7 ms·

I see two dimensions to this situation: is Wright actually Satoshi or does Wright know who the real Satoshi is, and does Satoshi want to be found. Condition A:

I see two dimensions to this situation: is Wright actually Satoshi or does Wright know who the real Satoshi is, and does Satoshi want to be found. Condition A: Wright is Satoshi and Satoshi wants to be found. In this condition, Wright's actions make no sense. Why publish an obviously fake proof? I suppose if Wright/Satoshi lost the original private keys this would make some sense, but is really unlikely. Condition B: Wright is Satoshi and Satoshi does not want to be found. Here things actually make perfect sense. Wright/Satoshi is trying to discredit himself by publishing fake proofs. This is a sort of hiding in the open thing that might work. Condition C: Wright is not Satoshi but knows who the real Satoshi is, and Satoshi wants to be found. In this condition, Wright is trying to prevent Satoshi from being found for some reason, and he is doing this by trying to muddle the waters and throw doubt. If the real Satoshi shows up and provides a proof, non-technical people can now say "well Wright provided proof, but that turned out to be fake. Do we trust that this is real?". Condition D: Wright is not Satoshi but knows who the real Satoshi is, and Satoshi does not want to be found. In this case Wright is trying to somehow capitalize on being considered the real Satoshi, or is trying to protect Satoshi from being found. Condition E: Wright is not Satoshi and does not know who the real Satoshi is, and Satoshi wants to be found. In this case Wright is trying to somehow capitalize on being considered the real Satoshi, or is trying to muddle the waters for the real Satoshi. Condition F: Wright is not Satoshi and does not know who the real Satoshi is, and Satoshi does not want to be found. In this case Wright is trying to somehow capitalize on being considered the real Satoshi. Thoughts?

