was mislead about the purpose of the interviews.
I've always kind of thought that Satoshi was probably one person who built it all in isolation, and I never played much attention to theories that Satoshi was actually multiple people. After watching the doc it does seem like Adam and Peter know a good deal more than they are letting on, even if they aren't behind it all, it seems likely that they have some idea who it was.
Why is this my first post on bitcoin-dev: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2011... ?
I'm sure you've heard the adage, "It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it."
But online when you're silent you're not thought of as a fool-- you just don't even exist at all. Many of us whose contribution to world is primarily our knowledge and insight often prefer to self-educate to an advanced level on a subject before commenting on it at all.
My first bitcoin-dev post wasn't actually my first public comments on Bitcoin, but I'd read the entire bitcoin code base before ever saying anything about it...
It's not surprising to see Bitcoin developer people emerge from nowhere somewhat well informed, even back then (though to be fair fairly few people really understood txn internals).
I've known Peter and Adam for a very long time. Both have resting smirkface. Petertodd grins like he ate the canary any time he says something even the slightest bit clever. Adam too, now that I say it, though the clever threshold is a bit higher. That combined with talented editing can probably make either of them look guilty of whatever you want, or at least anything that they enjoy talking about.
I'm definitely still team Dave.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Kleiman
Last time I talked to Peter was in 2019 and he was making fun of me for spending Bitcoins continuously since 2011, and said Bitcoins are supposed to be hoarded like gold or something, not used as money. Definitely not the attitude of someone who supposedly burned the million Satoshi coins (which was a claim from the movie, I guess some leaked IRC transcript or something). I wouldn't be surprised if the leaked transcript came from Peter himself. He seems to get off on weird deception plays like that.
It doesn't say anything that support's the documentary's thesis, Petertood is talking about provably destroying coins in order to mint identities and similar. This couldn't apply to the coins alleged by some to belong to Satoshi, as they haven't moved.
Almost all of Bitcoin's history is completely public, but sadly the wealth of information seems to just enable conspiracy theorists to allege that there is more hidden.
> I'm definitely still team Dave.
I'm so tired of dealing with the victims of Wright's nonsense. It's gross. Posts like this are like a IV drug user showing off their radical track marks.
Who is more likely to build ontop of some obscure code base called "Hash Cash"? Some random people that trolled the same forums or the original creator of it?
Imo this "secret" is known by many people as I have seen so many censorship and misdirection campaigns throughout the years if people mention Adam being the one.
Him being Satoshi also makes bitcoin core seem more legitimate. He can guide his creation without being formally known as satoshi.
It is obvious. Especially if you have ever been a solo dev for an extended period of time (like adam was)
There is a ton more evidence but seems like no one really wants to dig into Adam.
Adam literally stopped updating hash cash and a year later Bitcoin is released... check his website on archive.org.
Its ok. I like that there is still conversation as to who it is. It gives protection to him since there likely wont be anything concrete (if hopefully he was slick enough)
My guess is that it's someone who was not particularly well-known prior to Bitcoin.
Then there's Google editorializing a headline at the top of search hits:
> Top stories
> Bitcoin creator's identity revealed in new HBO documentary
Yet none of the headlines they show makes that claim:
> POLITICO.eu - Bitcoin creator is Peter Todd, HBO film says
> Bloomberg - HBO Documentary Suggests Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Is Peter Todd
> The New York Times - A New Bitcoin Documentary Reopens the Search for Satoshi Nakamoto
> The Crypto Times - Peter Todd Denies He is Satoshi Nakamoto as claimed by HBO...
> The New Yorker - Has Bitcoin's Elusive Creator Finally Been Unmasked?
In general (not just in this case), there should also soon be some huge lawsuits for robo-slander, robo-libel, robo-defamation, robo-reckless-endangerment, etc.
Government is getting a lot more tech-savvy, and "everything's legal, if you claim an AI/algorithm/computer/dog did it" isn't flying anymore.
https://lite.cnn.com/2024/10/08/investing/satoshi-nakamoto-i...
CO2 emissions, fraud, attacking democracy is on the negative side. What’s on the positive? Why is it still legal?
It feels like Crypto at the systemic level is an open vulnerability not an asset. It’d be nice to have this vulnerability to get fixed.
Mind you, I don't think in its present form it is worth it (POW is intrinsically power-intensive; a lot of things about the banking system that seem like bugs are actually features; etc).
But I think A) value stored in tokens, and B) decentralized ledgers and nonrepudiation are things that are may want to have as core financial services in the future.
See also: Why I'm less than infinitely hostile to crypto
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-im-less-than-infinitely...
>CNN sat down with Hoback, prior to Todd’s denial, to discuss why the director is so confident in his theory, whether he’s worried about being sued, and that big dramatic confrontation at the end of the film.
Given the info we have, what are the chances that state actors, such as intelligence agencies, are aware beyond doubt of Satoshi Nakamoto's true identity?
