Can you? it was more than 15 years ago.
Let me explain.
I see that you are now also arguing the IP leak is questionable and that others were running Bitcoin or could have been. Now combine this with the absurd idea that “retep” could have just been abandoned and it means nothing, even peter backwards, there are a million Peters whatever.
This is crazy you guys are basically accidentally admitting to technical somewhat knowledgable people like myself that retep is Satoshi because the excuses don’t pass the smell test. We know Peter was an actual wiz kid, it’s clear, Hal was emailing him in 2000, all using the email address that included … wait for it … “retep”, his IRC, his website, his freenode. It’s now obvious that he likely changed to his real name because the “cat was out of the bag” among the insiders. Hal would have immediately known Satoshi was Peter.
OMG guys get your act together fast. You need a plan B, no pun intended, because real investigators will tease it out, the top people doing that, have almost supernatural human intuition.
Regarding IP leak. Come on. Obviously it’s his IP. Was there a conference or vacation he was on maybe?
I’m just a dumb ass Bitcoiner from OG days and I can see though this charade so easily. I’m concerned.
Bitcoin is a gift to humanity from Satoshi (perhaps not retep!) and if the keys aren’t destroyed already and Satoshi is alive and has them then perhaps he should consider publicly burning the 1M coins or at least most of them. The nebulous case of supposedly the keys are destroyed is not a good situation tbh.
To answer your question. Yes I can definitely figure out where I was on January 10th, 2009. I know where I lived and worked then. I know if I took any vacations.
I’m hoping Peter Todd has a good alibi if he isn’t Satoshi. If he is … well time to confess and handle it in a way that doesn’t hurt the amazing invention.
EDIT: I wish I didn’t open this can of worms on HN. But I can’t delete it now …
Also, Satoshi almost certainly lived in the Benelux region when he released Bitcoin. See this paper for some actual evidence-based research: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.10257
I’ve been camp Szabo for a while. also have considered Sassaman however it’s not just his anti Bitcoin tweets, which could be misdirection, but people have reported he had genuine conversations with them with same sentiments.
I also initially thought Peter Todd theory was a joke. Wasn’t convinced by doc at all. However once you dig into his life from teen onward and see his current attempts to downplay himself and retell history in strange ways … I don’t know … my position has changed significantly, I think it’s looking more and more possible.
1) Why wouldn't he have used his Satoshi identity to discredit Craig Wright and save himself and fellow core developers a lot of pain and suffering?
2) Why wouldn't he have spent any of his large BTC stash?
3) Why is he fine being known as an early Bitcoin developer and adopter, but not fine being known as its creator?
4) How would he have a copy of the "20th Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux", given that it was only distributed to attendants and university libraries in the Benelux?
5) How would he have gotten his hands on the British version of a newspaper on 03/Jan/2009?
Due to 1), I highly doubt that Satoshi remained an active member of the Bitcoin community following his departure. The fact that he stayed silent during the "block wars" and the Craig Wright shitshow shows a complete indifference towards Bitcoin or more likely, that he was dead or incapacitated.
I'm not saying Sassaman is Satoshi, but simply that Sassaman is a much better candidate. This is a picture that Sassaman took of his office in 2007: https://www.flickr.com/photos/enochsmiles/488460964/. Notice anything interesting?
Try considering an alternative hypothesis: This is a new absurd allegation which has only just shown up. Petertodd only learned the documentary would run with this claim hours before it came out as a result of journalists who saw a screener asking him questions. I am not petertodd.
At some point surprising late I realized that the retep account on the forum was petertodd, so it sounded like a fine reason to me that this would be surprising. But it turns out that when you reason backwards from having information after the fact there were already a number of links. Okay so what?
Consider how your logic would work if Todd was maliciously trying to falsely convince people he was a reluctant satoshi-- by e.g. using ineffectual arguments that he wasn't? or failing to to provide "proof".
You would be totally taken by him. Good reasoning doesn't have that vulnerability.
It's not even a speculative attack, this is part of what Wright did to him that enabled him to defraud so many. The kind of reasoning you're using is so vulnerable that it's being accidentally exploited by someone who isn't even trying to do so.
> Regarding IP leak. Come on. Obviously it’s his IP. Was there a conference or vacation he was on maybe?
simply reiterating a position isn't an argument.
> Yes I can definitely figure out where I was on January 10th, 2009. I know where I lived and worked then. I know if I took any vacations.
Where's the proof? That's what you demanded above.
Most people have jobs or school and maybe kids in school. It means there are records and also we can often have our emails. It’s actually very likely in my opinion that Todd could easily figure out where he was that specific day and there would be corroborating evidence of that.
However it’s not limited to that. It could come from any of the Satoshi timestamps, being on an airplane (no internet back then) somewhere or in some situation that would make it impossible for him to be Satoshi.
