I beg to differ. If the real Satoshi actually wanted to identify himself, he'd have no trouble convincing us beyond a reasonable doubt even without his original keys.
This situation is not like trying to decide if you believe a person who says he bought the winning lottery ticket for cash but then lost it.
This situation is more like trying to decide if you believe a person who says he's a thoracic surgeon who's an expert in US Constitutional law, speaks Finnish, and can do somersaults while skiing. Ask him to explain in Finnish how to do laparoscopic Nissen fundoplication.
Just look at all the things that Satoshi has to answer correctly:
- expert level C++ programmer
- fluent English, excellent grammar
- deep knowledge of cryptography
- extensive knowledge of mathematics (maybe not a PhD, but he's no slouch)
- totally intimate with the original Bitcoin code
- familiar with all the history of Bitcoin (at least the history pre-2010)
- plausible explanations for all his actions
- etc.
We're talking about about a miniscule fraction of the world's population that could convincingly fake all of this knowledge and ability -- maybe a few hundred people at most on the entire Earth.
Suppose Bruce Schneier claimed to be Satoshi, then you could look at other things in Bruce background to rebuff it. (Example: Bruce was on a commercial airplane flying over the Atlantic when one of the Satoshi emails was sent.)
After this long? Probably not. I'm routinely surprised by the clever things I wrote five years ago.
Are you implying the Bitcoin client wasn't a botched up C with classes and the team is still trying to make it not crap?
And in any case, Nakamoto may not be a single person after all.
I suspect that this is not Satoshis fault, but that GMX security is really bad.
Inclusive a fake birthday.
Anecdotal evidence, but there are lots of security-related complaints in a popular (albeit non-technical) review site:
http://email.about.com/u/reviews/gmxmail/Gmx-Mail-User-Revie...
http://email.about.com/u/reviews/gmxmail/Gmx-Mail-User-Revie...
I wouldn't be surprised if satoshi's account turns out to have been hacked years ago, and the culprits have been using it to buy expensive electronics with stolen credit cards. After all, the original pastebin said that the account details where already circulating in the black market. Only recently somebody might have realized that this was no ordinary hacked account.
How did you know the account was hacked?
Did you have a secret question that could have been guessed?
Do you know what phishing is? Would you have ever fallen for it?
Is it possible your saved password was stolen by malware?
> How did you know the account was hacked?
Thunderbird, which I used almost exclusively at the time was unable to login, then I tried it via their website which didn't work.
I contacted support, and they told me that someone has changed the password and logged in since. They gave me the option to get my account back, by providing a scan of my ID or passport, which I did.
The hacker never contacted me. I do not know to this day what his or her goal was because the attacker didn't send or receive any emails with my account. I believe that the attacker got access to a large batch of accounts and he simply couldn't find a way to contact me via Internet. (I didn't use Facebook or other social services at the time)
> Did you have a secret question that could have been guessed?
I never used the secret question option on any service. Whenever I'm forced to enter something, I enter senseless garbage like "jkanshbuicbwnaiubdaibvjabfuzabfnbi" precisely because I think that secret questions are unsafe and dangerous.
> Do you know what phishing is? Would you have ever fallen for it?
Yes, but I have never shared the login data with anyone and when I logged in on other machines (which I did rarely) - I used a browser that I had on my USB stick for that (which was encrypted)
> Is it possible your saved password was stolen by malware?
I do not have any reason to believe that (I never had a malware problem that I know of), but obviously I could never rule that out. But on the other hand my GMX account wasn't really important. There were accounts that the attacker could have used to steal money from me (for example: PayPal), yet I have never lost access to any other account.
Like I said, I still can't rule out the possibility (nobody could), but I believe that I had a reasonable setup at the time. I used the GMX website (rarely) via a browser on my encrypted USB stick (which I still possess) and had a Thunderbird setup with POP3 at the time so I wouldn't have to login.
Hope this answers your questions.
Since we don't know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, there is no way to prove whether identity theft occurred to this person.
Whoever has control of certain accounts is, for all intents and purposes, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Someone who jumps up and down claiming that he is the real Satoshi who has been locked out from those accounts and subject to extortion could be the real one, or could be a liar.
There is no way to know whether the incident took place at all, or if it did take place, which of the two people are the real one.
It could be a complete hoax perpetrated by a single person, or two people, any of whom may or may not be Satoshi Nakamoto. The real Satoshi Nakamoto could also be a group of people to begin with. Or a very clever dog.
So my belief is there was some kind of incident here, but it is impossible to determine exactly what the scope of it was compared to the high likelihood of a lot of follow-up trolling.
Gregory Maxwell confirmed in irc he received multiple emails from satoshi's address. You can see that in #bitcoin-dev IRC logs online. [0]
As for the rest of it... That is a whole bunch of hearsay.
Edit: [0]: http://bitcoinstats.com/irc/bitcoin-dev/logs/2014/09/09
https://blockchain.info/address/19pta6x1hXzV9F5hHnhMARYbRjux...
He wouldn't be able to convince myself of his identity without one of his private keys, but there are thousands of people who would have latched on, and then once those people start confirming the story it only convinces more people and so on, in a snowball effect.
Nor his character assassination can affect Bitcoin much, while it could a few years ago. He was pretty smart staying anonymous, he realized he would be targeted and smeared.
It's speculated that he owns about a half a billion in Bitcoin at current market prices, how is that not wealthy "yet"?
So instead of respecting that wish we have people like this, also wishing to remain anonymous, attempting to hunt this man to shake him down for payment using that man's own creation!
That's closer to repugnance than to irony in my book.
what is that "hitman" threat ?
