5 ms·

Why do so many just assume he'd be a single real person? Could be a whole dev team at a company (Twitter Inc. for example) or a government agency just as well.

by lyind 3y ago

polishdude20 3y ago
What's the motivation for the secrecy though?
- TheBlight 3y ago
  It certainly wasn't clear if what they did would be considered legal or not by all locales. And if the project was successful you wouldn't want to make yourself a potential target. There isn't really much advantage to being famous.
- mortallywounded 3y ago
  The motivation? It clearly has roots somewhere in the cypherpunk crew, which was already obsessed with privacy, secrecy, etc.
TheBlight 3y ago
It's unlikely a large dev team would be able to keep this secret. The code was also very consistent and not that large of a code base. It reads to me very much like a single person wrote it.
- mortallywounded 3y ago
  Not only was the early code consistent with itself, it was messy as hell and full of "Windows-isms" which reaked of academia/not-a-fulltime-engineer.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - TheBlight 3y ago
    I disagree somewhat. I don't think it was that messy. It wasn't the most modern C++ code but it was written by an experienced programmer and IMO not likely an academic. Most academics would be likely to code for a Mac or UNIX environment while commercial coders would be more likely to work in Windows.
  - neffy 3y ago
    Honestly, "Windows-isms" especially in the area bitcoin is developed in reeks far more of industry than it does of academia. The other oddity in the code is that there is a mixture of US/UK spellings being used, which also suggests more than one person. Oh, and the pizza thing is another myth, the real monetization was the liberty exchange setting up as market for $/bitcoin exchanges.
    - usrusr 3y ago
      > The other oddity in the code is that there is a mixture of US/UK spellings being used, which also suggests more than one person. Not an oddity are all, it suggests a non-native speaker. US/UK spelling inconsistency is rather common unless you went to school in one of the two.
      - mortallywounded 3y ago
        Or, a person that was born in the US and educated in the UK, big into cryptography and the cipherpunk mailing list and often mixed up spellings on social media.. like I dunno, Len Sassaman.
    - mortallywounded 3y ago
      There were plenty of other oddities.. like the skeleton for a poker game in the code? Maybe a test for the digital currency? Maybe underlying motivation? Maybe... who knows.
    - bawolff 3y ago
      > mixture of US/UK spellings being used Maybe he is just canadian. We use a mix.
    - poopchute 3y ago
      We definitely use a mix of US/UK spellings in Canada. This gets further reinforced when you work a lot with a particular spelling (eg. we use spell 'colour' with the 'u' but every graphics library / css / etc use 'color' so its a toss up on which one I actually type)
    - 3y ago
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - nullc 3y ago
    No it wasn't-- it was highly portable. (unless you are just referring to the hungarian notation variable names, which is by no means unique to windows). It looked nothing like academic C++. It was also very small. Some people accuse it for being "messy" because it was highly coupled and non-modular. But that would have been premature and would have increased the size and complexity dramatically. Its lack of modularity was mostly reasonable for its level of complexity, and had Satoshi tried to make it modular he probably would have created boundaries that would have needed to be thrown out later. When I first got into Bitcoin I just read all the code. I know plenty of other people did too, that wouldn't have been half as reasonable had had been broken into a lot of parts with interfaces between them.
  - jdthedisciple 3y ago
    What are Windows-isms? First time I read this word and there seem to be no positive results for it on Google.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
Beijinger 3y ago
Why not? AFAIK, the wallets that are supposed to belong to him have not been touched in a long time. Based on the industry he created, he likely would be a candidate for the Nobel prize in economics. I think it can safely be assumed that he is dead. Or that he is a person with very little interest in money and fame, which is possible but unlikely. Persons like Grigory Perelman are rare.
- fdsafdsalkj 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - eimrine 3y ago
    Yes, using Bitcoin/other cryptocurrencies is always a good move if you are a person with Libertarian views.
    - bigfishrunning 3y ago
      Except for the fact that it is (a) not as anonymous as advertised, and (b) only as valuable as the "greater fool" thinks it is...
      - Beijinger 3y ago
        He laid the foundation for crypto and blockchain. Hey, anybody still remembering Napster? Nobody uses it anymore. But not because it was bad, it got replaced by better things. Bitcoin not anonymous enough? Try Monero.
    - lostlogin 3y ago
      I went looking to see what the criteria are for a Nobel prize, as I too think the idea of bitcoin getting one is ridiculous. I don’t find much - except that the prize in economic sciences isn’t a Nobel prize. “The prize in economic sciences is not a Nobel Prize. In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden’s central bank) instituted “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”, and it has since been awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences according to the same principles as for the Nobel Prizes.” https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/economic-sciences/ https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/economic-sciences/
Biganon 3y ago
A friend once told me it was probably a government agency, and according to him it was probably Japan (and not only because the name sounds Japanese)
- anonporridge 3y ago
  The metadata of how Satoshi operated suggests living in Europe at the time. However, a government agency with extreme competency and desire to keep their involvement secret could spoof this, as well as spoof looking like an individual. But Occam's Razor pushes me to believe it was just a single dude who happened to get enough things right to produce an escape velocity money protocol.
usrusr 3y ago
Are people assuming? Or are they just not speculating about cardinality and sticking to the identifier they have? Would you expect people in the DC universe who don't know about Bruce Wayne refer to sightings as batmen? They can't know! One thing that suggests a single author (but certainly no proof) is the continued secrecy: bigger group means higher probability of a leak (accidental as much as deliberate). In a way, the probability of an author group is sinking over time, because "unexposed for n years" and "unexposed for n+1 years" aren't the same observation.
modeless 3y ago
There is zero chance that a whole team and management above them would have been able to keep this secret for this long with this much attention on it. And there is no reason to believe a single person could not do the things Satoshi did. Even a single person would have continued communication as Satoshi if they were able to, as their life's work became an incredible success. No, Satoshi was a single person who is no longer able to communicate because they are dead. And there are several good candidates who meet that description. Personally I'm a fan of the "butler did it" theory, i.e. Hal Finney, who indeed died at the right time.

