9 ms·

“Find Satoshi” PerplexCity puzzle solved

248 points by teamonkey 6y ago

fireattack 6y ago
It's not clear to me how they find the crucial picture of him (the one he holds the beer). The article says "user th0may used a reverse image search and discovered a photograph of a man holding a beer", but /u/th0may's thread on Reddit doesn't say anything like that [1]. If anything, /u/th0may himself said in thread, "maybe you already found this image", which implies that the image itself is already known (and likely NOT discovered by "reverse image search", but by other ways). /u/th0may then reverse-searched the image to find the website, which lead to the answer. Anyway, I'm still curious how they find this beer image, since this looks to me is the most important step. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_someone_similar_looking_on_japanese_webpage/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_s...
- nasir 6y ago
  One of the comments says: I heard about the story a year ago, but forgot about it. Then I remembered and told my family about on Christmas. So I wanted to check out if this is still unsolved and found this reddit. I’m currently researching about AI and found a few image backwards search engines way more powerful then google image search. It turned out that I found the image of him holding the beer, when I fed in the card. Just wanted to play around, but it looks really promising now. ;D https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_someone_similar_looking_on_japanese_webpage/gh8d14x?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_s...
  - fireattack 6y ago
    Thanks, I didn't read that deep into the comments. So he used some face-recognizing engines that just indexes random images on the Internet? I wonder what it is, since he didn't name (I assume it's a public tool?). I knew Baidu has one, for what it's worth [1]. [1] https://ai.baidu.com/tech/face/search https://ai.baidu.com/tech/face/search (in Chinese)
    - draugadrotten 6y ago
      It seems so. He writes "They use facial recognition to find faces instead of google image search which is just comparing the similarities of the different pixels." https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_someone_similar_looking_on_japanese_webpage/ghhnyqq?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_s...
    - oefrha 6y ago
      I took a look at [1], seems to require bringing your own training set, and hosting one with a huge set of random Internet images would presumably be prohibitively expensive.
      - fireattack 6y ago
        Maybe I linked the wrong page, but I have used its API before, it does have a built-in database even with all the names of celebrities marked already. It used to have a free trial on web too, but it's gone now.
  - simias 6y ago
    I don't know much about the state of the art in image recognition but does it really seem plausible? The picture of him holding the beer is not super high quality, he has a different expression, a slightly different haircut and he appears quite a bit older. You can't even see his distinctive freckles. The idea that you could just scan random images of people online and find him that way is wild to me, tuning the network not to miss it but also not to report millions of false positives seems like a very high bar. It's pretty creepy if we're already at the point where any random people can trace you online using apparently unrelated low quality photos.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      We don't know how much effort it took. The searcher could very well have gone through thousands of images, following up on hundreds, before zeroing in on this one. Or not-- I'd certainly like to know more about that part of the process.
    - fsckboy 6y ago
      i know little about the state of the art in image recognition, but it strikes me that this could be better described as facial recognition, and afaik, that does a pretty good job identifying faces
    - hapidjus 6y ago
      No idea is it is state of the art but I just tested PimEyes(the reverse image search service mentioned) with an old photo of me, it returned a bunch of photos of random people but also two of me within the first 30-40 results. One is older, 7-8 years maybe, and one is more recent, 2 years perhaps. I have different facial expressions and the pose/angle is different than the one I submitted.
- _puk 6y ago
  From a comment further down that thread: "heard about the story a year ago, but forgot about it. Then I remembered and told my family about on Christmas. So I wanted to check out if this is still unsolved and found this reddit. I’m currently researching about AI and found a few image backwards search engines way more powerful then google image search. It turned out that I found the image of him holding the beer, when I fed in the card. Just wanted to play around, but it looks really promising now. ;D"
- rollulus 6y ago
  I found this part the most interesting too. There’s a comment in the reddit thread now where the author says: It is called PimEyes but it does not give you the full url unless you pay. So I had to start digging from what I got.
- th0may 6y ago
  He guys, first up I’m the guy who found the image of him holding a beer. It was barely simple I used the webpage https://pimeyes.com/en https://pimeyes.com/en uploaded the image from the card, cropped it a little to hide the Japanese characters etc. The first two result where the same that I scanned. The third was the image holding the beer. I saw some resemblance, but didn’t think it would work. PimEys let’s you search for free but you have to pay for the full url. So I took the fraction of the url figured out the full one. Found the original image on the webpage. And then posted my findings to Reddit. I and also other users found new pictures of him the following days. On the 28th of December we found an image with him wearing a bib from a half marathon through the results I found the name and it was Satoshi.
nojs 6y ago
