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The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator
- klrr 14y agoSorry if this is a obvious question but I haven't read much about Bitcoin actually. This Satoshi Nakomoto, is he/them a company, person, community or even a government?
- krapp 14y agoNo person actually named Satoshi Nakomoto, apparently, exists. Beyond that, nobody knows.
- neilxdsouza 14y agoPG himself posted a question on the origin of bitcoin. You can view the responses in the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423
- dsrguru 14y agoFrom Wikipedia: Fast Company's investigation brought up circumstantial evidence that indicated a link between an encryption patent application filed by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry on 15 August 2008, and the bitcoin.org domain name which was registered 72 hours later. The patent application (#20100042841) contained networking and encryption technologies similar to bitcoin's. After textual analysis, the phrase "...computationally impractical to reverse" was found in both the patent application and bitcoin's whitepaper. All three inventors explicitly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto#Identity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto#Identity
- AlexDanger 14y agoThats the million dollar question. Satoshi invented Bitcoin and worked on it for 3 years. Sometime in 2010, just as Bitcoin was gaining traction, he* withdrew from the project and no one has been heard from him since. There have been many attempts to discover the real identity of this person/group/company/government but to no avail. I believe the focus of this new analysis technique, whilst interesting in its own right, was done for the primary purpose of trying to identify Satoshi. The analysis technique purports to show that certain bitcoins were generated by the same person/computer. This information may assist the tracing of historical bitcoin transactions to their original sources. At the top of the tree is the 'genesis' block - the source of the very first bitcoins. Its reasonable to think that Satoshi mined this block considering he invented the system. There is a thread in the Bitcoin forums[1] discussing whether the initial blocks (up to around 50) were mined by an individual or a group. There is heated debate about what, if any, facts can be concluded by analysing the early blockchain events to discover how many (and what type) of CPUs were involved in this early stage. Satoshi appears to have political motivations (he references distain for bailouts and fiat currency): https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto The Bitcoin story would make a good movie script. *he/she/they/...I [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175996.msg1843782#msg1843782 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175996.msg1843782#ms...
- ultimoo 14y agoThanks for summing up the story till now so succinctly.
- Monkeyget 14y agoWhat an incredible story. Money, technology, mystery, criminals. this would make a great book.
- AlexDanger 14y agoSatoshi's story is just the tip of the iceberg. In the last few years there have been many fascinating technical developments (CPU->GPU->FPGA->ASIC mining), grand heists, price manipulation schemes and even some unexplained events.* I think the future analysis of the blockchain (all Bitcoin transactions are public record) will be a ripe area for economic research. Aside from the technical stuff, watching the growth and mistakes of the economic system is fascinating - like seeing 2000 years of banking/currency evolution packed into a few years. There is also the question of intrinsic worth and how to value a bitcoin - most online debates descend into chaos but the theoretical basis for projecting valuation is a real mind bender. There is no precedent. I'm personally interested in what, if any, nation state involvment there has been with Bitcoin. Regardless of Bitcoin thriving or dying, the system has unequivocally demonstrated that cryptographic systems relying on decentralised trust can work. The theoretical underpinnings of Bitcoin solve the Byzantine's Generals' Problem. And it doesnt just apply to money, it can apply to anything. There is already a decentralised DNS (NameCoin) based on the same protocol. I would have thought this type of system would be of keen interest to many nation states, as it could potentially undermine their own authority or be used as a weapon against other nation states. So yeah, a book would be interesting :) I strongly believe the decentralisation technology underpinning Bitcoin will be a notable part of history. *In 2011 a 'msytery miner' nearly doubled the total network's computing power for a short period only to disappear within a couple of days. The theories are this miner was a clever botnet utilising host GPUs,a supercomputer, or someone testing very early stage ASIC hardware, despite none of the known ASIC producers having working hardware at that point in time. http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mysteryminer.html http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mysteryminer.html
- WhoIsSatoshi 14y agoWho Is Satoshi Nakamoto?