Why do so many just assume he'd be a single real person? Could be a whole dev team at a company (Twitter Inc. for example) or a government agency just as well.

by lyind 3y ago

Why do so many just assume he'd be a single real person? Could be a whole dev team at a company (Twitter Inc. for example) or a government agency just as well.

polishdude20 3y ago

What's the motivation for the secrecy though?

TheBlight 3y ago
It certainly wasn't clear if what they did would be considered legal or not by all locales. And if the project was successful you wouldn't want to make yourself a potential target. There isn't really much advantage to being famous.
mortallywounded 3y ago
The motivation? It clearly has roots somewhere in the cypherpunk crew, which was already obsessed with privacy, secrecy, etc.

TheBlight 3y ago

It's unlikely a large dev team would be able to keep this secret. The code was also very consistent and not that large of a code base. It reads to me very much like a single person wrote it.

mortallywounded 3y ago
Not only was the early code consistent with itself, it was messy as hell and full of "Windows-isms" which reaked of academia/not-a-fulltime-engineer.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- TheBlight 3y ago
  I disagree somewhat. I don't think it was that messy. It wasn't the most modern C++ code but it was written by an experienced programmer and IMO not likely an academic. Most academics would be likely to code for a Mac or UNIX environment while commercial coders would be more likely to work in Windows.
- neffy 3y ago
  Honestly, "Windows-isms" especially in the area bitcoin is developed in reeks far more of industry than it does of academia. The other oddity in the code is that there is a mixture of US/UK spellings being used, which also suggests more than one person. Oh, and the pizza thing is another myth, the real monetization was the liberty exchange setting up as market for $/bitcoin exchanges.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    > The other oddity in the code is that there is a mixture of US/UK spellings being used, which also suggests more than one person. Not an oddity are all, it suggests a non-native speaker. US/UK spelling inconsistency is rather common unless you went to school in one of the two.
    - mortallywounded 3y ago
      Or, a person that was born in the US and educated in the UK, big into cryptography and the cipherpunk mailing list and often mixed up spellings on social media.. like I dunno, Len Sassaman.
  - mortallywounded 3y ago
    There were plenty of other oddities.. like the skeleton for a poker game in the code? Maybe a test for the digital currency? Maybe underlying motivation? Maybe... who knows.
  - bawolff 3y ago
    > mixture of US/UK spellings being used Maybe he is just canadian. We use a mix.
  - poopchute 3y ago
    We definitely use a mix of US/UK spellings in Canada. This gets further reinforced when you work a lot with a particular spelling (eg. we use spell 'colour' with the 'u' but every graphics library / css / etc use 'color' so its a toss up on which one I actually type)
  - 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nullc 3y ago
  No it wasn't-- it was highly portable. (unless you are just referring to the hungarian notation variable names, which is by no means unique to windows). It looked nothing like academic C++. It was also very small. Some people accuse it for being "messy" because it was highly coupled and non-modular. But that would have been premature and would have increased the size and complexity dramatically. Its lack of modularity was mostly reasonable for its level of complexity, and had Satoshi tried to make it modular he probably would have created boundaries that would have needed to be thrown out later. When I first got into Bitcoin I just read all the code. I know plenty of other people did too, that wouldn't have been half as reasonable had had been broken into a lot of parts with interfaces between them.