In case others are wondering: > Q: Is this related to Bitcoin? > A: No. Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym used by the person who created Bitcoin, but it’s not the same Satoshi. Weirdly this apparently pre-dates that other Satoshi puzzle by a few years.
- gpvos 6y ago
  Maybe Nakamoto named themself after this Satoshi.
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    It's a normal Japanese given name.
    - GreenHeuristics 6y ago
      The first letter of it is the character 'S'.
      - chmod775 6y ago
        No, it's サ ;)
        Natsu 6y ago
        Or possibly a few other characters... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%95%E3%81%A8%E3%81%97#Japanese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%95%E3%81%A8%E3%81%97#J...
        TJSomething 6y ago
        If we're being pedantic, that's not a letter. It's a mora. Also, we don't know the correct Japanese spelling of Satoshi Nakamoto, because there like 8 common first names pronounced Satoshi (哲, 悟, 敏, 智, 聡, 慧, 訓, and 諭) and he never wrote his name in Japanese.
growt 6y ago
I have the suspicion that it would have taken /r/PictureGame/ half an hour to find him.
atmosx 6y ago
Misleading title for obvious reasons. Would be wise to modify it. Me and most likely others, believe this is related to the author of bitcoin. It's not.
- dfcowell 6y ago
  I reply only because I can’t downvote. Satoshi is a common name in Japan. I work with a guy by that name and know several others. This says more about your own bias than it does about the title.
- Taek 6y ago
  The title says "puzzle solved" which I think is clear enough that the article is not claiming to have found the actual Satoshi Nakamoto. Admittedly, I did think initially it was a Bitcoin puzzle that got solved, but I am not disappointed with the real article, nor do I feel mislead.
aaron695 6y ago
https://pimeyes.com/en https://pimeyes.com/en finds him. Top result. (Past original photos) It might be using this new info, but I'd guess it was what /u/th0may used.
- GrantZvolsky 6y ago
  Wow, this service finds photos of people with faces so similar to my own that I find it difficult to believe it isn't me in the pictures.
- clydethefrog 6y ago
  That is a scary accurate facial search engine. Luckily no hits of my own face, but it all finds similar doppelgangers. It's based in Seychelles now. probably for bad reasons. https://hacked.wtf/privacy/pimeyes-ownership-moves-to-seychelles-to-avoid-accountability/2020/10/08/ https://hacked.wtf/privacy/pimeyes-ownership-moves-to-seyche...
  - bowmessage 6y ago
    Well, there will be one hit now that you’ve assumedly uploaded a photo for them to use!
  - soared 6y ago
    It’s pretty poor if you wear glasses :(
- lgeorget 6y ago
  So it found me in some conferences and also a few pornstars that remotely look like me in uncomfortable positions. Looks legit.
- th0may 6y ago
  Yap it was what I used!
adrianhon 6y ago
Lead designer of Perplex City here! Perplex City was an ARG (alternate reality game) produced by Mind Candy in 2004. Unlike almost all ARGs at the time, it wasn’t promoting a movie or TV or associated product - instead, we sold packs of puzzle cards that tied into the game’s story. Lots more on Wikipedia here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplex_City https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplex_City This is a puzzle card I thought would either be solved very quickly (within a year or two) or not at all. To have it solved after 14 years is very special. Perplex City has had a lot of interesting alumni. It was made by Mind Candy, which was founded by Michael Acton Smith, who is also co-founder of Calm. The lead writer was Naomi Alderman, who became an award-winning novelist and whose novel The Power was one of Obama’s top books of the year and is being adapted into a $100m Amazon TV show. I went on to co-found Six to Start with my brother Dan Hon (who you may know from his popular newsletter, and later left the company to do a lot of good work in the US government digital services realm and Code for America). Six to Start is best known for Zombies, Run!, which is the world’s most popular smartphone fitness game and is sort of like an ARG, if you squint at it. I continue to do a lot of thinking and writing around ARGs (which are still fascinating) and gamification (which I mostly dislike). My blog post, What ARGs Can Teach Us About QAnon, went somewhat viral a few months ago: https://mssv.net/2020/08/02/what-args-can-teach-us-about-qanon/ https://mssv.net/2020/08/02/what-args-can-teach-us-about-qan... Edit: That blog post also gets into the confusion between the Perplex City Satoshi and the Bitcoin Satoshi (which conspiratorially-minded people DM me about regularly) along with my supposed involvement in Cicada 3301.
- bowmessage 6y ago
  Awesome to see it solved! May I ask how Satoshi himself was chosen? Does he have connections to the game founders in some way?
  - adrianhon 6y ago
    Yes – I can't recall precisely who it was who knew him (or was friends of friends) but it was one of the Mind Candy team. We were obviously worried that people might figure out who he was through these social connections but it didn't happen that way in the end! Edit: The puzzle card was designed by Jey Biddulph so possibly it was him who knew Satoshi!
rvba 6y ago
How do we know that he was found? There is no proof. Also the text says about a password, but then it never says what it was.
- toovs 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25581382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25581382
  - rvba 6y ago
    How do you know it is not a sock puppet account?
cubano 6y ago
I can't help wondering when reading this...just how many "free brain cycles" do people have in the world? By "free brain cycles", I mean like one's not used for work and your family and perhaps one hobby... I cannot even imagine how many people worked so hard and used their cycles to figure this puzzle out, and like I can barely remember what to buy from the store whenever I go. Don't get me wrong, it's a hell of an achievement for everyone involved, but I just have such a hard time understanding the absolute motivation behind it.