- batgaijin 14y agoWho Is John Galt? Considering the pseudonymous nature of Bitcoin, the people it attracts and who most likely funded the creation of it, this inevitable question and its alluding nature is a laugh riot.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- kamkazemoose 14y agoIf this one person/entity really owns 63% of the market and their currently hoarding it, I imagine that anything they do with their coins could have a huge impact. It might be worth ~100M USD but if they tried to cash out it would likely collapse the market. Even if they start circulating those coins, if not done properly could cause huge inflation.
- lwat 14y agoYou misread, it's not 63% of the market. Its about 10% of the market - 1148800 BTC
- kamkazemoose 14y agoI was looking at this part: >Note that from the 1814400 BTC awarded, 1148800 BTC has never been spent (63%). I suppose (but have not checked it yet) that these are exactly the segments that belong to the mystery entity So I guess I'm confused the market bigger than the 1,814,400 that have been awarded somehow? I'm not that familiar with bitcoins so that's very possible, but the author seems to imply that Nakamoto has 63%.
- lwat 14y agoThe chart stops at 2010, many more bitcoins have been mined since.
- kamkazemoose 14y agoAh that makes sense, thanks. In that case I wonder how many more BTC Nakamoto may have mined since then.
- neilk 14y agoWouldn't Satoshi have spent at least some Bitcoins? Testing the system, or encouraging early economic activity? Although maybe this entity represents just one of the mining machines controlled by Satoshi.
- oleganza 14y agoThe first transaction was to Hal Finney, as a test. But if he tries to buy something pointing to his physical address, it would help a lot revealing his identity. Even buying drugs on Silk Road, since they are delivered by mail to your door.
- gwern 14y agoSatoshi seems to have been offering bitcoins to play with to a lot of people early on; a hacker of my acquaintance mentioned sending Satoshi 'hate mail' (he was annoyed by Satoshi contributing to the babel of half-baked P2P networks at the time) and Satoshi replied with some links explaining Bitcoin and an offer of some coins to try out. So false alarms are perfectly possible in tracking early bitcoins' movements.
- oleganza 14y agoIf Satoshi attempts to spend his coins, this might reveal his identity. Which in turn would increase a risk of kidnapping/blackmailing/torture/etc from anyone willing to get a share of his stash. Same applies to his heirs in the future. My guess is that he may have deleted all the keys to early coins traceable back to him, just to avoid temptation. He could have mined a lot of cheap coins in 2010-2011, though, so he's probably not without a big reward.
- lwat 14y agoNow that someone's identified these coins people will watch them very closely. It's gonna be very difficult for Satoshi to ever get their millions out of the system.
- oleganza 14y agoExactly. Anyone who gets a payment from Satoshi with any identifying info (including "meet at midnight on a bridge"), would be tempted to sell it to gangsters for at least $10M.
- thomasz 14y agoI will happily sell ídentifying info about a few dozen people with a lot more net worth than satoshi.... http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/ http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/
- hkmurakami 14y agoI'm thinking of how is this any different from your standard "hey I got rich suddenly" situations (startup exit, a large contract as an athlete, etc)? Bitcoins themselves are hard to trace / anonymous, but once they are "out of the system", they will be in a regular financial institution and the situation is analogous to your regular internet millionaire. I guess the thing is that he ows such a large fraction of the Bitcoins out there that he can't conceivable liquidate all his Bitcoins in a reasonable amount of time, thus exposing himself to a certain time period where he is known to have a large sum of Bitcoins that are by nature anonymously transferable to a kidnapper? IMO such threats depend largely on where he lives. If he lives in highly affluent areas, then the typical security precautions and rich neighborhood surroundings used by fellow millionaires should be sufficient protection. There are plenty of "rich people" in the world who get by just fine without being kidnapped. Just wander over to your neighborhood Silicon Valley rich neighborhood, and you'll bump into plenty of 8~10 figure people.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- lwat 14y agoL Ron Hubbard
- ewillbefull 14y agoSome context: This blog post is written by Sergio Demian Lerner who has found a number of minor security vulnerabilities in bitcoin's source code. His method of associating blocks to Satoshi's identity has been disputed by several developers of bitcoin.