at-fates-hands 11y ago
>>> I suppose if Wright/Satoshi lost the original private keys this would make some sense. Holy Jesus this makes my head hurt just thinking about this possibility.
joezydeco 11y ago
Condition E/F seem most likely, but the most confounding. Why would you want to publicly tell everyone you're worth $200MM in Bitcoin when you aren't? Aside from the bad actors that will try to wring the key out of you (politely or violently), you also have the Tax Office to deal with.
- reddytowns 11y ago
  The article explained that it may have helped him with getting VC money. Also, if he really is dodging taxes, the Tax Office would look like the bad guy going after what most people consider a brilliant scientist.
  - uxp 11y ago
    > the Tax Office would look like the bad guy going after what most people consider a brilliant scientist Plenty of famously smart and able people have gone to jail for dodging taxes before. In the US, Wesley Snipes spent 3 years in prison for failure to pay taxes between 1999 and 2004. In Australia, Paul Hogan (aka Crocodile Dundee) was named as a defendant in a large tax evasion scheme, which was eventually dropped, but he's since been named in another tax avoidance by the US in cooperation with Switzerland. I can't see, nor understand, how being a famous tax dodger would make someone less likely to be investigated than someone making minimum wage just failing to file taxes.
    - reddytowns 11y ago
      I wouldn't consider Wesley Snipes and Paul Hogan especially smart... Besides which, on assets, taxes is normally only collected when an item is sold. Since the bitcoin in possession by Satoshi were not touched, there should be no taxes owed. Also, when you're rich, or perceived to be rich, people are afraid of harming you, and often treat you nicely in hopes you will return the favor, and this includes the government. If you don't see how this is true, then you have some awfully rose tinted glasses on my friend.
      - cantrevealname 11y ago
        > Besides which, on assets, taxes is normally only collected when an item is sold. Plenty of countries have an asset tax that you need to pay annually[1]: Argentina, Spain, India, Norway, Switzerland, and Italy. Spain's wealth tax goes high as 3.75%! Granted, it doesn't appear that Craig Wright's home country of Australia has an asset tax on cash or currency holdings. Furthermore, if you think about it, pretty much every country in the world has a type of asset tax that you need to pay annually -- it's called property tax. You need to pay your annual property tax even if you never sell your house. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax
okket 11y ago
F, with Satoshi probably dead and his keys lost forever. Any sane or insane person would have used the keys by now.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  He (or they, didn't some folks think it might be a multi-person persona?) might have intentionally destroyed the keys, to avoid this temptation for whatever reason.
  - taneq 11y ago
    Well, no-one would surrender to the Dread Pirate Craig.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  My guess is that he just lost the keys in the usual hard-drive crash or forgot-the-password sense. This was a research project, remember. Did Satoshi have any reason to think the early coins he mined would become this valuable in real currency terms? Having lost the keys, he now has zero incentive to reveal himself. Consider how many people would never believe him if he came forward and said his keys were lost. It would suck to have everyone think you're a billionaire when you're not. The only rational option for Satoshi may be to cry himself to sleep every night and take his secret to his grave.
aakilfernandes 11y ago
Condition B does not make sense. The proof provided to Andresen/Matonis is not known to be fake, and they both vouch for his identity.
- joaorj 11y ago
  I agree that condition B should be discarded. It doesn't seem likely that Satoshi would want to trash Andersen in the process.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
It's even simpler. That he presented hearsay evidence instead of using obvious method plus forged the PGP evidence means he's a fraud. End of story.
- acqq 11y ago
  When he mentions PGP Nick refers to the four month old fraud by Wright: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3w027x/dr_craig_steven_wright_alleged_satoshi_by_wired/cxslii7 https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3w027x/dr_craig_st... Which was also "good enough" to appear "technical" and "valid" initially to some. So it's really time for the quote of one famous thinker: "I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee that says, 'Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me... You can't get fooled again!'" The shortest summary of the current Wright's hoax is by Kaminsky: "Yes, this is a scam. Not maybe. Not possibly. Wright is pretending he has Satoshi’s signature on Sartre’s writing. That would mean he has the private key, and is likely to be Satoshi. What he actually has is Satoshi’s signature on parts of the public Blockchain, which of course means he doesn’t need the private key and he doesn’t need to be Satoshi. He just needs to make you think Satoshi signed something else besides the Blockchain — like Sartre. He doesn’t publish Sartre. He publishes 14% of one document. He then shows you a hash that’s supposed to summarize the entire document. This is a lie. It’s a hash extracted from the Blockchain itself. Ryan Castellucci (my engineer at White Ops and master of Bitcoin Fu) put an extractor here. Of course the Blockchain is totally public and of course has signatures from Satoshi, so Wright being able to lift a signature from here isn’t surprising at all. He probably would have gotten away with it if the signature itself wasn’t googlable by Redditors. I think Gavin et al are victims of another scam, and Wright’s done classic misdirection by generating different scams for different audiences." https://dankaminsky.com/2016/05/02/validating-satoshi-or-not/ https://dankaminsky.com/2016/05/02/validating-satoshi-or-not...
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Good write-up. The Australian tax thing in the Reddit is another good example. And yes, those of us from Tennessee do not take kindly to folks trying to play us for a fool. ;)
rjeli 11y ago
Unless, of course, he predicted that we would conclude that someone with such poor evidence must be attempting to hide in plain sight, and is in fact a fraud. Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.
woodman 11y ago