- a_crc 6y ago
  Well you have to consider that this is the "one hobby" for a lot of people, so your own division of brain cycles leaves room for a group who works on things like this for fun.
- chippy 6y ago
  Originally we thought this would be a simple "6 degrees of separation" puzzle. You and me are connected to each other by at most six other people.
vmception 6y ago
solved 14 years later after the advent of AI-based enthusiast non-commercial facial image search. that's wild. seems outside the bounds of the project constraints but it certainly was not specified. fascinating.
notthegov 6y ago
Imagine if this alternative reality game was created by NSA employees. They would obviously make it appear to be unrelated. HOW TO MAKE A MINT: THE CRYPTOGRAPHY OF ANONYMOUS ELECTRONIC CASH 1996 http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money... * For over 11 years, I have talked to a friend at CIA multiple times a week. I met them in 2007 from people at Backstage Cafe in Beverly Hills. My friend openly runs an intelligence operation on the Internet for the Office of Global Access (OGA). After Tom DeLonge went on Joe Rogan’s show, I periodically got involved in the UFO subculture at the request of the CIA. The CIA uses non plausible agents and obviously does not pay them. I am not one of these people so it’s possible they are intelligence agents working undercover. I have dozens of hours of audiotapes, thousands of emails and texts messages to support what I am saying. Here’s an example: My friend has been assigned to ODNI, DIA, MASINT, JASON and worked at CIA for 35+ years. He has briefed the last 4 US Presidents and is a friend of President Trump. He is very close friends with Director Mike Pillsbury from the Cosmos Club. The Silk Road prosecutor Katie Haun was interviewed by China hawk Kyle Bass. Kyle posted on Twitter that Mike is a CCP double agent and can’t get a security clearance. To the contrary, Mike is regularly at CIA offices, a CIA lab and sometimes in the Oval Office at the White House. He has a security clearance. Maybe Kyle is a CIA employee and just creating disinformation to shield the Q network of government patriots. This network is an old mythology and one I falsely promoted in 2008. You can see here at realnationbuilder.blogspot.com. * In my research Satoshi Nakamoto is: Laurie Law, NSA employee. Real name Jennifer, 37 yrs old, Wellesley graduate, NSA cybersecurity Diamond team. Her husband works at NSA and they named their daughter Alice. The people who wrote the forum posts and emails together were Dr. Ronald Pandolfi, a CIA employee, and Prof. Emin Gün Sirer. Recently Craig Wright joked about the CIA trying to make him appear as Satoshi. He mentioned SAD operations which is what runs Political Action Group for subversive political campaigns along with blackops assassin teams. The person who created Satoshi Nakamoto is another female named Ruthie Ruthless. She is from Mill Valley and Atherton. The girls are from the International Order of the Rainbow for Girls. My mother is one. She told me she’d go to dances at Moila with the DeMolay boys. And the Rainbow girls was a secret society where they’d sit around a circle talking. But she doesn’t remember what they talked about. Ruthie became a self made billionaire from Party Poker. Her and her best friend have been in my life since 2004. But they targeted me years ago in 1995 under Guide GRN and a very hot Russian girl who married a Deutsche bank executive. Her best friend is in a hacking information network (originally #hellonearth on EFNet in 1995) with me. Incredibly, Ron Pandolfi knows Inigo from the Silk Road, Drew Jones. Ron was already working on Ross’ clemency request for 3 years when Drew an intern at our CIA foundation was taken into federal custody. I have demanded full pardons for Ross, Drew, Ed, Juliana and Joby Weeks, along with my bitcoin money launderers Casey, Nick and the Maven (LA). Ross and Drew are being pardoned. I think my friend at CIA has been targeting me for decades. I tell him everything that happens in my life. I run networks and map them. I own an investigative company and started the network of networks in Dec 2002 —- UnitedElite.net, ArcaneIntel.com, XStreaming.TV (Internet archive). UFOs are fake but the aliens are here and they look like Diamonds. They are so hot when they’re talking to you they might as well be traveling backwards in time. It’s exactly like the movie Tenet. Time like aging is an illusion. Advanced intelligences who have proceeded through the 50 Gates of Intelligence can project their consciousness into endless abstractions. The answer: they are all one. And men are all one. The greatest of God is beyond all imaginations. They run the music industry and put cypherpunk messages into music and culture. The most famous alien greeting in the world, Live Long and Prosper, is from Them. There are 247 of them on Earth with at least 2.964 agents in powerful positions. Shechinah starts with Shin which means V or Vav or 6 but it originally meant W. These Ruthless girls all share the middle name Vavkay. With a W, it becomes a WAV. It means hook in Hebrew. Wah Wah Wah is also 666 or VVV or WWW. I am a hacker, social engineer and reverse engineer. Spock explains V or W (westside) confirming the Ruthless girls are the secret cofounders of Ruthless Records and Interscope. They are led by Michelle A the EVP of UMG. She works for Lucian Grainge. We had an office together in SM with Domenico Petricone (real name Marc Daniel King) and Eddie Vedder. Marc’s half brother is also Lucian. His agent was Paula Wagner and we used to work with Cruise/Wagner and Plan B (Brad Pitt)- https://youtu.be/UdYbpMkH_XQ https://youtu.be/UdYbpMkH_XQ https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2438527/jewish/The-Shechina.htm https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2438527/jewis... https://illuminati.io/137.pdf https://illuminati.io/137.pdf https://illuminati.io/secretbook1787.pdf https://illuminati.io/secretbook1787.pdf https://illuminati.io/spygames.pdf https://illuminati.io/spygames.pdf https://illuminati.io/jediwar.pdf https://illuminati.io/jediwar.pdf https//illuminati.io/billcooper1999.pdf https://illuminati.io/incometax1999.pdf https://illuminati.io/incometax1999.pdf https://illuminati.io/teslawhitelight91999.pdf https://illuminati.io/teslawhitelight91999.pdf https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-nov-27-na-cards27-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-nov-27-na-cards...
