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Tell HN: Meeting Satoshi
back in 2011 I convinced my wife who ran a small creperie in DUMBO, Brooklyn to start accepting bitcoins. We were one of the first in the world physical location that accepted this new digital currency [1]. In the next couple of month we received a lot of attention, but no one has purchased anything with btc. Then one day, my wife calls me and informs that there is someone who would like to pay with bitcoins. I got excited and asked her to take a picture of the guy because he is the first one and it's a historic moment for us.
He bought 2 crepes and paid using his smartphone and our QR code with btc address. One crepe and a lemonade was 1 bitcoin at that time :)
After he finished his food my wife approached him and asked to take a picture of him for being the first. He blushed and politely declined citing that bitcoin is an anonymous currency. He wished us well, added that bitcoins should already be in our account and left.
My wife called me back and revealed that he refused to take a picture. So I asked her to describe him. She portrayed the guy as a humble polite Japanese man in his 50s. We joked maybe it was Satoshi, but I dismissed the idea. I assumed it was some one from Mt Gox since it was located in Japan.
Today I showed the picture of Satoshi in Newsweek to my wife and she recognized him.
http://bitcoinbabe.blogspot.com/2011/07/bitcoin-sex-drugs-and-baklava-and.html
- rdlecler37 13y agoDo you know which BitCoin it is? This is a collectors piece and you can probably trace its lineage!
- mnw21cam 13y agoOh yay, a collectors' item. So, some bitcoins may be more valuable than others!
- samwilliams 13y agoThis is kind of the idea behind colored coins. http://coloredcoins.org/ http://coloredcoins.org/
- swalsh 13y agoDo we have enough information to track the 10k bitcoins used to buy the first pizza?
- maaku 13y agoCan you identify the transaction? We are fairly certain which bitcoins belong to the real Satoshi Nakamoto.
- out7 13y agoWould you be able to give us the Transaction ID for this? :)
- FT-clox 13y agoWe need to know the adress he used!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- SnaKeZ 13y agoreally fascinating story: now we must ask you the Transaction ID :D
- platz 13y agoI love how smiley faces make it easy to spot evil :D
- malgorithms 13y agoPlease don't disclose the transaction. It's a serious decision, at least.
- chevreuil 13y agowhy ?
- Zikes 13y agoRespect and professionalism?
- angrydev 13y agoBecause a cornerstone of the currency is anonymity.
- dsr_ 13y agoPsuedonymity. The difference is important.
- harryh 13y agoA cornerstone of the currency rests on random folks like this threads OP not disclosing transaction IDs? That sounds like an incredibly weak cornerstone to me.
- Phlarp 13y agoIf that's really the case; the unmasking of Satoshi should (would?) be the final nail in it's coffin.
- jellicle 13y agoActually, disclosing the transaction ID would demonstrate the real cornerstone of bitcoin: the fact that when you get your fingernail under the surface, the whole thing peels up. Identifying Satoshi's account would likely reveal a great deal of information about him and his dealings, and the de-anonymizing can occur anytime, even years or centuries after the fact.
- jpmattia 13y ago> and politely declined citing that bitcoin is an anonymous currency. I wonder if he still believes that today.
- lucb1e 13y agoI wonder about a lot of what he thinks of Bitcoin nowadays and I would love to hear it from him, but I'm not going to ask for it. He may come forward on his own, when and if he wants to.
- brunnsbe 13y agoOh what a witch-hunt after Satoshi, he wants to be left alone from the public so please respect it.
- g4m8i7 13y agoAll of you asking for the transaction ID are incorrigible. The man clearly wants privacy. The kind of privacy that you all opine for every time there's some governmental incursion. Or some startup gets hacked or whatever. Leave the man be.
- rayiner 13y agoIf the man wanted privacy, he shouldn't have designed a system that broadcasts every transaction you make out onto the entire internet.
- lucb1e 13y agoWell we haven't exactly found him through this information yet, but disclosing it after the news of earlier today I think is unethical.
- chm 13y agoAnd well all know that 1-1 = 1. You're confusing concepts here.
- judk 13y agoPlease stop repeating all over HN the ridiculous claim that just because something is visible (with enough work to dig through layers of cloaking) then we conclude that its owner wants it to be seen. It isn't true for government surveillance of our mail and it isn't true with Bitcoin.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- typisk 13y agoWallet of the store: 1KfQKmME7bQm5AesPiizWk6h3JPUekwoBC source: https://twitter.com/Ocrepes/status/83671795693133824 https://twitter.com/Ocrepes/status/83671795693133824
- diminish 13y agonow everyone is tracing a maze of chains to discover the account with millions...