Sounds to me like you're already familiar with ACH [0]. I was sure that there was a free online platform, but I'm not seeing one. But if there was, it would be easy to plug in what you've posted and enable a structured collaboration. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_competing_hypotheses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_competing_hypothes...
- IgorPartola 11y ago
  Oh man. Nope, not familiar with ACH. Thanks for the link.
  - rdl 11y ago
    It'd be fun to recreate http://competinghypotheses.org/ http://competinghypotheses.org/ in a more modern technology.
    - woodman 11y ago
      It would be fun to implement it to take advantage of the benefits that a restricted natural language would bring, like Attempto [0]. That would allow you to really automate the evaluation of hypotheses against new data points. You might be able to wedge a SAT solver in there as well. I've got it on the ever growing todo list. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempto_Controlled_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempto_Controlled_English
- Lxr 11y ago
  Interesting, what about prior probability and Occam's razor? The 'process' section mentions "less consistency implies a lower likelihood" but makes no mention of preferring simpler hypotheses which I find surprising. Edit: 'Bayesian analysis' is briefly mentioned further down the page.
  - woodman 11y ago
    ACH is just a very high level framework for shaking bias, the methods are implementation details. This is for humans, so you have to keep that in mind when you are choosing the analytic method - the most difficult that I'd press for is first order logic. Having a machine come along behind the human analysts and perform the more difficult forms of analysis is basically what Deep Green [0] was about. A more manual version of that would be the Lockwood Analytical Method for Prediction [1]. The funny thing about Deep Green was that developers had to address the fact that military commanders didn't like having a machine perform the planning process, so they had the algorithm include sub optimal options in the selection menu - allowing the human operator to feel good about choosing the obviously correct solution. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Green https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Green [1] http://lamp-method.org/ http://lamp-method.org/
webkike 11y ago
Who knew 21st century internet mysteries would be so compelling.
Benjammer 11y ago
For condition D, Is it possible that the people involved (Wright, etc...) would purposely concoct this situation in order to "smoke out" the real Satoshi? Maybe they believe if they cause enough of a stir, the real Satoshi would come forward to settle the issue?
fullshark 11y ago
This is fun to think about but the most likely explanation is simple fraud.
heartbreak 11y ago
Isn't this actually three dimensions?
- IgorPartola 11y ago
  No. If Weight is Satoshi, he knows who Satoshi is, so those are not orthogonal. Basically, the first dimension has four discrete states, while the second has two.
  - tanderson92 11y ago
    Thank you for posting this method of analysis (as well as the poster who pointed to ACH). I think the analytically-minded typically think along these lines, but it is very helpful to me to have a system to formalize around.
j1vms 11y ago
What about: Condition G: Wright is not Satoshi, does/does not know who the real Satoshi is, but is trying to motivate/encourage/force Satoshi (for reasons unknown) to come forward by Wright making the strongest claim (not at all bulletproof!) thus far to being Satoshi, and taking credit for Bitcoin.
- maxander 11y ago
  If Satoshi were watching and cared, all he'd (she'd) have to do is send an appropriately-signed text via Tor or whatever saying Craig is a liar. Coming forward in any substantial sense would be unnecessary. That Craig is proceeding with this big hoax regardless means either that A) he knows who Satoshi is, and knows that Satoshi is cooperating/dead/apathetic/etc, or B) he's looking for sufficiently short-term gain that there's low enough risk that Satoshi would intervene in time.
  - dllthomas 11y ago
    Watching, cared, and still had access to those keys.
    - pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
      and the price of bitcoin plummets as everyone now knows those $billions thought to be out of circulation are now in play.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - maxander 11y ago
      I'd trust the brilliant mind behind Bitcoin to hold onto some backups of keys worth half a billion dollars. Since you never know, such a a thing could come in handy someday.
      - dllthomas 11y ago
        There were many years where the keys guarded bitcoins worth approximately zero. And shit happens, even to geniuses sometimes.
dllthomas 11y ago
You left out cases where Wright is Satoshi and does not know who Satoshi is, but I suppose we are not living in a Philip K Dick story.
- hrnnnnnn 11y ago
  "How could a guy do that?" Arctor said. "Pose as a nark?" "What?" both Barris and Luckman said together. "Shit, I'm spaced," Arctor said, grinning. "'Pose as a nark' - wow." He shook his head, grimacing now. Staring at him, Luckman said, "POSE AS A NARK? POSE AS A NARK?"
- WorldMaker 11y ago
  Makes as weird a sense as any in this whole thing. Suppose you support the theory that Satoshi is actually a collective rather than individual. In that case, the Satoshi keys could have been formed in such a way that none of the individual members of the cabal have direct access to the actual keys (as they were formed by parts split amongst the cabal and require collective effort to make use of) and with compartmentalization of efforts none of the members of the cabal necessarily know the full extent of the cabal's membership, either...
baby 11y ago
One theory is that Satoshi is dead. Another is that Satoshi, or the group of people behind Satoshi, are finding all these Satoshi stories very funny. So they are encouraging them (and that might be why one of the bitcoin dev got fooled/is lying) Another theory is that Wright is Satoshi, Wright truly demoed a signature to BBC/bitcoin devs, but Wright wants to cast a doubt and make people forget that he is Satoshi so he published a fake signature.
c3d 11y ago
Wright is trying to force Satoshi to come out of the closet. No way I will fall for that. -- Sotashi Nomokata
cookiecaper 11y ago
I believe B is semi-reasonable considering that Wright asserts he's revealing himself due to an extortion/blackmail threat. This could be a way of getting a non-technical extortionist off his back while not taking credit in a way that gives him authority or respect in Bitcoin's technical community. This situation is plausible, if, for example, a government knows he is Satoshi (and government surveillance programs would probably make it easy to find the real Satoshi) and is trying to make him impact Bitcoin in a way that benefits them.