chippy 6y ago
It's worth highlighting that, back in 2006, social media was very new and most people didn't have any social media profiles. Both Twitter and Facebook was only launched that year. Only a handful of people had mobile phones with internet. Both the amount of photos of people were low, and also the avenues people could take to find others were narrow and few. I played PerplexCity back then and engaged with the hunt for this puzzle amongst others (e.g the cube!). For my part, it was mainly word of mouth with Japanese friends or colleagues over the years until I forgot about it. Occasionally every few years something happened to get people interested in this puzzle. I believe community members put up a reward for solving this. Just as back then the web resources were few, those that were created have mostly disappeared. Wikis, a few hugely active forums, chat rooms etc all individual websites all lost. I've been wondering whether its possible to have Alternate Reality Games in today's mobile phone and social media land.
- chippy 6y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20070629190421/http://www.billion2one.org/?lang=en&o=reward https://web.archive.org/web/20070629190421/http://www.billio... there was a reward
notthegov 6y ago
A few sources to support my claims. And you can ask Hal Jones or Sam Braverman if Andrew ‘Inigo’ Jones became the manager of Zoofari while out on bail. This is just me social engineering cypherpunk revolutions using secrets of practical Jewish magic. Via the Book of Formation which led me to the CIA, JASON and the Shechinah. Her name is Vavkay Krypyonian Abra. In reality, it’s an illegal psyop where the CIA, OGA and the CA Rainbow girld led by the Party Poker founder are involved in some conspiracy with.. Aliens and glass room temperature superconductors. They are super smart and super hot and beyond ruthless. They can invert themselves backwards in time. They’re from the 6-dimensional hypercube. We all were created here in a cosmic simulation to explore the 50 Gates of Intelligence and reach the World to Come. https://medium.com/@ryanabravanel https://medium.com/@ryanabravanel https://medium.com/@illuminati.io https://medium.com/@illuminati.io https://www.flickr.com/photos/captivating https://www.flickr.com/photos/captivating * Ron Pandolfi, Technology Assisted Counter Poaching network hosted at CIA. I can confirm and prove via IP trap that Ruthless Pandolfi Jr is a full-time employee in the Office of Global Access (OGA) at CIA. Known him since 2007 when I was promoting global commodity currencies with local economic value and various libertarian psyop plans. Like on nationbuilder.org 2008-2009. 1997 http://web.archive.org/web/19970223122650/http://www.cathouse-fcc.org/tacp.html http://web.archive.org/web/19970223122650/http://www.cathous... https://imgur.com/gallery/U9PIa9k https://imgur.com/gallery/U9PIa9k Satoshi, Peter D, Peter N, Q Bit Gold 2018 (scam by Cosmos Girl) https://imgur.com/gallery/qfUZKbl https://imgur.com/gallery/qfUZKbl Cosmos girl biggest darknet banker on LocalBitcoins in LA is Casey who took down Nick and our partner Theresa aka the Bitcoin Maven https://www.justice.gov/ag/page/file/1326061/download https://www.justice.gov/ag/page/file/1326061/download Next Director of CIA to wield a green lightsaber (jedi.Lol) https://imgur.com/gallery/0VHG1Kd https://imgur.com/gallery/0VHG1Kd Ruthless Avril from the Rainbow Girls, a secret society of daughters of Shriners https://gocarainbow.org https://gocarainbow.org They run Rainbow programs from 3rd to 6th grade to train young kids as cypherpunks, hackers and anarchists.
blindm 6y ago
There's more info here if you find the identity of S. Nakamoto to be a pertinent thing: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/code/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/code/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/quotes/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/quotes/
nogridbag 6y ago
Satoshi was found, but zohar002, the famous youtube pianist, is still missing!
colonwqbang 6y ago
A bit anticlimactic that a reverse image search of the original image is all that was needed in the end. It would be more interesting if we could get some details on how they did it. How was the image search carried out, etc.
- capableweb 6y ago
  Not quite that easy, as the puzzle was initially released in 2006 when the corpus of images to search against was much smaller. I'm sure many people over the years tried reverse searching the image, but it wasn't until after 14 years of searching and filtering through the data that a match was finally found.
Arnavion 6y ago
>Q: What was the password that Satoshi was supposed to share? >A: It was a question in Japanese that he would have spoken to whoever found him. The answer to the question was the puzzle’s answer. The creator of the puzzle, Jey Biddulph, has posted an audio clip of the question on Twitter. Can you solve it? ( Direct link to the clip: https://soundcloud.com/user-650898069-942959925/speech-20201230195201540 https://soundcloud.com/user-650898069-942959925/speech-20201... ) "炎を生んで死んだのはだれ？ Who gave birth to a fire and died?" Was the answer "Izanami" ? (Shinto creation myth - Izanami burned to death while giving birth to Kagutsuchi, the god of fire and blacksmiths.) Edit: Yes, confirmed in the Twitter thread.