The Son: Peter Todd
The Holy Ghost: Greg Maxwell"
https://www.wired.com/story/crypto-home-invasion-crime-ring/
But for someone involuntarily accused that's another matter. A security detail is eye wateringly expensive -- particularly one comprehensive enough to stop kidnappers in general.
They don’t seem to occur in a speculative fashion where “maybe this person can pay…”.
Anyone who knows, knows the coins haven’t been touched in a suspiciously long time, and moving Bitcoin is not always anonymous…
Then there are the other crypto people who have met grisly ends: Bob Lee and Li Chiming, as well as the suspicious deaths of John Forsyth, Tiantian Kullander, Vyacheslav Taran, and Park Mo. Not candidates for Satoshi, but it goes to show that "outing" potential Satoshis is not a safe thing to do.
That and various other evidence (coding style, british-english spelling) has suggested to me for a long time that it's an older gentleman from the UK, likely with an academic background in economics or related distributed systems. I don't know either way, but it seems borderline libel to suggest without much more substantial evidence that it's Peter Todd.
That said, Satoshi was clearly extremely diligent in concealing their identity, and so they may well have purposefully decided to use a headline that they wouldn't have had ordinary access too-- when someone is trying to conceal themselves it creates an environment which is hostile to logical reasoning. Any point which could point one direction might instead point the opposite or in a random direction.
Leave it at that.
1. Satoshi emailed me at the same time Hal was taking part in a marathon. Yes, technically emails can be delayed, but ... why? There was no urgency in those discussions.
2. Hal preferred to write C and was still writing C up until the moment he sadly passed away. Satoshi wrote in modern(ish) C++. Note that the same problem applies for Len Sassaman and basically everyone who has been fingered as a possible Satoshi. The combination of C++, Win32 and cryptography is not very common in the cypherpunk space.
3. Hal was a professional cryptographer who worked on an encrypted messaging product (PGP). Satoshi had some fairly basic misunderstandings about cryptography, like believing that you can't use elliptic curve keys to encrypt messages, and referenced having to do research to understand the cryptography he needed. Why would Hal pretend to be a newbie at cryptography, up to and including not having features Satoshi said he wanted?
4. Hal did try to create digital cash already, but tried to build it on trusted computing hardware. He had a long term interest in that approach, as did I, and his last project before his death was one I suggested related to this tech. In fact there are emails between me and Hal in list archives pre-Bitcoin where we swap notes on Intel LaGrande. If Hal had been Satoshi it seems likely that Satoshi would have at least commented on the ways TC could be used at some point, but Satoshi never showed any awareness the tech exists.
6. If you're trying to be anonymous, why would you immediately and pointlessly reveal your identity by messaging yourself?
7. He denied that he was Satoshi.
As a result of timestamping emails with their DKIM into Bitcoin, now even rotated, broken, or released keys can be used to partially authenticate e.g. Google messages. You can see this for example in this project here:
https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim
And in particular, here:
https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim/pull/5
So you see, even historical DKIM signatures can act as strong authentication.
That's OK though - you're the only one insinuating that I faked the emails, nobody else ever has. You won't come out and say it directly of course, because if you had to spell out this theory explicitly it would sound obviously idiotic.
This paper makes a pretty good case that the late Len Sassaman was Satoshi. Its a pretty thorough examination regardless if you think it was Len or not and doesn't come to a definitive conclusion.
Plus, Satoshi's email was hacked in 2014 (or earlier), and it was likely hacked multiple times[0].
He was interviewed when he could no longer speak. He was asked if he was Satoshi. He just smiled.
It's just the kind of joke Hal would play.
To the extent that someone could argue that there is some public interest angle, I think that's only arguable in the case of certainty. Speculation is a dime a dozen. Even if there is a public interest angle in identifying Satoshi, I don't think that extends to idle speculation.
Hal was an amazing guy and I feel privileged for the bit of interaction I had with him, refraining from a fun game of public speculation is a small cost. I'm sure if he's cryonically revived in the far future he'll appreciate the consideration. :)
In general speculation like this risks creating a lot of harm for the targets, especially since brutal cryptocurrency related kidnapping and torture appears to be on the rise.
It's unclear what bitcoin Satoshi might have had access too, but people who aren't Satoshi certainly don't have access to it... and the cost of security against criminal gangs hoping for a billion dollar windfall are unreasonable large even for a wealthy person and are unimaginable for someone of more ordinary means.
It's also nice to know another of Hal's friends.
Stylometry was known at the time, Hal might have changed his. People have been using computer stylometry for years to rule in or out pretenders to be Shakespeare.
Emails can be sent with a timer.
That person was also familiar with Hal's PoW implementation (where Hal mentions it was an implementation of this guy's concept) 3 years before the Bitcoin paper, but attempted to obfuscate that fact.
