6 ms·

I find it increasingly hard to believe that Satoshi was one person. It is, however, in the best interest of everyone but journalists that they keep their identi

by abrkn 12y ago

I find it increasingly hard to believe that Satoshi was one person. It is, however, in the best interest of everyone but journalists that they keep their identities hidden to avoid ad hominem attacks.

at-fates-hands 12y ago
I've always felt it was more of a consortium of people as well. It makes a lot of sense if you start to think about it. With a small group of people working on it, it spreads the knowledge out, decentralizes any authorship or specific authority for credit and makes it easy for the team to simply vanish without a trace since most people are looking for one person, instead of many. Sounds a lot like BTC itself, doesn't it? I wouldn't doubt this was part of the design from the very beginning. It then leaves the by-product behind for others to pick up and push forward - which is essentially what's happened.
- javert 12y ago
  I very much doubt Satoshi is a group of people, because the nature of bitcoin is too much of a creative leap to have been discovered by committee. That said, "Satoshi" could have had a group of suboordinates or collaborators working with him on the grunt work. Though again, from what I've read about the original C++ code, it looked like the work of a lone genius-albiet-non-programmer.
  - Retric 12y ago
    A distributed Digital currency backed by processing power was a fairly old idea at the time. The first time I heard about the idea was late 90's but I think it's earlier than that. EX: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
    - jafaku 12y ago
      What about the idea of a blockchain? Because that's the creative leap.
      - Retric 12y ago
        How else do you propose to create a distributed concurrency? The traditional approach would be a public ledger mantained by the 'miners' aka a block-chain. The the issue is that's not anonymous, but while a lot research went into creating an anonymous currency bitcoin was a MVP which took off. Now, I am not saying nothing about bitcoin was new, just the innovation was in the specific implementation not the overall idea. Bit torrent was released in July 2001, bitcoin 2009 so the idea of distributed networks was fairly well established at the time. PS: And yes, there was a lot of early criticism about the public nature of bitcoin.
        leviself 12y ago
        There really was no "traditional approach" to creating a distributed digital currency at the time. The blockchain is a product of Satoshi's thought and is the central innovation in bitcoin. The principal issue was not anonymity but making a network that didn't require third parties to prevent double-spending. Genuine technical problems that a lot of smart people hadn't been able to solve were solved by bitcoin. Bittorrent was way easier because it was about copying, whereas a currency has to in a sense make copying impossible via some sort of time-stamping to prevent double-spend.
        jafaku 12y ago
        > How else do you propose to create a distributed concurrency? That's the point: No one knew how to do that before Satoshi. > The traditional approach would be a public ledger mantained by the 'miners' aka a block-chain. Are you joking? If you knew about the blockchain and miners before 2008, you could have simply created Bitcoin yourself and become multimillionaire. > The the issue is that's not anonymous, but while a lot research went into creating an anonymous currency bitcoin was a MVP which took off. The issue was no one knew how to create a trustless consensus mechanism. And Bitcoin is not anonymous, it's pseudonymous. True anonymity only became possible after Bytecoin's innovation in the use of ring signatures. Nowadays the most popular coin with true anonymity is Monero (created in 2014, as a fork of Bytecoin with a fair distribution). > the innovation was in the specific implementation not the overall idea Clearly you don't know what you are talking about. > Bit torrent What does that have to do with anything? Bittorrent doesn't use a blockchain.
    - leviself 12y ago
      This is not exactly correct. Nobody had proposed a system that was as distributed as bitcoin until bitcoin came on the scene. Szabo wanted to use lots of timestamp servers and Finney wanted to rely on "transparent servers" that borrowed ideas from Trusted Computing so they could be audited. To have a currency backed by processing power is not really an old idea either. It was at most 10 years old and nobody really had a good idea how proof-of-work (POW) could make a currency at that time (around 1999). I'm referring to the "Bread Pudding" variant of MicroMint (http://www.hashcash.org/papers/bread-pudding.pdf http://www.hashcash.org/papers/bread-pudding.pdf), not Cryptonomicon which doesn't really mention distributed computing or POW.
  - swalsh 12y ago
    One person could have come up with the idea, brought it to a few close friends who took it and ran. There are many examples of close groups of talented friends building successful good quality products.
    - junto 12y ago
      But not a bunch of friends that can keep such a huge secret and resist touching those (very valuable) early mined coins. With multiple people in a consortium, I cannot believe that one of them can resist appearing on the front page of Time magazine. Loners are much better at staying hidden. E.g. the Unibomber or any number of serial killers who worked alone.
      - at-fates-hands 12y ago