at-fates-hands 11y ago

>>> I suppose if Wright/Satoshi lost the original private keys this would make some sense. Holy Jesus this makes my head hurt just thinking about this possibility.

joezydeco 11y ago

Condition E/F seem most likely, but the most confounding. Why would you want to publicly tell everyone you're worth $200MM in Bitcoin when you aren't? Aside from the bad actors that will try to wring the key out of you (politely or violently), you also have the Tax Office to deal with.

reddytowns 11y ago
The article explained that it may have helped him with getting VC money. Also, if he really is dodging taxes, the Tax Office would look like the bad guy going after what most people consider a brilliant scientist.
- uxp 11y ago
  > the Tax Office would look like the bad guy going after what most people consider a brilliant scientist Plenty of famously smart and able people have gone to jail for dodging taxes before. In the US, Wesley Snipes spent 3 years in prison for failure to pay taxes between 1999 and 2004. In Australia, Paul Hogan (aka Crocodile Dundee) was named as a defendant in a large tax evasion scheme, which was eventually dropped, but he's since been named in another tax avoidance by the US in cooperation with Switzerland. I can't see, nor understand, how being a famous tax dodger would make someone less likely to be investigated than someone making minimum wage just failing to file taxes.
  - reddytowns 11y ago
    I wouldn't consider Wesley Snipes and Paul Hogan especially smart... Besides which, on assets, taxes is normally only collected when an item is sold. Since the bitcoin in possession by Satoshi were not touched, there should be no taxes owed. Also, when you're rich, or perceived to be rich, people are afraid of harming you, and often treat you nicely in hopes you will return the favor, and this includes the government. If you don't see how this is true, then you have some awfully rose tinted glasses on my friend.
    - cantrevealname 11y ago
      > Besides which, on assets, taxes is normally only collected when an item is sold. Plenty of countries have an asset tax that you need to pay annually[1]: Argentina, Spain, India, Norway, Switzerland, and Italy. Spain's wealth tax goes high as 3.75%! Granted, it doesn't appear that Craig Wright's home country of Australia has an asset tax on cash or currency holdings. Furthermore, if you think about it, pretty much every country in the world has a type of asset tax that you need to pay annually -- it's called property tax. You need to pay your annual property tax even if you never sell your house. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax

okket 11y ago

F, with Satoshi probably dead and his keys lost forever. Any sane or insane person would have used the keys by now.

MichaelGG 11y ago
He (or they, didn't some folks think it might be a multi-person persona?) might have intentionally destroyed the keys, to avoid this temptation for whatever reason.
- taneq 11y ago
  Well, no-one would surrender to the Dread Pirate Craig.
CamperBob2 11y ago
My guess is that he just lost the keys in the usual hard-drive crash or forgot-the-password sense. This was a research project, remember. Did Satoshi have any reason to think the early coins he mined would become this valuable in real currency terms? Having lost the keys, he now has zero incentive to reveal himself. Consider how many people would never believe him if he came forward and said his keys were lost. It would suck to have everyone think you're a billionaire when you're not. The only rational option for Satoshi may be to cry himself to sleep every night and take his secret to his grave.

