* There was an account/wallet that was created a week after Bitcoin mining 'commenced' in 2009.
* SN was known to have been active in the early mining. However so was Hal Finney (inventor of RPOW). They refer to it as the founder's wallet, but I think it would be more appropriate to think of it as the wallet of an early miner.
* This early miner's accumulated into it over 77,600 BTCs (mostly from mining operations)
* During June 2011 (4/6/2011 - 28/6/2011) almost all of these bitcoins were moved into a second account
* On the transaction graph, on one path, 45% of these bitcoins are are transferred to another wallet over the course of late 2012 to new year 2013. On the other path, the remaining 55% is sent to another wallet over the course of early 2012 to the same day new year 2013.
* The 45% wallet has a little of its funds sent to the 55% wallet, and then has laid dormant since a month back. In the 45% wallet in March'13, a fifth of the wallet is sent to the 55% wallet. Again, from the 14/9/13 to 23/10/13, another 15% is sent to the 55% wallet.
* However, if we look at the 55% wallet, we can see a clear link to DPR's wallet. In March'13, the 55% wallet sends 6 transfers totalling 2.5% of its balance ($1000) to another wallet, which sends this to DPR's account (as we know from the FBI's discovery of the wallet).
The authors suggest that all of these accounts belonged to the same person, this same early miner they call the founder. This is a possible flaw in their argument, as there were multiple early miners, Hal Finney being one of them.
The transactions that divided this wallet into the 45% and 55% wallets could have also split the ownership.
Lastly, it's very important to understand that while it may not be publicly recorded in the blockchain, these accounts could've changed hands by manually exchanging the private keys, and thus could bring into question the basis of this speculation.
I'm not sure why they'd hypothesize that someone who apparently used Bitcoin only some time after it was widely made public, and then used it in a rather poor manner anonymity wise (the aggregation), was the founder— other than to make headlines like this one. :(
In any case, the address in question (https://blockchain.info/address/12higDjoCCNXSA95xZMWUdPvXNmk...) doesn't belong to Satoshi, it belongs to Dustin Trammell: http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewgpg.php?nick=I}ruid ... who was actually my first guess, and could have easily been discovered by anyone with 20 minutes and access to google. :(
I really can't understand why such a respected name is attached to work of such low quality.
Imagine our surprise when we realized that not only did the paper not reveal anything new (Satoshi mined many of the early coins -- Eureka!), but that in order to do their analysis, they scraped the entire blockchain explorer web site to access Bitcoin's transaction history, and then commented on how difficult it was to access that history.
So little was their research and understanding of how Bitcoin works, that they misunderstood its most fundamental property: the shared public ledger that sits on the desktop of anyone running the reference Bitcoin client.
Unfortunately, it looks like they're after publicity, and not new knowledge. A big disappointment.
So in theory it's "seized" ... if they can brute force / guess the password.
But in practice, with access to a computer, DPR could probably transfer the contents from the address to a new wallet.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1reuwq/vigorous_deb...
The real story here is how Adi Shamir can get caught up in such horrible published research, not once - but twice now[0]. They keep referring to blockchain.info as the blockchain, and have again scraped the website (referring to 'HTML output') to get their data - even after it was pointed out to them last time that the websites are just a representation of the blockchain.
You really have to question just how much the authors understand what they are writing about when they don't even understand the blockchain. This research isn't even worthy of a blog post, let alone being published as an academic paper by a noted cryptographer.
I'm not sure THIS is really the issue worth debating. Their first paper states: "On May 13th 2012 we downloaded the full public record of this system in one of its two major forms (1), which consisted of about 180,000 HTML files." "(1) We believe (but did not verify) that these two forms contain exactly the same information, and even if there are tiny differences they are likely to have only a negligible effect on our statistical results."
That, to me, is acknowledgement that they knowingly chose to scrape the website instead of parsing the 'real' blockchain. If I'm guessing, I'd say they did it this way because they had someone with the skills to do the scraping available to them (when all you've got is a hammer...).
> even after it was pointed out to them last time that the websites are just a representation of the blockchain.
Yes, 'just' a representation of the blockchain. Good enough for all their intents and purposes...
But, you know, we could just email them.
This paper is trying to make a connection between a few transactions sent from a very early Bitcoin address to some Silk Road addresses. It is possible that if this early address belongs to "Satoshi" that he was simply buying from Silk Road. Whatever he was doing, the connection is tenuous at best, which of course is the entire point of Bitcoin. DPR is facing a life sentence, so there is a good chance that if he has partners, the feds (and eventually the rest of the world) will find out about them as part of a plea deal.
>It could represent either large scale activity on Silk Road, or some form of investment or partnership, but this is pure speculation.
Does this mean I can sit down and write a similar-form paper consisting of wild speculation about Shamir being financially in bed with the Citi Foundation specifically to write hatchet-job pieces linking trivially-discoverably innocent people to black market drug bazaars?
No, of course not. I'm a nobody. But when Shamir does it, dozens of people spread it to thousands of others and now I}ruid is almost certainly wondering whether he's going to get a knock on his door.
How much more of a dick do you have to be before people in general just agree that it was a shitty thing to do with so little evidence?
It's not interesting, it's reputationally dishonest, and damaging.
I never know whether it's allowed to tell people they're dead...
He probably did truly feel like he was an extremely powerful druglord, even if in reality he was a nerd with a laptop.
This is what makes this whole situation funny in a horrible way.
I stopped reading there...
The rigorousness of the argument and research is comparable to that of the proofreading.
And their first paper was also full of typos.
Could these be rewards for transaction confirmations? (Probably not since it's not suggested in the paper, and they're the experts and I'm not).
Satoshi address - https://blockchain.info/address/12higDjoCCNXSA95xZMWUdPvXNmk...
Satoshi -> DPR transfer - https://blockchain.info/tx/cdcaaa0ff1446d41aae5d32c23da1ff33...
Bottom line, it's clear why the Bitcoin creators chose to be anonymous.
(the owner of the bitcoin address in question): " Dustin D. Trammell Lived in Austin, Texas " (and has since 2002, when Ross lived there) source: https://plus.google.com/116073269295024509653/about
Study debunked, nothing to see here, move along eh? Probably just a big coincidence and they never met or knew each other yet were working in parallel and Trammell's exact coins happened to end up in Ross's hands. The FBI will be all over this soon enough.