- mrb 14y agoNo "developers of bitcoin" have disputed Sergio's findings. The 2 persons who are disputing Sergio's findings (gmaxwell and DeathAndTaxes) are the minority. I personally agree with Sergio, I understand his analysis technique, and I have read his previous supporting arguments. gmaxwell was for example making incorrect claims, saying you would need 50+ computers to mine at ~5 Mhash/s (average hashrate throughout 2009) because CPU and code at the time was not optimized. I proved gmaxwell wrong by benchmarking an early version of Bitcoin and showing a 5-year old $200 4-core Phenom was able to do 5 Mhash/s. This validates Sergio's theory that Satoshi could have very well represented the majority of the mining hashrate with a single computer throughout 2009.
- ewillbefull 14y agohttp://bitcoin.org/en/development http://bitcoin.org/en/development Gregory Maxwell is listed as a developer. He also has contributed a lot of code to the project.
- mrb 14y agoMy bad. I forgot his status. It does not change my opinion though (that his criticism is invalid).
- Devilboy 14y agoCan you detail some of the criticism please? I understand what he's doing and it makes sense to me - and I too believe those blocks identified probably belongs to Satoshi or someone very close to them.
- jbackus 14y agoSatoshi is a smart. I would assume that if he/they wanted to remain anonymous and still get some money out of bitcoin later on then he/they are probably mining to multiple wallets. Not sure what the motive is to continuously mine with the wallet linked to block 0, but assuming there are multiple Satoshi wallets in the picture it may be to divert attention away from the wallet he/they are actually spending money with.
- joewee 14y agoI believe its not difficult to find Satoshi Nakamoto. However admitting that you found this person/entity would likely put you in danger. So there is no motivation for the people who might know to speak up. I believe that most large governments do know the identity.
- eridius 14y agoSince everyone's saying Satoshi can't spend any of these bitcoins without revealing him/her/itself, my question is why can't Satoshi convert the bitcoin to USD in a numbered swiss bank account? Is there no way to make a sale like that today? And if not, then what's stopping there from being a way to do that in the next few years?
- rwmj 14y agoWhy wouldn't he just reveal his identity, and become a minor internet celebrity (as well as rich)? It's not as if he's in any real danger.
- eric_bullington 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold Bear in mind that these court cases were taking place as the Bitcoin protocol and client were likely being developed (2007 and 2008).
- Evbn 14y agoHow is that vaguely superficially similar fraud relevant?
- rmc 14y agoIs there no way to make a sale like that today? Correct. There are not enough people who want to buy bitcoins. If those 1M bitcoin were put on the market, the price would plummet.
- darkarmani 14y agoAllowing him to buy more of them for a very cheap price.
- gwern 14y agoErr... Suppose that works. Take it to the logical conclusion: Satoshi drives out every buyer and buys up all outstanding bitcoins. Now what? Bitcoin has become worthless. What does he do with 10m worthless bitcoins to cash out? This is the classic question in attempts to corner a market: how do you bury the body? When you hold as many bitcoins as does Satoshi, you will profit far more from not selling and trying to help out the entire Bitcoin economy and make it grow.
- just2n 14y agoPersonally, I don't find 5% ownership of a currency as a justifiable "deserved" fortune to any one person. That's trillions on the scale of existing currencies. That's enough to buy a world power. Is the idea so novel that it can't be re-booted in a manner that has better protection of anonymity and which isn't amenable to being mined for years by just a handful of people (to the point that they own a huge % of all available coins)? The guy who owns all of the gold mines is more than happy to back gold as a currency, after all.
- jjs 14y agoReboot? Anonymity (and liquidity!) seems more feasible with multiple viable cryptocurrencies coexisting. e.g. using an exchange site (which has legitimate reason to exist), sell Bitcoins for Litecoins, then sell Litecoins for Bitcoins of different provenance.
- Evbn 14y agoMoney laundering. National governments will not tolerate this unregulated. This might work for a little while on Tor, but not on Time Warner internet.
