5 ms·

One of things I find fascinating is exactly why Satoshin has proven so hard to identify. In truth there's probably only about twenty people on Earth who have t

One of things I find fascinating is exactly why Satoshin has proven so hard to identify. In truth there's probably only about twenty people on Earth who have the requisite skills, knowledge and obsessive personality to pull off what they did, and you'd think somebody like that would be well known in the security community. It should be EASY. But the mystery endures.

k__ 11y ago
on the other hand such mad security skills can be used to hide oneself too.
aakilfernandes 11y ago
I think ideological conviction played a large part as well. You have to have a certain set of political beliefs to forsee interest in a deflationary currency without government backing.
silverbax88 11y ago
You are assuming that the best security/coding/encryption people in the world are all well-known. I would suggest that's likely not the case.
nhaehnle 11y ago
Surely there are thousands of people on Earth who had the required skill and knowledge at the time, probably much more. Hash cash and Merkle trees had been a thing for a while. On the other hand, a comparatively smaller number of people seeks out the public stage in a way that makes them well known. Furthermore, I think what's easy to miss in hindsight is that somebody with that knowledge would certainly be asking themselves how such a thing as a Bitcoin could ever have value. Certainly I know that if I'd been thinking about digital money at the time, I would have rejected the idea of Bitcoin as obviously infeasible because why would it ever have value? Whatever the required properties are for somebody to actually believe that something like Bitcoin could take off, they are in the political/social/economic domain and therefore unlikely to correlate much with being known in the security community. And to top it all off, the mining arms-race inherent in Bitcoin requires an extreme amount of computing power. On the other hand, crypto researchers are always looking for protocols that are efficient to implement. In that sense, there is even an anti-correlation between being likely to invent Bitcoin and being well known in the security community. You could easily imagine a Torvalds-Tanenbaum-style argument happening in the early days of Bitcoin between the inventor of Bitcoin and, say, DJB. The parallel is actually kind of eery ;)
badloginagain 11y ago
I speculate that it isn't, and/or has never been a single person. It's likely that its a group of people who use Satoshi as obfuscation and branding. People want to believe that an ubermensch cryptographic Einstein is among us, single-handedly dragging us into the future. It's high drama for a fairly dry industry. It's stands to reason that the more boring answer is correct- that Satoshi is a group of people from the beginning working on the blockchain and the ideology behind it. This allows the Satoshi Group to engage in public discussion about the 'chain without the starry-eyed bullshit of celebrity appeasement.
- greggarious 11y ago
  Comedy option (not seriously proposing this): Some gov't agency or group of non state actors looking to have an untracable source of income invents the bitcoin. This is why Satoshi never cashed in their coins - the idea was you invent the protocol, then make your money by being one of the early miners.
mikekchar 11y ago
Not quite sure what skills you are referring to. The skills of staying pseudonymous are not that difficult -- Use throw-away email address, connect via tor, use porn-mode and web interfaces for mail, identify yourself only with PGP signatures. These things will keep your identity away from anybody who isn't a government. As for Bitcoin itself, it is not nearly as complicated as people imagine. It certainly does not take anything like an expert in security to understand or implement. It is very clever, don't get me wrong, but it requires almost no understanding of cryptography. Any competent programmer could implement/devise it easily. Also, when I was curious about who Satoshi might be, I looked at the source code and the initial development forum. Based on that, I can pretty much say with confidence that the people who are trying to find out who he is, haven't done so :-P Not that it says who he is, but let's just say that it narrows the field pretty well... To be honest, the reason nobody knows who Satoshi is relates a lot more to the fact that nobody with the skills to find such a person is looking.
- manigandham 11y ago
  Who is it then? Spill the beans
samfisher83 11y ago
The math doesn't support you 20 people notion. Suppose you need an IQ of 160 to pull this off. That means there would be (100%-99.9911555410%)*6e9=500k people who could do. That is a lot of people.
greggarious 11y ago
Why does it have to be ONE person? One person who understand economics, applied crypto, networking, etc is hard to find but 2-3 people who could work together would make the candidate pool much, much larger.

k__ 11y ago

on the other hand such mad security skills can be used to hide oneself too.

aakilfernandes 11y ago

I think ideological conviction played a large part as well. You have to have a certain set of political beliefs to forsee interest in a deflationary currency without government backing.

silverbax88 11y ago

You are assuming that the best security/coding/encryption people in the world are all well-known. I would suggest that's likely not the case.

nhaehnle 11y ago

Surely there are thousands of people on Earth who had the required skill and knowledge at the time, probably much more. Hash cash and Merkle trees had been a thing for a while. On the other hand, a comparatively smaller number of people seeks out the public stage in a way that makes them well known. Furthermore, I think what's easy to miss in hindsight is that somebody with that knowledge would certainly be asking themselves how such a thing as a Bitcoin could ever have value. Certainly I know that if I'd been thinking about digital money at the time, I would have rejected the idea of Bitcoin as obviously infeasible because why would it ever have value? Whatever the required properties are for somebody to actually believe that something like Bitcoin could take off, they are in the political/social/economic domain and therefore unlikely to correlate much with being known in the security community. And to top it all off, the mining arms-race inherent in Bitcoin requires an extreme amount of computing power. On the other hand, crypto researchers are always looking for protocols that are efficient to implement. In that sense, there is even an anti-correlation between being likely to invent Bitcoin and being well known in the security community. You could easily imagine a Torvalds-Tanenbaum-style argument happening in the early days of Bitcoin between the inventor of Bitcoin and, say, DJB. The parallel is actually kind of eery ;)

badloginagain 11y ago

I speculate that it isn't, and/or has never been a single person. It's likely that its a group of people who use Satoshi as obfuscation and branding. People want to believe that an ubermensch cryptographic Einstein is among us, single-handedly dragging us into the future. It's high drama for a fairly dry industry. It's stands to reason that the more boring answer is correct- that Satoshi is a group of people from the beginning working on the blockchain and the ideology behind it. This allows the Satoshi Group to engage in public discussion about the 'chain without the starry-eyed bullshit of celebrity appeasement.

greggarious 11y ago
Comedy option (not seriously proposing this): Some gov't agency or group of non state actors looking to have an untracable source of income invents the bitcoin. This is why Satoshi never cashed in their coins - the idea was you invent the protocol, then make your money by being one of the early miners.

mikekchar 11y ago

Not quite sure what skills you are referring to. The skills of staying pseudonymous are not that difficult -- Use throw-away email address, connect via tor, use porn-mode and web interfaces for mail, identify yourself only with PGP signatures. These things will keep your identity away from anybody who isn't a government. As for Bitcoin itself, it is not nearly as complicated as people imagine. It certainly does not take anything like an expert in security to understand or implement. It is very clever, don't get me wrong, but it requires almost no understanding of cryptography. Any competent programmer could implement/devise it easily. Also, when I was curious about who Satoshi might be, I looked at the source code and the initial development forum. Based on that, I can pretty much say with confidence that the people who are trying to find out who he is, haven't done so :-P Not that it says who he is, but let's just say that it narrows the field pretty well... To be honest, the reason nobody knows who Satoshi is relates a lot more to the fact that nobody with the skills to find such a person is looking.

manigandham 11y ago
Who is it then? Spill the beans

samfisher83 11y ago

The math doesn't support you 20 people notion. Suppose you need an IQ of 160 to pull this off. That means there would be (100%-99.9911555410%)*6e9=500k people who could do. That is a lot of people.

greggarious 11y ago

Why does it have to be ONE person? One person who understand economics, applied crypto, networking, etc is hard to find but 2-3 people who could work together would make the candidate pool much, much larger.