aakilfernandes 11y ago

Condition B does not make sense. The proof provided to Andresen/Matonis is not known to be fake, and they both vouch for his identity.

joaorj 11y ago
I agree that condition B should be discarded. It doesn't seem likely that Satoshi would want to trash Andersen in the process.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

It's even simpler. That he presented hearsay evidence instead of using obvious method plus forged the PGP evidence means he's a fraud. End of story.

acqq 11y ago
When he mentions PGP Nick refers to the four month old fraud by Wright: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3w027x/dr_craig_steven_wright_alleged_satoshi_by_wired/cxslii7 https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3w027x/dr_craig_st... Which was also "good enough" to appear "technical" and "valid" initially to some. So it's really time for the quote of one famous thinker: "I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee that says, 'Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me... You can't get fooled again!'" The shortest summary of the current Wright's hoax is by Kaminsky: "Yes, this is a scam. Not maybe. Not possibly. Wright is pretending he has Satoshi’s signature on Sartre’s writing. That would mean he has the private key, and is likely to be Satoshi. What he actually has is Satoshi’s signature on parts of the public Blockchain, which of course means he doesn’t need the private key and he doesn’t need to be Satoshi. He just needs to make you think Satoshi signed something else besides the Blockchain — like Sartre. He doesn’t publish Sartre. He publishes 14% of one document. He then shows you a hash that’s supposed to summarize the entire document. This is a lie. It’s a hash extracted from the Blockchain itself. Ryan Castellucci (my engineer at White Ops and master of Bitcoin Fu) put an extractor here. Of course the Blockchain is totally public and of course has signatures from Satoshi, so Wright being able to lift a signature from here isn’t surprising at all. He probably would have gotten away with it if the signature itself wasn’t googlable by Redditors. I think Gavin et al are victims of another scam, and Wright’s done classic misdirection by generating different scams for different audiences." https://dankaminsky.com/2016/05/02/validating-satoshi-or-not/ https://dankaminsky.com/2016/05/02/validating-satoshi-or-not...
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Good write-up. The Australian tax thing in the Reddit is another good example. And yes, those of us from Tennessee do not take kindly to folks trying to play us for a fool. ;)

rjeli 11y ago

Unless, of course, he predicted that we would conclude that someone with such poor evidence must be attempting to hide in plain sight, and is in fact a fraud. Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

woodman 11y ago

Sounds to me like you're already familiar with ACH [0]. I was sure that there was a free online platform, but I'm not seeing one. But if there was, it would be easy to plug in what you've posted and enable a structured collaboration. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_competing_hypotheses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_competing_hypothes...

IgorPartola 11y ago
Oh man. Nope, not familiar with ACH. Thanks for the link.
- rdl 11y ago
  It'd be fun to recreate http://competinghypotheses.org/ http://competinghypotheses.org/ in a more modern technology.
  - woodman 11y ago
    It would be fun to implement it to take advantage of the benefits that a restricted natural language would bring, like Attempto [0]. That would allow you to really automate the evaluation of hypotheses against new data points. You might be able to wedge a SAT solver in there as well. I've got it on the ever growing todo list. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempto_Controlled_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempto_Controlled_English
Lxr 11y ago
Interesting, what about prior probability and Occam's razor? The 'process' section mentions "less consistency implies a lower likelihood" but makes no mention of preferring simpler hypotheses which I find surprising. Edit: 'Bayesian analysis' is briefly mentioned further down the page.
- woodman 11y ago
  ACH is just a very high level framework for shaking bias, the methods are implementation details. This is for humans, so you have to keep that in mind when you are choosing the analytic method - the most difficult that I'd press for is first order logic. Having a machine come along behind the human analysts and perform the more difficult forms of analysis is basically what Deep Green [0] was about. A more manual version of that would be the Lockwood Analytical Method for Prediction [1]. The funny thing about Deep Green was that developers had to address the fact that military commanders didn't like having a machine perform the planning process, so they had the algorithm include sub optimal options in the selection menu - allowing the human operator to feel good about choosing the obviously correct solution. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Green https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Green [1] http://lamp-method.org/ http://lamp-method.org/

webkike 11y ago

Who knew 21st century internet mysteries would be so compelling.