- Devilboy 14y agoTrillions? I think you're being just a little over optimistic about the future of bitcoin here.
- eric-hu 14y agoMany comments here discuss how easy it is to discover Satoshi if he moved any money out of these known accounts. Please point out the flaw in the following strategy: Satoshi (the man, the woman, the government, the organization, etc) programmatically creates many wallets at random intervals over an extended period of time (months, years). Money is moved into and out of these accounts to make them appear to be 'consumers'. Bitcoins are then moved from Satoshi's wallets into these accounts as well as some percentage "burned" by sending bitcoins to random addresses not belonging to him. The larger the burn rate, the higher the chances he won't be discovered. (Essentially, this ends up being a self-implemented version of Bitlaundry that sends the service fee to random members of the Bitcoin community).
- waterlesscloud 14y agoThere's an interesting point in the bitcoin forums that someone basically had to mine the entire first year or two, just to ensure the network even existed. If someone downloaded a client to play around with it and there was no network to connect to, the project would never take off. So it's possible Satoshi ran a client or two for that purpose, which had the side-effect of mining coins. To me, this seems like a very likely scenario. Almost required, even. Another interesting comment- if enough miners agreed, coins from the Satoshi blocks could just be blacklisted from the network. Some irony there, eh?
- polemic 14y ago> "if enough miners agreed, coins from the Satoshi blocks could just be blacklisted from the network. Some irony there, eh?" Well, if enough miners agreed, anything can happen, but I doubt you'd get the required majority. It would undermine the entire system.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoThere's previously been talk supporting blacklists for stolen coins. I suspect it's the sort of thing that will increase in pressure if bitcoin grows much further. It wouldn't surprise me if blacklisting eventually happens in some form or another.
- OGC 14y agoi have a bad feeling about that.
- davidjohnstone 14y agoI've made this comment here before, but the possibility of this happening concerns me. The 51% attack is a known potential issue of Bitcoin, but the more subtle problem is that Bitcoin is essentially a sort of democracy where voting power is proportional to computing power. The miners collectively have the power to change the way Bitcoin works, and it's up to them to not abuse that power (although Bitcoin would quickly drop in value if that power was abused). This matters for decisions like blacklisting stolen Bitcoins, because it causes deflationary pressure, making all future Bitcoins mined more valuable. Note that about half of all Bitcoins are yet to be mined, and they will all start out in the wallets of miners.
- logn 14y agoThe Well Deserved Fortune of the Federal Reserve Seriously, as the world's currency and failures of other countries to issue a reserve currency, one of the dollar's biggest threats would be a crypto-currency. Either the project succeeds and you have an enormous source of potentially hidden money in the currency to maybe overtake the dollar, or it fails and you make sure it fails with such repercussions that no other crypto-currency can be easily introduced again, either due to new laws or loss of confidence. Additionally if they have the ability to crack SHA256 (designed by the NSA), the government could print the money. And they could probably have planned a way to sabotage bitcoins if they decided to back out before a certain point. The financial crisis may have helped sway the final decision to execute the plan: August 7, 2007: BNP Paribas terminated withdrawals from three hedge funds citing "a complete evaporation of liquidity". September 6, 2008: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac placed in conservatorship by the U.S. government. September 15, 2008: Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. November 1, 2008: Satoshi Nakamoto publishes first bitcoin paper. Sources of dates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932012_global_finan.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932012_global_finan.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_takeover_of_Fannie_Mae_.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_takeover_of_Fannie_Mae_.... http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/all/ http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/all/
- codeulike 14y agoIts often supposed that Bitcoin arose as a reaction to the financial crisis, but that reaction is just as likely to have come from someone who was fed up with the government, as is it to come from the government. So your list of dates doesn't really count either way.