- jdthedisciple 3y ago
  What are Windows-isms? First time I read this word and there seem to be no positive results for it on Google.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

Beijinger 3y ago

Why not? AFAIK, the wallets that are supposed to belong to him have not been touched in a long time. Based on the industry he created, he likely would be a candidate for the Nobel prize in economics. I think it can safely be assumed that he is dead. Or that he is a person with very little interest in money and fame, which is possible but unlikely. Persons like Grigory Perelman are rare.

fdsafdsalkj 3y ago
[flagged]
- eimrine 3y ago
  Yes, using Bitcoin/other cryptocurrencies is always a good move if you are a person with Libertarian views.
  - bigfishrunning 3y ago
    Except for the fact that it is (a) not as anonymous as advertised, and (b) only as valuable as the "greater fool" thinks it is...
    - Beijinger 3y ago
      He laid the foundation for crypto and blockchain. Hey, anybody still remembering Napster? Nobody uses it anymore. But not because it was bad, it got replaced by better things. Bitcoin not anonymous enough? Try Monero.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    I went looking to see what the criteria are for a Nobel prize, as I too think the idea of bitcoin getting one is ridiculous. I don’t find much - except that the prize in economic sciences isn’t a Nobel prize. “The prize in economic sciences is not a Nobel Prize. In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden’s central bank) instituted “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”, and it has since been awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences according to the same principles as for the Nobel Prizes.” https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/economic-sciences/ https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/economic-sciences/

Biganon 3y ago

A friend once told me it was probably a government agency, and according to him it was probably Japan (and not only because the name sounds Japanese)

anonporridge 3y ago
The metadata of how Satoshi operated suggests living in Europe at the time. However, a government agency with extreme competency and desire to keep their involvement secret could spoof this, as well as spoof looking like an individual. But Occam's Razor pushes me to believe it was just a single dude who happened to get enough things right to produce an escape velocity money protocol.

usrusr 3y ago

Are people assuming? Or are they just not speculating about cardinality and sticking to the identifier they have? Would you expect people in the DC universe who don't know about Bruce Wayne refer to sightings as batmen? They can't know! One thing that suggests a single author (but certainly no proof) is the continued secrecy: bigger group means higher probability of a leak (accidental as much as deliberate). In a way, the probability of an author group is sinking over time, because "unexposed for n years" and "unexposed for n+1 years" aren't the same observation.

modeless 3y ago

There is zero chance that a whole team and management above them would have been able to keep this secret for this long with this much attention on it. And there is no reason to believe a single person could not do the things Satoshi did. Even a single person would have continued communication as Satoshi if they were able to, as their life's work became an incredible success. No, Satoshi was a single person who is no longer able to communicate because they are dead. And there are several good candidates who meet that description. Personally I'm a fan of the "butler did it" theory, i.e. Hal Finney, who indeed died at the right time.