- ecto 13y agoThis is the address for the creperie's wallet: 1KfQKmME7bQm5AesPiizWk6h3JPUekwoBC Blockexplorer: https://blockexplorer.com/address/1KfQKmME7bQm5AesPiizWk6h3JPUekwoBC https://blockexplorer.com/address/1KfQKmME7bQm5AesPiizWk6h3J... Source: http://o-crepes.com/ http://o-crepes.com/
- lucb1e 13y agoGoddamnit guys. Let him be. Come on. Are we hackers here or are we paparazzi? I thought Hacker News was a club of quality-valuing people that saw the world from a hacker's perspective and questioned the status quo. My view is shifting with every comment posted here.
- Delmania 13y agoHi, newsflash "hackers" are people too, and who doesn't love being in the spotlight?
- Peroni 13y agoDong Nguyen and Satoshi Nakamoto.
- Zikes 13y agoYes, there are people in the world with poor manners and still more people that have lapses in judgement, but neither is an excuse for dismissing civility altogether in a community that selects for it. These people are trying to doxx a man using the excuse that he is a public figure, as if that strips him of his humanity. It's a positively shameful behavior, and should not be encouraged or allowed to continue.
- lotsofmangos 13y agoShy people. They find it painful.
- diminish 13y agochasing bitcoin transaction requires a bit of 'hackarazzi'. identifying Satoshi's bitcoin transaction traces may be useful for some applications.
- CmonDev 13y agoWhy use your real name if you don't want the fame?
- lucb1e 13y ago
- priyakanth024 13y agoDO NOT DISCLOSE THE TRANSACTION ID, PLEASE
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Aqueous 13y agoAmazing - that you had the foresight to ask for a picture and he had the foresight to politely decline. Do you think Satoshi travelled all the way from his home in California to your creperie in Brooklyn just to try out BitCoin in real life?
- banachtarski 13y agoWhy does anybody care?
- seeingfurther 13y agoYour crepes are awfully expensive now. ;-) http://o-crepes.com/bitcoin/# http://o-crepes.com/bitcoin/#
- Zikes 13y agoI think we're at the point now where we need a mod to step in and delete this entire post. You guys are literally trying to doxx this man.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- vitd 13y agoHe's already been doxxed by Newsweek. They even published a picture of his house with the street address clearly visible.
- Zikes 13y agoThat's no excuse and you know it.
- gtirloni 13y agoYou sound like the CIA saying the leaked documents are not public information. There is no 'doxxing' to be done anymore. Satoshi has been 'doxxed' as much as anyone can be in real life. If you are worried about the anonymity of his Bitcoins transactions (and all other's that could be identified from that), I'm sorry, there is no such thing as complete anonymity (as the Bitcoin community apparently still has to learn).
- Zikes 13y agoThis is not about anonymity. He posted his name in the original Bitcoin white paper after all. This is about an individual's right to privacy. His finances and personal life have just as much right to protection as yours or mine, and just because you may have the power to disclose that information does not mean you should. For god's sake, you even cite the leaked documents in your argument. Do you remember why that's a big deal? Why we're all so upset that the government has been invading our right to privacy despite our knowing all along that they have technically had the capability and we only expected they would exercise proper caution and due process in wielding it? You're not some internet economics superhero detective, and I don't care what the impact to the economics of bitcoin would be, that still does not give you the ethical right to harass Satoshi Nakamoto.
- rmc 13y agoNo wonder Satoshi wanted to be anonymous. People are already tracing the transaction and the BitCoin. Though it might just be a lesson in how "anonymous" bitcoin transactions actually are.
- gcb0 13y ago>Invents a currency that allows all your received and paid values to be tracked by the entire world. >Says it's anonymous. Good luck with that.
- foxhill 13y ago> apparently knows nothing about bitcoin and the level of anonymity it provides. > comments on it anyway. good luck indeed.
- samfisher83 13y agoEventually the government is going to come after him. If you just happen to be sitting on 400 million without paying taxes the government is going to be interested.
- JanezStupar 13y agoWhat would be the exact time he would owe them? I mean at what price? When he mined them and they were worthless? When he sells them? I think he either owes couple of cents or nothing.
- g4m8i7 13y agoYou usually pay for this sort of thing based on profit, more or less. In this case, his basis is $0 (his cost to acquire the asset). Were he to sell all of them, his profit is essentially 100%; however, I'm not entirely sure how bitcoin gains are codified. If they're regular capital gains, then it's done around that cost basis ($0 in this case), but if they aren't, then I don't know.
