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If it's true that privacy is dead, how come Satoshi is still unknown?
by lawn 7y ago
If it's true that privacy is dead, how come Satoshi is still unknown?
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y agoHe/they may be known to some. https://medium.com/cryptomuse/how-the-nsa-caught-satoshi-nakamoto-868affcef595 https://medium.com/cryptomuse/how-the-nsa-caught-satoshi-nak...
- wyxuan 7y agoStylometry only works too an extent with helping to identify what's what. I could just stylometry to show that this document was written by a professional screenwriter, but it writing style isn't unique enough to identify one person out of billions. Gwern has an excellent post about this.
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y agoIt depends on how much data you have. When you have everyone's emails you can rank everyone by closest match and narrowing parameters.
- varenc 7y agoAgree 100%. I'd believe that the DHS has identified Satoshi, but very very skeptical that they could use mass email collection to do it. Stylometry could work though if you limited your search to the set of people active on niche pre-Bitcoin lists/forums where Satoshi was likely to be active under a different name.
- zawerf 7y agoI remember a really impressive demo where someone found all the alt accounts of a HN user using stylometry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17944484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17944484 The account didn't have that many comments on it (maybe ~1000 karma) He also claims to have used the same algorithm for identifying company insiders for trades (see parent comment in that thread for context). I don't think he was bullshitting even though his tool isn't public because he has a different NLP project that works reasonably well (https://hnprofile.com/ https://hnprofile.com/ which can find users based on their interests).
- donaldknuth123 7y agoThe likelihood that they were able to use Stylometry to identify him is near Nil in my opinion. State of the art language models out of Google, Stanford, MIT etc. are barely able to accurately identify authors based on style. I doubt very much that even with "trillions of emails" the NSA was able to do this successfully.
- the8472 7y agoThe deathnote game is played iteratively. Satoshi ceased publishing before running out of bits.
- lawn 7y agoThis is true. I would very much like an article in this style examining Satoshi and how many bits he theoretically had left.
- mjevans 7y agoBaseless gut-guess: Any move clearly associated to Satoshi, including use of any of the Bitcoin value, would receive such unrelenting scrutiny that there are only two likely outcomes. A) Satoshi would be identified as a unique individual and any number of bad things would happen since they are such a high value target. B) Satoshi would be identified as (effectively?) a pseudonym for one or more nation states and whatever value they derived from creating Bitcoin would evaporate. Given we are currently in a superposition between states A and B, as well as a possible state C where the pseudonym Satoshi is either effectively dead (lost the credentials) or actually dead (end of life); one can infer that the value of Bitcoin continuing to exist as it is either outweighs any change of state or that such a change of state is no longer possible.
- gwern 7y agoI have written one but haven't posted it for obvious reasons. In Satoshi's case, it's vexed by the problem that it depends heavily on what datasets you have access to. For example, the California IP leak reduces Satoshi's anonymity to perhaps 2 or 3 bits... but only if you know the location/identity of everyone in California and also where that IP was assigned to at that time.
- gfosco 7y agoSatoshi hasn't posted in almost 9 years. If he was still active, it's much less likely he would still be unknown.
- jandrese 7y agoMaybe he was discovered and killed?
- jquery 7y agoIs he? He leaked a lot of writing samples. Unless he took great care to anonymize his writing style (and I'm not even convinced that it's possible to completely anonymize a writing style without scrambling the ideas themselves), it's possible (perhaps likely) he leaked enough bits for a state actor to track him (or her) down.
- Symmetry 7y agoI'd expect they'll be AIs in 2040 that'll be able to figure out who he is by writing samples, at least. And the rest of us here on Hacker News, too.
- donaldknuth123 7y agoYou are vastly overestimating how good Author identification methods are.
- quickthrower2 7y agoYou and I might not know who they (1..n) are, but maybe some sleuths have figured it out, and not leaked the fact that they have.