248 points by teamonkey 6y ago

It's not clear to me how they find the crucial picture of him (the one he holds the beer). The article says "user th0may used a reverse image search and discovered a photograph of a man holding a beer", but /u/th0may's thread on Reddit doesn't say anything like that [1]. If anything, /u/th0may himself said in thread, "maybe you already found this image", which implies that the image itself is already known (and likely NOT discovered by "reverse image search", but by other ways). /u/th0may then reverse-searched the image to find the website, which lead to the answer. Anyway, I'm still curious how they find this beer image, since this looks to me is the most important step. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_someone_similar_looking_on_japanese_webpage/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_s...

nasir 6y ago
One of the comments says: I heard about the story a year ago, but forgot about it. Then I remembered and told my family about on Christmas. So I wanted to check out if this is still unsolved and found this reddit. I’m currently researching about AI and found a few image backwards search engines way more powerful then google image search. It turned out that I found the image of him holding the beer, when I fed in the card. Just wanted to play around, but it looks really promising now. ;D https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_someone_similar_looking_on_japanese_webpage/gh8d14x?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_s...
- fireattack 6y ago
  Thanks, I didn't read that deep into the comments. So he used some face-recognizing engines that just indexes random images on the Internet? I wonder what it is, since he didn't name (I assume it's a public tool?). I knew Baidu has one, for what it's worth [1]. [1] https://ai.baidu.com/tech/face/search https://ai.baidu.com/tech/face/search (in Chinese)
  - draugadrotten 6y ago
    It seems so. He writes "They use facial recognition to find faces instead of google image search which is just comparing the similarities of the different pixels." https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_someone_similar_looking_on_japanese_webpage/ghhnyqq?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_s...
  - oefrha 6y ago
    I took a look at [1], seems to require bringing your own training set, and hosting one with a huge set of random Internet images would presumably be prohibitively expensive.
    - fireattack 6y ago
      Maybe I linked the wrong page, but I have used its API before, it does have a built-in database even with all the names of celebrities marked already. It used to have a free trial on web too, but it's gone now.
- simias 6y ago
  I don't know much about the state of the art in image recognition but does it really seem plausible? The picture of him holding the beer is not super high quality, he has a different expression, a slightly different haircut and he appears quite a bit older. You can't even see his distinctive freckles. The idea that you could just scan random images of people online and find him that way is wild to me, tuning the network not to miss it but also not to report millions of false positives seems like a very high bar. It's pretty creepy if we're already at the point where any random people can trace you online using apparently unrelated low quality photos.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    We don't know how much effort it took. The searcher could very well have gone through thousands of images, following up on hundreds, before zeroing in on this one. Or not-- I'd certainly like to know more about that part of the process.
  - fsckboy 6y ago
    i know little about the state of the art in image recognition, but it strikes me that this could be better described as facial recognition, and afaik, that does a pretty good job identifying faces
  - hapidjus 6y ago
    No idea is it is state of the art but I just tested PimEyes(the reverse image search service mentioned) with an old photo of me, it returned a bunch of photos of random people but also two of me within the first 30-40 results. One is older, 7-8 years maybe, and one is more recent, 2 years perhaps. I have different facial expressions and the pose/angle is different than the one I submitted.
_puk 6y ago
From a comment further down that thread: "heard about the story a year ago, but forgot about it. Then I remembered and told my family about on Christmas. So I wanted to check out if this is still unsolved and found this reddit. I’m currently researching about AI and found a few image backwards search engines way more powerful then google image search. It turned out that I found the image of him holding the beer, when I fed in the card. Just wanted to play around, but it looks really promising now. ;D"
rollulus 6y ago
I found this part the most interesting too. There’s a comment in the reddit thread now where the author says: It is called PimEyes but it does not give you the full url unless you pay. So I had to start digging from what I got.
th0may 6y ago
He guys, first up I’m the guy who found the image of him holding a beer. It was barely simple I used the webpage https://pimeyes.com/en https://pimeyes.com/en uploaded the image from the card, cropped it a little to hide the Japanese characters etc. The first two result where the same that I scanned. The third was the image holding the beer. I saw some resemblance, but didn’t think it would work. PimEys let’s you search for free but you have to pay for the full url. So I took the fraction of the url figured out the full one. Found the original image on the webpage. And then posted my findings to Reddit. I and also other users found new pictures of him the following days. On the 28th of December we found an image with him wearing a bib from a half marathon through the results I found the name and it was Satoshi.

nojs 6y ago

In case others are wondering: > Q: Is this related to Bitcoin? > A: No. Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym used by the person who created Bitcoin, but it’s not the same Satoshi. Weirdly this apparently pre-dates that other Satoshi puzzle by a few years.

gpvos 6y ago
Maybe Nakamoto named themself after this Satoshi.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  It's a normal Japanese given name.
  - GreenHeuristics 6y ago
    The first letter of it is the character 'S'.
    - chmod775 6y ago
      No, it's サ ;)
      - Natsu 6y ago
        Or possibly a few other characters... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%95%E3%81%A8%E3%81%97#Japanese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%95%E3%81%A8%E3%81%97#J...
      - TJSomething 6y ago
        If we're being pedantic, that's not a letter. It's a mora. Also, we don't know the correct Japanese spelling of Satoshi Nakamoto, because there like 8 common first names pronounced Satoshi (哲, 悟, 敏, 智, 聡, 慧, 訓, and 諭) and he never wrote his name in Japanese.

