3 ms·

How you probably will find Satoshi

48 points by lalaland1125 4mo ago

petterroea 4mo ago
Why are people so obsessed with finding him? As others have pointed out wrt the New York Times article, it will just put him in danger.
- edelbitter 4mo ago
  That particular alias is mildly interesting. The obsession is with finally making progress in understanding the "We kill people based on metadata" threat. Maybe we can please finally stop stuffing PII & timestamps into each "crash report" and every "telemetry ping" and get back to work towards 100% reproducible outputs. (Well, right after I "enable javascript and cookies" because Cloudflare/Fastly/Akamai refuse to talk to me before they can grab a unique fingerprint..)
  - petterroea 4mo ago
    You are right. I just wish we didn't need victims to get change :(
- tim333 4mo ago
  I think who Satoshi is is fairly clear if you look into it all but most who do don't put it out there for those reasons.
  - petterroea 4mo ago
    In hacker culture I think there's a pretty clear culture that proving you aren't interested in the inner circle's identities (and therefore proving you are a mature person who understands what is at stake) is one of the ways you earn access to the inner circle. The lemma is that people who actively want to be friends with and know people of the inner circle are usually marked as untrustable and (somewhat regrattably) made fun of and excluded. That is, prove you are here for the game, not for rubbing shoulders with powerful people, and you shall become one. I have seen this in warez-related circles, seems like social mechanic that appears naturally to protect those that matter.
illusive4080 4mo ago
Make it a distributed compute problem like GIMPS and let the crowd solve it.
golly_ned 4mo ago
Newsweek already found him back in 2014, remember? They searched for everyone named SN and narrowed it down to the most likely candidate. Foolproof.
recursivecaveat 4mo ago
This is all premised on his windows user account name being identifying no? I have a hard time believing that to be the case for someone who was clearly extremely painstaking about privacy. Even I set mine to some nonsense because I know I'll accidentally leak it.
- edelbitter 4mo ago
  Should not set it to nonsense, but rather low-entropy. If its unique, someone with access to old (browser, probably) crash reports might be able to cross-reference. Plus, not too long ago browsers did not care to sanitize the path for input[type="file"], so some websites remembered your account name somewhere in their database.
- verzali 4mo ago
  His account name could just be 'satoshi'. Or similar.
brador 4mo ago
Someone aware of computer security will not use their name as windows user.
demorro 4mo ago
Please don't support this. Satoshi wants to be anonymous.
sometimelurker 4mo ago
why are we looking for him?
syspec 4mo ago
Good article on why Satoshi is Adam Back https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto-identity-adam-back.html?unlocked_article_code=1.kVA.LT9t.dqerovPi-KbB&smid=nytcore-ios-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-...

48 points by lalaland1125 4mo ago

Why are people so obsessed with finding him? As others have pointed out wrt the New York Times article, it will just put him in danger.

edelbitter 4mo ago
That particular alias is mildly interesting. The obsession is with finally making progress in understanding the "We kill people based on metadata" threat. Maybe we can please finally stop stuffing PII & timestamps into each "crash report" and every "telemetry ping" and get back to work towards 100% reproducible outputs. (Well, right after I "enable javascript and cookies" because Cloudflare/Fastly/Akamai refuse to talk to me before they can grab a unique fingerprint..)
- petterroea 4mo ago
  You are right. I just wish we didn't need victims to get change :(
tim333 4mo ago
I think who Satoshi is is fairly clear if you look into it all but most who do don't put it out there for those reasons.
- petterroea 4mo ago
  In hacker culture I think there's a pretty clear culture that proving you aren't interested in the inner circle's identities (and therefore proving you are a mature person who understands what is at stake) is one of the ways you earn access to the inner circle. The lemma is that people who actively want to be friends with and know people of the inner circle are usually marked as untrustable and (somewhat regrattably) made fun of and excluded. That is, prove you are here for the game, not for rubbing shoulders with powerful people, and you shall become one. I have seen this in warez-related circles, seems like social mechanic that appears naturally to protect those that matter.

illusive4080 4mo ago

Make it a distributed compute problem like GIMPS and let the crowd solve it.

golly_ned 4mo ago

Newsweek already found him back in 2014, remember? They searched for everyone named SN and narrowed it down to the most likely candidate. Foolproof.

recursivecaveat 4mo ago

This is all premised on his windows user account name being identifying no? I have a hard time believing that to be the case for someone who was clearly extremely painstaking about privacy. Even I set mine to some nonsense because I know I'll accidentally leak it.

edelbitter 4mo ago
Should not set it to nonsense, but rather low-entropy. If its unique, someone with access to old (browser, probably) crash reports might be able to cross-reference. Plus, not too long ago browsers did not care to sanitize the path for input[type="file"], so some websites remembered your account name somewhere in their database.
verzali 4mo ago
His account name could just be 'satoshi'. Or similar.

brador 4mo ago

Someone aware of computer security will not use their name as windows user.

demorro 4mo ago

Please don't support this. Satoshi wants to be anonymous.

sometimelurker 4mo ago

why are we looking for him?

syspec 4mo ago

Good article on why Satoshi is Adam Back https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto-identity-adam-back.html?unlocked_article_code=1.kVA.LT9t.dqerovPi-KbB&smid=nytcore-ios-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-...