You guys are a bit younger than my generation and so you still think 15 years is a long time. It’s not really.
I noticed you are also now questioning the Finney alibi and asking for DKIM email message. I mean yeah not a bad idea to check but interesting that you and petertodd seem to be actively questioning things, which honestly is also good. I mean these details are important.
For example I see you raise something about freenode and IPs with the IP leak. I’m planning to study what you said tomorrow. I don’t on the surface understand what you mean about that. It seems pretty clear the IP in the debug.log file is Satoshi’s node and IRC connection, likely a configuration mistake for the windows VM networking.
> I am not petertodd
I know that. However you and him I believe have a long history together.
> This is a new absurd allegation which has only just shown up.
Yes that’s exactly what I initially thought. But once people look closer I’m not so sure.
A few questions for you: - didn’t Hal actually know retep for a long time? and invite him to join the bluesky list?
- isn’t retep remarkably skilled for his age in 2009 and earlier? he worked professionally on a C++ large codebase at 17! and was clearly very gifted based on an early resume.
- petertodd/retep appears to be trying to misdirect. for instance claiming to he a poor C++ coder?
A good alibi will clear this up if he has it.
Yet you can't produce it for yourself, you don't see the issue here? I know I absolutely cannot prove anything about my whereabouts on most random days in 2009, I might be able to reason out where I was on some days but even that wouldn't result in transferable proof. Like I can say, 2009 was before I retired from Juniper and the tenth was a saturday-- so maybe I was home which wouldn't leave any evidence. Or maybe I was on a work trip. But if I was I wouldn't have any evidence of it, and even if I did it quite possibly would have been to California (though not socal, thankfully for my kidnapping risk).
Maybe some people can, if you could then I'd have to argue that just because you can it's no reason to assume everyone can, but it seems you can't prove where you were on that day.
So I guess you're Satoshi! Glad we settled it. :D
> It seems pretty clear the IP in the debug.log file is Satoshi’s node and IRC connection
Why do you believe these is clear?
> I know that. However you and him I believe have a long history together.
Sure, but that doesn't extend to knowing what usernames he used where back before I met him, except by chance.
> didn’t Hal actually know retep for a long time?
As far as I can tell the people on the bluesky list were sort of the expected fallout from the dying cypherpunks lists. But I communicated with Hal extensively in 2004-ish about RPOW, am I suddenly Satoshi?
My SO interacted with him due to the extropians list, I guess she's Satoshi now too?
> isn’t retep remarkably skilled for his age in 2009 and earlier?
Petertodd was 24 in 2009. Here is a wired article about a project of mine in 1997, when I was 18: https://archive.is/UT9NE
When I was 20 I helped crack the cryptography underlying CSS, addressing the risk of player key cancellation wack-a-mole. https://web.archive.org/web/20000226011228/http://www.emedia... (not specifically on the crack however)
It's always fun to talk about myself, but also I could give similar or better examples from other early Bitcoin developers, but I don't want to say anything that would drive this sort of bad logic to accusing them of being Satoshi... but an example:
Another early Bitcoin developer created a novel kind of arithmetic coder as a teenager, starting a line of development that eventually became JPEG-XL.
> for instance claiming to he a poor C++ coder?
He is, as am I. (I'm competent in _C_ however).
The standard for claiming proficiency when you are 18 and clueless is different than when you're 40 and competent. C++ has also evolved significantly over the time. While I can't speak for him, after working and Mozilla and with some of the other Bitcoin developers my idea of what qualifies as a good level of skill in C++ has changed radically.
Petertodd's about being poor re-C++ were specifically related to the Bitcoin codebase. And he like me would generally needs to get someone else to explain varrious fancy C++ features in it these days.
> he worked professionally on a C++ large codebase at 17!
I'm missing the context for this, his webpage from around that age says things like " A mass and springs physics sim I wrote in C++ I didn't manage to finish it though, the physics and math proved too difficult for me. :( The code is more messy then I'd like, I didn't have a good mental picture of what I was working on and my usual good commenting and clear style was hurt because of that." and "I was working on a nice large C++ TradeWars like game called Corporate Raiders. However I got bored of it and stopped work around June 2000. The last thing I did for it was make a compiler which I did manage to get working. Oh well, good learning experience. :) "
I don't think this supports what you're saying? But so what?
We may be suffering from a disconnect about the caliber of people that contributed to Bitcoin early on. Every one of them was weird, every one was exceptional. Bitcoin was the most interesting and radical new thing at least since P2P file trading.
But beyond that there are over three hundred million people in North America, so even if you're looking for one-in-a-million people there are hundreds of them, plenty to have a few show up in Bitcoin development, or even in a particularly interesting HN thread.