Benjammer 11y ago

For condition D, Is it possible that the people involved (Wright, etc...) would purposely concoct this situation in order to "smoke out" the real Satoshi? Maybe they believe if they cause enough of a stir, the real Satoshi would come forward to settle the issue?

fullshark 11y ago

This is fun to think about but the most likely explanation is simple fraud.

heartbreak 11y ago

Isn't this actually three dimensions?

IgorPartola 11y ago
No. If Weight is Satoshi, he knows who Satoshi is, so those are not orthogonal. Basically, the first dimension has four discrete states, while the second has two.
- tanderson92 11y ago
  Thank you for posting this method of analysis (as well as the poster who pointed to ACH). I think the analytically-minded typically think along these lines, but it is very helpful to me to have a system to formalize around.

j1vms 11y ago

What about: Condition G: Wright is not Satoshi, does/does not know who the real Satoshi is, but is trying to motivate/encourage/force Satoshi (for reasons unknown) to come forward by Wright making the strongest claim (not at all bulletproof!) thus far to being Satoshi, and taking credit for Bitcoin.

maxander 11y ago
If Satoshi were watching and cared, all he'd (she'd) have to do is send an appropriately-signed text via Tor or whatever saying Craig is a liar. Coming forward in any substantial sense would be unnecessary. That Craig is proceeding with this big hoax regardless means either that A) he knows who Satoshi is, and knows that Satoshi is cooperating/dead/apathetic/etc, or B) he's looking for sufficiently short-term gain that there's low enough risk that Satoshi would intervene in time.
- dllthomas 11y ago
  Watching, cared, and still had access to those keys.
  - pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
    and the price of bitcoin plummets as everyone now knows those $billions thought to be out of circulation are now in play.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - maxander 11y ago
    I'd trust the brilliant mind behind Bitcoin to hold onto some backups of keys worth half a billion dollars. Since you never know, such a a thing could come in handy someday.
    - dllthomas 11y ago
      There were many years where the keys guarded bitcoins worth approximately zero. And shit happens, even to geniuses sometimes.

dllthomas 11y ago

You left out cases where Wright is Satoshi and does not know who Satoshi is, but I suppose we are not living in a Philip K Dick story.

hrnnnnnn 11y ago
"How could a guy do that?" Arctor said. "Pose as a nark?" "What?" both Barris and Luckman said together. "Shit, I'm spaced," Arctor said, grinning. "'Pose as a nark' - wow." He shook his head, grimacing now. Staring at him, Luckman said, "POSE AS A NARK? POSE AS A NARK?"
WorldMaker 11y ago
Makes as weird a sense as any in this whole thing. Suppose you support the theory that Satoshi is actually a collective rather than individual. In that case, the Satoshi keys could have been formed in such a way that none of the individual members of the cabal have direct access to the actual keys (as they were formed by parts split amongst the cabal and require collective effort to make use of) and with compartmentalization of efforts none of the members of the cabal necessarily know the full extent of the cabal's membership, either...

baby 11y ago

One theory is that Satoshi is dead. Another is that Satoshi, or the group of people behind Satoshi, are finding all these Satoshi stories very funny. So they are encouraging them (and that might be why one of the bitcoin dev got fooled/is lying) Another theory is that Wright is Satoshi, Wright truly demoed a signature to BBC/bitcoin devs, but Wright wants to cast a doubt and make people forget that he is Satoshi so he published a fake signature.

c3d 11y ago

Wright is trying to force Satoshi to come out of the closet. No way I will fall for that. -- Sotashi Nomokata

cookiecaper 11y ago

I believe B is semi-reasonable considering that Wright asserts he's revealing himself due to an extortion/blackmail threat. This could be a way of getting a non-technical extortionist off his back while not taking credit in a way that gives him authority or respect in Bitcoin's technical community. This situation is plausible, if, for example, a government knows he is Satoshi (and government surveillance programs would probably make it easy to find the real Satoshi) and is trying to make him impact Bitcoin in a way that benefits them.