        >>> I cannot believe that one of them can resist appearing on the front page of Time magazine. I agree on this point. But if you have three people with the integrity and high moral cause, there's no reason a group of people can keep a secret. Look at all the secret societies we currently have just in this country. >>> Loners are much better at staying hidden. E.g. the Unibomber or any number of serial killers who worked alone. This, however is not true in terms of serial killers. Most get caught because they want to get caught and like the media attention and the trying to out smart the police. The only reason the unabomber got caught was that he was upset about the 9/11 bombing overshadowed one of his recent bombings and was stealing his media attention. Shortly thereafter, he insisted his manifesto be published, which then led his brother to turn him in after he read it. It was the very pursuit of attention that you say leads groups to not be able to keep secrets that did in many high profile serial killers who often worked alone. The one exception being either the Zodiac killer or the Golden State killer who you could just as easily call outliers.
    - vertex-four 12y ago
      I'll point out that the Bitcoin cliet was not originally a good quality product, and in fact was rather full of bugs and security issues, not to mention being rather heavily tied to Windows.
  - Terr_ 12y ago
    "Creative leap"? Most influential technologies are either incremental improvements that overcame some final hump, or straight retries of things which were before their time.
    - jafaku 12y ago
      The blockchain is a creative leap, not an "improvement".
  - hellbanner 12y ago
    If "Satoshi" was smart enough to write Bitcoin, could "Satoshi" have been smart enough to obfuscate their code writing style?
amurph 12y ago
Well, if we have access to his posts (which we do) couldn't someone run it through a program that attempts to find consistencies in an author's writing style? I know there are several such. Of course this would only prove if there was either on 'PR' person for the group or not, but it's a start for testing this hypothesis.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- wmf 12y ago
  https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-nick-szabo/ https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakam... After this article came out Szabo denied that he is Satoshi.
junto 12y ago
One argument against the consortium of people is that the more people you add, the more likely someone leaks. There have been no leaks and as far as I aware those early mined Satoshi blocks haven't been moved. That being said, rather than a group of friends, a government agency or a highly secretive group of cyberpunks, I could imagine two or more family members keeping such a secret. However it would still be hard to resist the urge to cash in on even some of those mined coins, unless you were already stinking rich. I know that many have theorised that Satoshi could have simply lost the coins, but as the author states in his article, it seems like Satoshi went out of his way to back up his clients on a regular basis. That isn't the action of someone who loses things so easily, especially if they both believed in, and could appreciate the impact of the project. Just my two cents.
- 0x0 12y ago
  Could they have been mined towards a wallet whose private key were never recorded, if a group agreed ahead of time to never spend those first blocks? They could probably still get wealthy by getting in on the action fairly early with a separate set of mining identities, if that's what they wanted.
  - stormbrew 12y ago
    This is an interesting idea. Given the additive properties of bitcoin keys it would even be pretty easy to make a key that was very very unlikely to be recoverable. Three people separately generate keys, throw away the private keys, and then mine to the product of the three public keys. It would take all three of them lying about throwing away the private keys and then collaborating to recover the combined private key to get the coins back.
    - 0x0 12y ago
      That sounds like a reasonable scheme!
    - yohanatan 12y ago
      Another possibility is that one (or more) of the 3 installs spyware on the other collaborators before the generation (or at least before the subsequent destruction) of the private keys. Then the attacker waits a while and then combines all the captured keys to produce the combined private key and claim/spend the mother lode.
meowface 12y ago
I'm willing to wager 0.3 BTC that Satoshi is and has always been one person. I'll also wager 0.05 BTC that he's male, lives in the US, and is currently under 40.
- johnwyles 12y ago
  I'd bet 0.05 BTC he is over 40.
  - jafaku 12y ago
    I'd bet 0.05 BTC he watches anime.
    - meowface 12y ago
      Any particular reason why? There's no real evidence that he's a Japanophile, other than being a non-Japanese person taking a Japanese name. edit: I'm not sure if I was downvoted because I failed to notice the person I was replying to was joking, or for some other reason.
      - oofabz 12y ago
        Are you sure he's not Japanese? I've never seen any evidence of his location. He is fluent in written English, but that doesn't really narrow it down.
        adamnemecek 12y ago
        He uses a bunch of colloquialisms which kinda hints at him living in an English speaking country. Obv one could also pick those up online, but I'm guessing that the first scenario is more likely.
        meowface 12y ago
        No, I am not sure, but if you look at all the evidence discussed by other people who have researched his posts, there are a lot of signs that suggest he is a native speaker. If you sit down and read all of his bitcointalk posts, it's pretty easy to come to the same conclusion. There's also always the chance his parents are Japanese but he was born in an English-speaking country, but I think considering the fact he clearly wanted to hide his identity, he probably picked a name that was unrelated to his true nationality and ethnicity.