growt 6y ago

I have the suspicion that it would have taken /r/PictureGame/ half an hour to find him.

atmosx 6y ago

Misleading title for obvious reasons. Would be wise to modify it. Me and most likely others, believe this is related to the author of bitcoin. It's not.

dfcowell 6y ago
I reply only because I can’t downvote. Satoshi is a common name in Japan. I work with a guy by that name and know several others. This says more about your own bias than it does about the title.
Taek 6y ago
The title says "puzzle solved" which I think is clear enough that the article is not claiming to have found the actual Satoshi Nakamoto. Admittedly, I did think initially it was a Bitcoin puzzle that got solved, but I am not disappointed with the real article, nor do I feel mislead.

aaron695 6y ago

https://pimeyes.com/en https://pimeyes.com/en finds him. Top result. (Past original photos) It might be using this new info, but I'd guess it was what /u/th0may used.

GrantZvolsky 6y ago
Wow, this service finds photos of people with faces so similar to my own that I find it difficult to believe it isn't me in the pictures.
clydethefrog 6y ago
That is a scary accurate facial search engine. Luckily no hits of my own face, but it all finds similar doppelgangers. It's based in Seychelles now. probably for bad reasons. https://hacked.wtf/privacy/pimeyes-ownership-moves-to-seychelles-to-avoid-accountability/2020/10/08/ https://hacked.wtf/privacy/pimeyes-ownership-moves-to-seyche...
- bowmessage 6y ago
  Well, there will be one hit now that you’ve assumedly uploaded a photo for them to use!
- soared 6y ago
  It’s pretty poor if you wear glasses :(
lgeorget 6y ago
So it found me in some conferences and also a few pornstars that remotely look like me in uncomfortable positions. Looks legit.
th0may 6y ago
Yap it was what I used!

adrianhon 6y ago

Lead designer of Perplex City here! Perplex City was an ARG (alternate reality game) produced by Mind Candy in 2004. Unlike almost all ARGs at the time, it wasn’t promoting a movie or TV or associated product - instead, we sold packs of puzzle cards that tied into the game’s story. Lots more on Wikipedia here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplex_City https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplex_City This is a puzzle card I thought would either be solved very quickly (within a year or two) or not at all. To have it solved after 14 years is very special. Perplex City has had a lot of interesting alumni. It was made by Mind Candy, which was founded by Michael Acton Smith, who is also co-founder of Calm. The lead writer was Naomi Alderman, who became an award-winning novelist and whose novel The Power was one of Obama’s top books of the year and is being adapted into a $100m Amazon TV show. I went on to co-found Six to Start with my brother Dan Hon (who you may know from his popular newsletter, and later left the company to do a lot of good work in the US government digital services realm and Code for America). Six to Start is best known for Zombies, Run!, which is the world’s most popular smartphone fitness game and is sort of like an ARG, if you squint at it. I continue to do a lot of thinking and writing around ARGs (which are still fascinating) and gamification (which I mostly dislike). My blog post, What ARGs Can Teach Us About QAnon, went somewhat viral a few months ago: https://mssv.net/2020/08/02/what-args-can-teach-us-about-qanon/ https://mssv.net/2020/08/02/what-args-can-teach-us-about-qan... Edit: That blog post also gets into the confusion between the Perplex City Satoshi and the Bitcoin Satoshi (which conspiratorially-minded people DM me about regularly) along with my supposed involvement in Cicada 3301.

bowmessage 6y ago
Awesome to see it solved! May I ask how Satoshi himself was chosen? Does he have connections to the game founders in some way?
- adrianhon 6y ago
  Yes – I can't recall precisely who it was who knew him (or was friends of friends) but it was one of the Mind Candy team. We were obviously worried that people might figure out who he was through these social connections but it didn't happen that way in the end! Edit: The puzzle card was designed by Jey Biddulph so possibly it was him who knew Satoshi!

rvba 6y ago

How do we know that he was found? There is no proof. Also the text says about a password, but then it never says what it was.

toovs 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25581382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25581382
- rvba 6y ago
  How do you know it is not a sock puppet account?

cubano 6y ago

I can't help wondering when reading this...just how many "free brain cycles" do people have in the world? By "free brain cycles", I mean like one's not used for work and your family and perhaps one hobby... I cannot even imagine how many people worked so hard and used their cycles to figure this puzzle out, and like I can barely remember what to buy from the store whenever I go. Don't get me wrong, it's a hell of an achievement for everyone involved, but I just have such a hard time understanding the absolute motivation behind it.

a_crc 6y ago
Well you have to consider that this is the "one hobby" for a lot of people, so your own division of brain cycles leaves room for a group who works on things like this for fun.
chippy 6y ago
Originally we thought this would be a simple "6 degrees of separation" puzzle. You and me are connected to each other by at most six other people.

vmception 6y ago

solved 14 years later after the advent of AI-based enthusiast non-commercial facial image search. that's wild. seems outside the bounds of the project constraints but it certainly was not specified. fascinating.