- logn 14y agoI see two main possibilities: (1) the paper was prepared anytime in advance and withheld until the dollar/US/world faced serious risk. (2) The BTC paper was started in the early stages of the crisis or later. Both possibilities could suggest the BTC creators had an interest in the success of the dollar. The alternative would be that it was opportunism of BTC creators who were always against the dollar or turned on it in the crisis. I happen to think that if you were always against the dollar you would just release bitcoin immediately and hope for the most disruption. I'd think that someone supportive of the dollar would be more apt to release it strategically as a contingency. In my mind that means that dollar supporters are the better chance of being behind bitcoin because they could have made it any time in the past or as the crisis progressed, whereas dollar opponents only had the time of the crisis to make it. Assuming that, I think then the US has an above-average chance of being the authors of bitcoin.
- salman89 14y agoIs there enough liquidity (I'm not even sure if this is the right word) in the standard exchanges to move $100M USD of BTC?
- waterlesscloud 14y agoSort of. Selling 1,000,000 coins on MtGox right now would take the price down to $0.10, with an average price of $19.64, so you'd net $19 million. Of course, what would really happen is that everyone would see it happening and cancel their bids before the wave reached them, so you'd likely not be able to actually sell them all at once. Leaking them out a few thousand a day, though, would be completely possible. And if done correctly need not move the market at all.
- mckoss 14y agoI disagree that 1M coins could not be sold very quickly on MtGox. Yes, the price would go way down, but there are plenty of interested buyers who would be happy to "cash Satoshi out" to take some profits; he would certainly get serveral millions of dollars for his coins. The bigger problem is that selling on MtGox requires identifying himself to create an account (not to mention the current $1,000 per day withdrawal limit for USD).
- goggles99 14y agoSomeone wanted to get rich so they invented their own money and suckered a bunch of people into a "cult" with a bunch of hippie ideas. Nothing new here. Do you know how many cults have done this throughout history?
- chii 14y agoexcept this hippie idea is based on sound mathematical proofs and concepts, and not some flying spaghetti monster god.
- illuminate 14y agoThe technical operation is not the ideology behind Bitcoin, and it certainly isn't the whole of how Bitcoin is used. There's plenty of utopian fantasy surrounding it and a fascinating social dynamic that has absolutely nothing to do with "sound mathematical proofs and concepts" but more intangible qualities assigned to it by its proponents.
- betterunix 14y ago"this hippie idea is based on sound mathematical proofs and concepts" What proofs? There is not even a formal security definition for Bitcoin.
- b6 14y agoWhat Satoshi did is easy, right? You could do it tomorrow, it's just that you're too ethical, right?
- illuminate 14y agoNot everybody wants to be L Ron Hubbard? Granted, I don't think BTC is as much of a "cult" as that poster is stating, but I don't think your counterargument is very convincing. Critics of the social aspects of technology (let's use Google Glasses as another example, only slightly less polarizing than BTC) aren't hating on technology, just implementation and the less technical predictions/assumptions/evangelism surrounding the technology.
- advaitraut 14y agoWhen it comes to Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto, the first character comes to my mind: Kira from 'Death Note'
- Charlesmigli 14y agoI highlighted the conclusion of Lerner's analysis here https://tldr.io/tldrs/516f951cc8cb5249260002c5/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto-bitcoin-creator-visionary-andgenius https://tldr.io/tldrs/516f951cc8cb5249260002c5/the-well-dese.... This looks pretty convincing even tough one might think that Satoshi would own multiple wallets.
- aray 14y agoIs there any particular reason Satoshi Nakamoto would want their identity hidden, other than personal preference? If I had $100M USD then I probably would care a lot less about who knew it.
- andypants 14y agoReally? I'm not too bothered about my identity right now, as just another face in the crowd. If I had $100M, I'd care a lot more about who knew it.
- mcherm 14y agoPerhaps the person (or persons) is concerned that bitcoin will become even more successful and will threaten powerful institutions like major world governments. I wouldn't want to be Julian Assange right now, and that is a perfectly sensible reason for the inventor of bitcoin to wish to remain anonymous. A different reason might be a fear that if a single inventor were known that bitcoin would become vulnerable to "change it this way because the founder says so" attacks, weakening the decentralized, P2P nature of the currency. (This is a less plausible reason, but still valid.)