by abrkn 12y ago

at-fates-hands 12y ago

I've always felt it was more of a consortium of people as well. It makes a lot of sense if you start to think about it. With a small group of people working on it, it spreads the knowledge out, decentralizes any authorship or specific authority for credit and makes it easy for the team to simply vanish without a trace since most people are looking for one person, instead of many. Sounds a lot like BTC itself, doesn't it? I wouldn't doubt this was part of the design from the very beginning. It then leaves the by-product behind for others to pick up and push forward - which is essentially what's happened.

javert 12y ago
I very much doubt Satoshi is a group of people, because the nature of bitcoin is too much of a creative leap to have been discovered by committee. That said, "Satoshi" could have had a group of suboordinates or collaborators working with him on the grunt work. Though again, from what I've read about the original C++ code, it looked like the work of a lone genius-albiet-non-programmer.
- Retric 12y ago
  A distributed Digital currency backed by processing power was a fairly old idea at the time. The first time I heard about the idea was late 90's but I think it's earlier than that. EX: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
  - jafaku 12y ago
    What about the idea of a blockchain? Because that's the creative leap.
    - Retric 12y ago
      How else do you propose to create a distributed concurrency? The traditional approach would be a public ledger mantained by the 'miners' aka a block-chain. The the issue is that's not anonymous, but while a lot research went into creating an anonymous currency bitcoin was a MVP which took off. Now, I am not saying nothing about bitcoin was new, just the innovation was in the specific implementation not the overall idea. Bit torrent was released in July 2001, bitcoin 2009 so the idea of distributed networks was fairly well established at the time. PS: And yes, there was a lot of early criticism about the public nature of bitcoin.
      - leviself 12y ago
        There really was no "traditional approach" to creating a distributed digital currency at the time. The blockchain is a product of Satoshi's thought and is the central innovation in bitcoin. The principal issue was not anonymity but making a network that didn't require third parties to prevent double-spending. Genuine technical problems that a lot of smart people hadn't been able to solve were solved by bitcoin. Bittorrent was way easier because it was about copying, whereas a currency has to in a sense make copying impossible via some sort of time-stamping to prevent double-spend.
      - jafaku 12y ago
        > How else do you propose to create a distributed concurrency? That's the point: No one knew how to do that before Satoshi. > The traditional approach would be a public ledger mantained by the 'miners' aka a block-chain. Are you joking? If you knew about the blockchain and miners before 2008, you could have simply created Bitcoin yourself and become multimillionaire. > The the issue is that's not anonymous, but while a lot research went into creating an anonymous currency bitcoin was a MVP which took off. The issue was no one knew how to create a trustless consensus mechanism. And Bitcoin is not anonymous, it's pseudonymous. True anonymity only became possible after Bytecoin's innovation in the use of ring signatures. Nowadays the most popular coin with true anonymity is Monero (created in 2014, as a fork of Bytecoin with a fair distribution). > the innovation was in the specific implementation not the overall idea Clearly you don't know what you are talking about. > Bit torrent What does that have to do with anything? Bittorrent doesn't use a blockchain.
  - leviself 12y ago
    This is not exactly correct. Nobody had proposed a system that was as distributed as bitcoin until bitcoin came on the scene. Szabo wanted to use lots of timestamp servers and Finney wanted to rely on "transparent servers" that borrowed ideas from Trusted Computing so they could be audited. To have a currency backed by processing power is not really an old idea either. It was at most 10 years old and nobody really had a good idea how proof-of-work (POW) could make a currency at that time (around 1999). I'm referring to the "Bread Pudding" variant of MicroMint (http://www.hashcash.org/papers/bread-pudding.pdf http://www.hashcash.org/papers/bread-pudding.pdf), not Cryptonomicon which doesn't really mention distributed computing or POW.
- swalsh 12y ago
  One person could have come up with the idea, brought it to a few close friends who took it and ran. There are many examples of close groups of talented friends building successful good quality products.
  - junto 12y ago
    But not a bunch of friends that can keep such a huge secret and resist touching those (very valuable) early mined coins. With multiple people in a consortium, I cannot believe that one of them can resist appearing on the front page of Time magazine. Loners are much better at staying hidden. E.g. the Unibomber or any number of serial killers who worked alone.
    - at-fates-hands 12y ago
      >>> I cannot believe that one of them can resist appearing on the front page of Time magazine. I agree on this point. But if you have three people with the integrity and high moral cause, there's no reason a group of people can keep a secret. Look at all the secret societies we currently have just in this country. >>> Loners are much better at staying hidden. E.g. the Unibomber or any number of serial killers who worked alone. This, however is not true in terms of serial killers. Most get caught because they want to get caught and like the media attention and the trying to out smart the police. The only reason the unabomber got caught was that he was upset about the 9/11 bombing overshadowed one of his recent bombings and was stealing his media attention. Shortly thereafter, he insisted his manifesto be published, which then led his brother to turn him in after he read it. It was the very pursuit of attention that you say leads groups to not be able to keep secrets that did in many high profile serial killers who often worked alone. The one exception being either the Zodiac killer or the Golden State killer who you could just as easily call outliers.
  - vertex-four 12y ago
    I'll point out that the Bitcoin cliet was not originally a good quality product, and in fact was rather full of bugs and security issues, not to mention being rather heavily tied to Windows.
- Terr_ 12y ago
  "Creative leap"? Most influential technologies are either incremental improvements that overcame some final hump, or straight retries of things which were before their time.
  - jafaku 12y ago
    The blockchain is a creative leap, not an "improvement".
- hellbanner 12y ago
  If "Satoshi" was smart enough to write Bitcoin, could "Satoshi" have been smart enough to obfuscate their code writing style?