- ufmace 13y agoThere was a good post on the tax implications of Bitcoin by (what I think was) an actual accountant a while back. The gist is that it's taxable only when converted to real goods. So if he mined some number of coins early on and is just holding them in wallets, then he owes nothing. Any time anybody sells any coins for cash or any other real goods, they owe tax on the difference between the sale price and the original purchase price. There hasn't been much formal on "purchase price" of mined coins as far as I know/remember. It's probably safest to treat them as a purchase price of zero, thus if you sell mined coins for $100, then you have a $100 income that you owe tax on. A clever accountant might be able to claim that mining hardware, electricity, etc, is the cost of acquisition, and so offset the sale price in that way, but it probably isn't worth the trouble for Satoshi or anyone else mining in the early days.
- PaulAJ 13y ago
- yuxt 13y agoI am not going to reveal any more information that I already have. I respect his will to stay anonymous. It was just an emotional post without a thought of provoking a witch-hunt. Satoshi has been an inspiration to me, I apologize for any inconvenience I might cause.
- GBond 13y agoI saw no harm in the post. Thanks for sharing. IMO, the criticisms are unfounded and just another example of the HN's community recent penchant to hate on anything and everything.
- duaneb 13y agoI think you were well within your rights (and even the bounds of politeness for a cash transaction). If Dorian is not Satoshi, then this won't be a problem. If he is, this wouldn't be what would prove it. His problems are far, far larger than any one person's claim to resolve, I think.
- georgemcbay 13y agoThis wouldn't prove anything one way or another but if it turns out that Dorian was in New York in the later half of 2011 (presumably he would have flown since he lives in CA and thus flight records could probably show one way or another), that would be pretty convincing circumstantial evidence.
- andypag 13y agoHe stated in his denial he'd not heard of "bitcom" until his brother told him about it 3 weeks ago, so if it transpired he'd used it in 2011 then that would prove that he wasn't being entirely truthful.
- josephagoss 13y agoRemember everyone, if you get the correct transaction ID you will not learn too much. It's widely known the vast majority of Satoshi's 1,000,000 bitcoin still sit in their mined blocks. So you might search back to a small set of addresses probably totalling a few thousand bitcoin but nothing spectacular like a giant 50,000+ address.
- Yorn 13y agoWhat cellphone app allowed you to buy and sell Bitcoins in July 2011? I didn't think QR codes were regularly used till late 2011/early 2012.
- jnbiche 13y agoYeah, there were several floating around at that time, as I recall. For example, Bitpay started up around that time, and they had a QR-code-enabled mobile app when they launched. The first commit of bitcoin-wallet (most popular Android wallet presently) was March 8, 2011: https://github.com/schildbach/bitcoin-wallet https://github.com/schildbach/bitcoin-wallet Here's another from that time: https://github.com/barmstrong/bitcoin-android https://github.com/barmstrong/bitcoin-android
- Yorn 13y agoThanks. I do remember using that one or one similar in maybe Fall of that year. I believe the first ones actually downloaded the entire Blockchain which was maybe a gig or two at the time. The one I had became unwieldy enough that I eventually just uninstalled it.
- mathattack 13y agoAnd most of New York wants photos of athletes, musicians and movie stars. :-) I wonder if his motivation was testing, or to generate some seed business for it?
- greyman 13y agoOP: Your account is interesting, but was it really necessary to confirm the doxxing?
- ufmace 13y agoHey, I tried to go to your place to spend some bitcoins last time I was in NYC, which was about 6 months ago. It didn't look like your store was in business anymore, though, and a tweet to a blog post seemed to confirm it. Too bad, I'd still like to spend some BTC at a brick-and-mortar store.
- desult 13y agoI'm curious because this suggests that Satoshi was maybe at the Bitcoin World Conference and Expo in New York, which was in August 2011.
- mattm 13y agoNot that I doubt this story, but human memory is not very reliable. There's many studies that have been done on this. The fact that your wife would remember someone from three years ago who she met for 20 minutes is a little far fetched even if it was a significant meeting. It also matters how you showed the picture. Depending on how you did it can influence people to remember incorrectly.
- a_bonobo 13y agoFurthermore, it's known that Europeans make errors in recognizing Asian faces. From 1987: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3627925 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3627925 Ten European subjects made significantly more errors in recognising Asian faces than European faces http://pss.sagepub.com/content/16/6/440.short http://pss.sagepub.com/content/16/6/440.short Koreans who grew up in Europe recognize Asian faces much worse than Koreans who grew up in Korea, and Koreans who grew up in Korea make mistakes in recognizing European faces. It's called the "Cross-race effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect OP seems to be American so I'd wager that his/her wife is, too.
- aut0mat0n1c 13y agoHello neighbor. I've eaten your crepes. :D
- Sealy 13y agoHow many bitcoins did he pay at the time? (no need to be exact to the satoshi if you want to maintain anonymity, i'm just curious)