- dcaranda 14y agoit's to avoid bias in the system
- flux_w42 14y agoMaybe Satoshi Nakamoto died before bitcoins got popular ...
- L0j1k 14y agoWhy is everyone here completely forgetting about the recent Zerocoin development? It's a system that could one day piggyback on the Bitcoin blockchain, and it pretty effectively wipes BTC of any prints that might be on them through a system not unlike an anonymous exchange (based heavily on zero knowledge proof of work concepts). Once Zerocoin becomes a "thing" in the BTC community, the Satoshis can spend as many of their coins as they want with zero fear of being tracked down through transactions.
- mikegioia 14y agoI found this on bitcointalk re: zerocoin: "Zerocoin would give you this incredible privacy guarantee, then we could add on some features which let the police, for instance, to be able to track money laundering. A back door." From http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2013/03/bitcoin-zerocoin.html http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2013/03/bitcoin...
- runeks 14y agoZerocoin is interesting, definitely, but it turns out there are a lot of problems with it. I started a thread on bitcointalk.org about it, and a lot of developers chimed in with their opinion on it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175156.0;all https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175156.0;all
- brianbreslin 14y agoLet's assume Satoshi (the entity) is insanely patient, decides to wait until say 2015, by then BTC is trading around $1000/BTC (theoretical). He is then sitting on BILLIONS of dollars in value. If he feels the market can bear it, he starts liquidating and reveals himself. Assuming the market doesn't collapse and he isn't kidnapped, he would quickly become one of the wealthiest people on the planet (top 20).
- qoo 14y agoSatoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym of Keyser Söze.
- zetazzed 14y agoThis is clearly illuminating the Ponzi-like elements of Bitcoin. As in a Ponzi scheme, early arrivals to the system earn easy money, funded by later arrivals. Tales of bitcoin fortunes draw more and more entry to the system, leading to large payoffs for second stage arrivals, attracting more speculators due to the media attention and very real money that has been made by early players. This continues until, oh, wait, bitcoins aren't so easy to mine anymore and there's no new wave of incoming money to pay of the next generation of miners. The hilarious thing is that Bitcoin is quite transparent about exactly how it works, while a real Ponzi scheme goes to great lengths to hide this dynamic. Anyone can see this dynamic in the rising price and the increasing CPU time needed to mine a new coin. And yet, brilliant, savvy investors like the Winklevosses are somehow still getting involved...
- smartician 14y agoBy that logic, any emerging industry has this Ponzi-like characteristics. Early players will always have a large share, almost by definition. A more defining characteristic of a Ponzi scheme is that the early player's dividends are actually paid from the principal of late-comers. Which only works until you have a steady stream of new investors. As far as I understand Bitcoin, this is not the case there. It just gets harder and harder to "mine" new coins.
- bertomartin 14y agoWhat's stopping someone with a really fast computer from corner the bitcoin market? I'm probably being naive here as I don't know the details of bitcoin, just that it's a digital currency that can only be mined to come into being. Anyways, a good explanation from the HN community would be really helpful. thnx.
- baudehlo 14y ago(Opportunity) cost. Right now bitcoin mining is starting to require custom ASICs/FPGAs to be worthwhile (although the increasing price offsets that, obviously), because mining bitcoins becomes harder the more bitcoins there are found, so the costs of hardware and electricity start to get very large. If you had a supercomputer with tens of thousands of CPUs it's probably being put to more scientific use than trying to corner the bitcoin market, which is basically still a gamble at this stage.
- bertomartin 14y agogood answer and thank you. I was thinking of it more as an accepted currency. Because if it's seen as being such, then it would be worth it to mine as much as possible. And what happens when they run out? It's pretty confusing to me...
- dobbsbob 14y agoI dont think Satoshi owns a single bitcoin. Never did he write anywhere that Bitcoins should be hoarded as a shady get rich scheme and all his writings clearly are for Bitcoin to be used for pseudo anon payments. He also gave thousands of them away to Hal and other people on the cryptography mailing list.
- jgoodwin 14y agoSomeone should verify the 'large entity' discovered by Shamir is distinct: http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584 http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584