amurph 12y ago

Well, if we have access to his posts (which we do) couldn't someone run it through a program that attempts to find consistencies in an author's writing style? I know there are several such. Of course this would only prove if there was either on 'PR' person for the group or not, but it's a start for testing this hypothesis.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
wmf 12y ago
https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-nick-szabo/ https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakam... After this article came out Szabo denied that he is Satoshi.

junto 12y ago

One argument against the consortium of people is that the more people you add, the more likely someone leaks. There have been no leaks and as far as I aware those early mined Satoshi blocks haven't been moved. That being said, rather than a group of friends, a government agency or a highly secretive group of cyberpunks, I could imagine two or more family members keeping such a secret. However it would still be hard to resist the urge to cash in on even some of those mined coins, unless you were already stinking rich. I know that many have theorised that Satoshi could have simply lost the coins, but as the author states in his article, it seems like Satoshi went out of his way to back up his clients on a regular basis. That isn't the action of someone who loses things so easily, especially if they both believed in, and could appreciate the impact of the project. Just my two cents.

0x0 12y ago
Could they have been mined towards a wallet whose private key were never recorded, if a group agreed ahead of time to never spend those first blocks? They could probably still get wealthy by getting in on the action fairly early with a separate set of mining identities, if that's what they wanted.
- stormbrew 12y ago
  This is an interesting idea. Given the additive properties of bitcoin keys it would even be pretty easy to make a key that was very very unlikely to be recoverable. Three people separately generate keys, throw away the private keys, and then mine to the product of the three public keys. It would take all three of them lying about throwing away the private keys and then collaborating to recover the combined private key to get the coins back.
  - 0x0 12y ago
    That sounds like a reasonable scheme!
  - yohanatan 12y ago
    Another possibility is that one (or more) of the 3 installs spyware on the other collaborators before the generation (or at least before the subsequent destruction) of the private keys. Then the attacker waits a while and then combines all the captured keys to produce the combined private key and claim/spend the mother lode.

meowface 12y ago

I'm willing to wager 0.3 BTC that Satoshi is and has always been one person. I'll also wager 0.05 BTC that he's male, lives in the US, and is currently under 40.

johnwyles 12y ago
I'd bet 0.05 BTC he is over 40.
- jafaku 12y ago
  I'd bet 0.05 BTC he watches anime.
  - meowface 12y ago
    Any particular reason why? There's no real evidence that he's a Japanophile, other than being a non-Japanese person taking a Japanese name. edit: I'm not sure if I was downvoted because I failed to notice the person I was replying to was joking, or for some other reason.
    - oofabz 12y ago
      Are you sure he's not Japanese? I've never seen any evidence of his location. He is fluent in written English, but that doesn't really narrow it down.
      - adamnemecek 12y ago
        He uses a bunch of colloquialisms which kinda hints at him living in an English speaking country. Obv one could also pick those up online, but I'm guessing that the first scenario is more likely.
      - meowface 12y ago
        No, I am not sure, but if you look at all the evidence discussed by other people who have researched his posts, there are a lot of signs that suggest he is a native speaker. If you sit down and read all of his bitcointalk posts, it's pretty easy to come to the same conclusion. There's also always the chance his parents are Japanese but he was born in an English-speaking country, but I think considering the fact he clearly wanted to hide his identity, he probably picked a name that was unrelated to his true nationality and ethnicity.