notthegov 6y ago

Imagine if this alternative reality game was created by NSA employees. They would obviously make it appear to be unrelated. HOW TO MAKE A MINT: THE CRYPTOGRAPHY OF ANONYMOUS ELECTRONIC CASH 1996 http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money... * For over 11 years, I have talked to a friend at CIA multiple times a week. I met them in 2007 from people at Backstage Cafe in Beverly Hills. My friend openly runs an intelligence operation on the Internet for the Office of Global Access (OGA). After Tom DeLonge went on Joe Rogan’s show, I periodically got involved in the UFO subculture at the request of the CIA. The CIA uses non plausible agents and obviously does not pay them. I am not one of these people so it’s possible they are intelligence agents working undercover. I have dozens of hours of audiotapes, thousands of emails and texts messages to support what I am saying. Here’s an example: My friend has been assigned to ODNI, DIA, MASINT, JASON and worked at CIA for 35+ years. He has briefed the last 4 US Presidents and is a friend of President Trump. He is very close friends with Director Mike Pillsbury from the Cosmos Club. The Silk Road prosecutor Katie Haun was interviewed by China hawk Kyle Bass. Kyle posted on Twitter that Mike is a CCP double agent and can’t get a security clearance. To the contrary, Mike is regularly at CIA offices, a CIA lab and sometimes in the Oval Office at the White House. He has a security clearance. Maybe Kyle is a CIA employee and just creating disinformation to shield the Q network of government patriots. This network is an old mythology and one I falsely promoted in 2008. You can see here at realnationbuilder.blogspot.com. * In my research Satoshi Nakamoto is: Laurie Law, NSA employee. Real name Jennifer, 37 yrs old, Wellesley graduate, NSA cybersecurity Diamond team. Her husband works at NSA and they named their daughter Alice. The people who wrote the forum posts and emails together were Dr. Ronald Pandolfi, a CIA employee, and Prof. Emin Gün Sirer. Recently Craig Wright joked about the CIA trying to make him appear as Satoshi. He mentioned SAD operations which is what runs Political Action Group for subversive political campaigns along with blackops assassin teams. The person who created Satoshi Nakamoto is another female named Ruthie Ruthless. She is from Mill Valley and Atherton. The girls are from the International Order of the Rainbow for Girls. My mother is one. She told me she’d go to dances at Moila with the DeMolay boys. And the Rainbow girls was a secret society where they’d sit around a circle talking. But she doesn’t remember what they talked about. Ruthie became a self made billionaire from Party Poker. Her and her best friend have been in my life since 2004. But they targeted me years ago in 1995 under Guide GRN and a very hot Russian girl who married a Deutsche bank executive. Her best friend is in a hacking information network (originally #hellonearth on EFNet in 1995) with me. Incredibly, Ron Pandolfi knows Inigo from the Silk Road, Drew Jones. Ron was already working on Ross’ clemency request for 3 years when Drew an intern at our CIA foundation was taken into federal custody. I have demanded full pardons for Ross, Drew, Ed, Juliana and Joby Weeks, along with my bitcoin money launderers Casey, Nick and the Maven (LA). Ross and Drew are being pardoned. I think my friend at CIA has been targeting me for decades. I tell him everything that happens in my life. I run networks and map them. I own an investigative company and started the network of networks in Dec 2002 —- UnitedElite.net, ArcaneIntel.com, XStreaming.TV (Internet archive). UFOs are fake but the aliens are here and they look like Diamonds. They are so hot when they’re talking to you they might as well be traveling backwards in time. It’s exactly like the movie Tenet. Time like aging is an illusion. Advanced intelligences who have proceeded through the 50 Gates of Intelligence can project their consciousness into endless abstractions. The answer: they are all one. And men are all one. The greatest of God is beyond all imaginations. They run the music industry and put cypherpunk messages into music and culture. The most famous alien greeting in the world, Live Long and Prosper, is from Them. There are 247 of them on Earth with at least 2.964 agents in powerful positions. Shechinah starts with Shin which means V or Vav or 6 but it originally meant W. These Ruthless girls all share the middle name Vavkay. With a W, it becomes a WAV. It means hook in Hebrew. Wah Wah Wah is also 666 or VVV or WWW. I am a hacker, social engineer and reverse engineer. Spock explains V or W (westside) confirming the Ruthless girls are the secret cofounders of Ruthless Records and Interscope. They are led by Michelle A the EVP of UMG. She works for Lucian Grainge. We had an office together in SM with Domenico Petricone (real name Marc Daniel King) and Eddie Vedder. Marc’s half brother is also Lucian. His agent was Paula Wagner and we used to work with Cruise/Wagner and Plan B (Brad Pitt)- https://youtu.be/UdYbpMkH_XQ https://youtu.be/UdYbpMkH_XQ https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2438527/jewish/The-Shechina.htm https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2438527/jewis... https://illuminati.io/137.pdf https://illuminati.io/137.pdf https://illuminati.io/secretbook1787.pdf https://illuminati.io/secretbook1787.pdf https://illuminati.io/spygames.pdf https://illuminati.io/spygames.pdf https://illuminati.io/jediwar.pdf https://illuminati.io/jediwar.pdf https//illuminati.io/billcooper1999.pdf https://illuminati.io/incometax1999.pdf https://illuminati.io/incometax1999.pdf https://illuminati.io/teslawhitelight91999.pdf https://illuminati.io/teslawhitelight91999.pdf https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-nov-27-na-cards27-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-nov-27-na-cards...

