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"The newfound Satoshi candidate is Paul Solotshi Calder Le Roux, a 46-year old former cartel boss, drug smuggler, arms dealer, informant to the US Drug Enforcem

by ak39 7y ago

"The newfound Satoshi candidate is Paul Solotshi Calder Le Roux, a 46-year old former cartel boss, drug smuggler, arms dealer, informant to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and genius programmer." How do you run a drug cartel, be responsible for gun running, play undercover informant for the DEA and still have time to program in C++ AFTER thinking deeply about the best architecture for crypto-currency through trial and error prototypes and then also have the presence of mind to author a near perfect academic quality paper on the seminal algos? Keyser Söze! The legend continues with new apocryphal evidence.

tribeofone 7y ago
Some people are just orders of magnitude smarter than the rest of us. Look at Kim.com, how was this guy able to run a series of companies, become a multimillionaire and be the #1 rated Call of Duty player in the world? I can hardly manage holding down a job, and coaching my kid's soccer team!
- tschwimmer 7y ago
  this is the first time I've seen Kim Dotcom's name rendered that way. As far as I can tell he usually spells it out.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  His companies weren't overly clever or technical and could be delegated. This is something that would have to fall on this guy's shoulders alone.
- DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
  I know Kim because I interviewed with his company "Data Protect" in Munich in person. He was a hero back then in infosec and kids like me were told by "the Internet elders" that if you want to make it in InfoSec you have to work for Dataprotect ... "because this is a company where the boss flies to work with his helicopter". I was young and easy to impress and this kind of talk was even echoed by fyodor @ insecure.org so it wasn't just idiots like myself who believed it. When I met him and his other German partner in September 2000 at his swanky office in Nymphenburgerstraße all my alarm bells rang because they had literally cartoon cut-outs of Kim and posters of Kim everywhere plastered around the office. Kim is a genius in managing his brand but he isn't a hacker, in fact his questions in the interview were so lame that I felt really disappointed. Later it turned out that he hasn't even done the credit card hacks that he used to say he did. Instead he made his money with insider trading and ponzi schemes during the dot-com bubble which was the reason why he did a runner and why German authorities wanted him for so long. Kim isn't a technology genius, he is just a really good con-man (oh btw his real name is "Kimble Schmitz", which sounds way less cool than Kim Dotcom).
  - wp381640 7y ago
    > Kim is a genius in managing his brand but he isn't a hacker He was the butt of all jokes on IRC hacker circles for years - the crazy eccentric guy who would threaten to hack and ping DoS everyone and have a meltdown. He is/was essentially a charlatan and snake oil salesman who never proved any actual skill That he has come so far in terms of being respected by anybody is bemusing
jiveturkey 7y ago
He didn't do all of these things in parallel. Rather, in serial.
betterunix2 7y ago
"a near perfect academic quality paper on the seminal algos" What paper are you referring to? The original Bitcoin whitepaper was poorly written, demonstrated limited background research (including a failure to cite the vast body of previous work on e-cash, which seems pretty obviously relevant), and probably would not have been accepted at even a third-tier conference. Really, people idolize Satoshi to an absurd degree. There is no reason to think Bitcoin is anything more than a hobby project that, for a combination of reasons, happened to become something big enough for non-tech folks to care about.

by ak39 7y ago

tribeofone 7y ago

Some people are just orders of magnitude smarter than the rest of us. Look at Kim.com, how was this guy able to run a series of companies, become a multimillionaire and be the #1 rated Call of Duty player in the world? I can hardly manage holding down a job, and coaching my kid's soccer team!

tschwimmer 7y ago
this is the first time I've seen Kim Dotcom's name rendered that way. As far as I can tell he usually spells it out.
BubRoss 7y ago
His companies weren't overly clever or technical and could be delegated. This is something that would have to fall on this guy's shoulders alone.
DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
I know Kim because I interviewed with his company "Data Protect" in Munich in person. He was a hero back then in infosec and kids like me were told by "the Internet elders" that if you want to make it in InfoSec you have to work for Dataprotect ... "because this is a company where the boss flies to work with his helicopter". I was young and easy to impress and this kind of talk was even echoed by fyodor @ insecure.org so it wasn't just idiots like myself who believed it. When I met him and his other German partner in September 2000 at his swanky office in Nymphenburgerstraße all my alarm bells rang because they had literally cartoon cut-outs of Kim and posters of Kim everywhere plastered around the office. Kim is a genius in managing his brand but he isn't a hacker, in fact his questions in the interview were so lame that I felt really disappointed. Later it turned out that he hasn't even done the credit card hacks that he used to say he did. Instead he made his money with insider trading and ponzi schemes during the dot-com bubble which was the reason why he did a runner and why German authorities wanted him for so long. Kim isn't a technology genius, he is just a really good con-man (oh btw his real name is "Kimble Schmitz", which sounds way less cool than Kim Dotcom).
- wp381640 7y ago
  > Kim is a genius in managing his brand but he isn't a hacker He was the butt of all jokes on IRC hacker circles for years - the crazy eccentric guy who would threaten to hack and ping DoS everyone and have a meltdown. He is/was essentially a charlatan and snake oil salesman who never proved any actual skill That he has come so far in terms of being respected by anybody is bemusing

jiveturkey 7y ago

He didn't do all of these things in parallel. Rather, in serial.

betterunix2 7y ago

"a near perfect academic quality paper on the seminal algos" What paper are you referring to? The original Bitcoin whitepaper was poorly written, demonstrated limited background research (including a failure to cite the vast body of previous work on e-cash, which seems pretty obviously relevant), and probably would not have been accepted at even a third-tier conference. Really, people idolize Satoshi to an absurd degree. There is no reason to think Bitcoin is anything more than a hobby project that, for a combination of reasons, happened to become something big enough for non-tech folks to care about.