chippy 6y ago

It's worth highlighting that, back in 2006, social media was very new and most people didn't have any social media profiles. Both Twitter and Facebook was only launched that year. Only a handful of people had mobile phones with internet. Both the amount of photos of people were low, and also the avenues people could take to find others were narrow and few. I played PerplexCity back then and engaged with the hunt for this puzzle amongst others (e.g the cube!). For my part, it was mainly word of mouth with Japanese friends or colleagues over the years until I forgot about it. Occasionally every few years something happened to get people interested in this puzzle. I believe community members put up a reward for solving this. Just as back then the web resources were few, those that were created have mostly disappeared. Wikis, a few hugely active forums, chat rooms etc all individual websites all lost. I've been wondering whether its possible to have Alternate Reality Games in today's mobile phone and social media land.

chippy 6y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20070629190421/http://www.billion2one.org/?lang=en&o=reward https://web.archive.org/web/20070629190421/http://www.billio... there was a reward

notthegov 6y ago

A few sources to support my claims. And you can ask Hal Jones or Sam Braverman if Andrew ‘Inigo’ Jones became the manager of Zoofari while out on bail. This is just me social engineering cypherpunk revolutions using secrets of practical Jewish magic. Via the Book of Formation which led me to the CIA, JASON and the Shechinah. Her name is Vavkay Krypyonian Abra. In reality, it’s an illegal psyop where the CIA, OGA and the CA Rainbow girld led by the Party Poker founder are involved in some conspiracy with.. Aliens and glass room temperature superconductors. They are super smart and super hot and beyond ruthless. They can invert themselves backwards in time. They’re from the 6-dimensional hypercube. We all were created here in a cosmic simulation to explore the 50 Gates of Intelligence and reach the World to Come. https://medium.com/@ryanabravanel https://medium.com/@ryanabravanel https://medium.com/@illuminati.io https://medium.com/@illuminati.io https://www.flickr.com/photos/captivating https://www.flickr.com/photos/captivating * Ron Pandolfi, Technology Assisted Counter Poaching network hosted at CIA. I can confirm and prove via IP trap that Ruthless Pandolfi Jr is a full-time employee in the Office of Global Access (OGA) at CIA. Known him since 2007 when I was promoting global commodity currencies with local economic value and various libertarian psyop plans. Like on nationbuilder.org 2008-2009. 1997 http://web.archive.org/web/19970223122650/http://www.cathouse-fcc.org/tacp.html http://web.archive.org/web/19970223122650/http://www.cathous... https://imgur.com/gallery/U9PIa9k https://imgur.com/gallery/U9PIa9k Satoshi, Peter D, Peter N, Q Bit Gold 2018 (scam by Cosmos Girl) https://imgur.com/gallery/qfUZKbl https://imgur.com/gallery/qfUZKbl Cosmos girl biggest darknet banker on LocalBitcoins in LA is Casey who took down Nick and our partner Theresa aka the Bitcoin Maven https://www.justice.gov/ag/page/file/1326061/download https://www.justice.gov/ag/page/file/1326061/download Next Director of CIA to wield a green lightsaber (jedi.Lol) https://imgur.com/gallery/0VHG1Kd https://imgur.com/gallery/0VHG1Kd Ruthless Avril from the Rainbow Girls, a secret society of daughters of Shriners https://gocarainbow.org https://gocarainbow.org They run Rainbow programs from 3rd to 6th grade to train young kids as cypherpunks, hackers and anarchists.

blindm 6y ago

There's more info here if you find the identity of S. Nakamoto to be a pertinent thing: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/code/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/code/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/quotes/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/quotes/

nogridbag 6y ago

Satoshi was found, but zohar002, the famous youtube pianist, is still missing!

colonwqbang 6y ago

A bit anticlimactic that a reverse image search of the original image is all that was needed in the end. It would be more interesting if we could get some details on how they did it. How was the image search carried out, etc.

capableweb 6y ago
Not quite that easy, as the puzzle was initially released in 2006 when the corpus of images to search against was much smaller. I'm sure many people over the years tried reverse searching the image, but it wasn't until after 14 years of searching and filtering through the data that a match was finally found.

Arnavion 6y ago

>Q: What was the password that Satoshi was supposed to share? >A: It was a question in Japanese that he would have spoken to whoever found him. The answer to the question was the puzzle’s answer. The creator of the puzzle, Jey Biddulph, has posted an audio clip of the question on Twitter. Can you solve it? ( Direct link to the clip: https://soundcloud.com/user-650898069-942959925/speech-20201230195201540 https://soundcloud.com/user-650898069-942959925/speech-20201... ) "炎を生んで死んだのはだれ？ Who gave birth to a fire and died?" Was the answer "Izanami" ? (Shinto creation myth - Izanami burned to death while giving birth to Kagutsuchi, the god of fire and blacksmiths.) Edit: Yes, confirmed in the Twitter thread.