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The Satoshi Nakamoto Email Hacker Says He's Negotiating with the Bitcoin Founder
- jokoon 12y agowhy does that story matter ? what is that "hitman" threat ?
- imaginenore 12y agoIt no longer really matters who Satoshi is. He doesn't participate in Bitcoin development. He isn't that wealthy, yet at least. Nor his character assassination can affect Bitcoin much, while it could a few years ago. He was pretty smart staying anonymous, he realized he would be targeted and smeared.
- taternuts 12y agoHe's potentially worth a _lot_ of money and could have a heavy hand in swaying the bitcoin market for the worse if he wanted to.... or if someone else was somehow able to force his hand
- gnaritas 12y ago> He isn't that wealthy, yet at least. It's speculated that he owns about a half a billion in Bitcoin at current market prices, how is that not wealthy "yet"?
- harwoodr 12y agoInteresting read... the whole Degavas1337/LulzClerk thing could be a red-herring depending on how many ended up with access to the mail account... However if it is him, he's got quite the digital footprint: http://pastebin.com/G2GJJfP3 http://pastebin.com/G2GJJfP3
- eli 12y agoI think it's pretty much always a bad idea to "dox" someone. Especially when, as you say, you're not even sure it's the right person.
- kinghajj 12y agoWait, so this pastebin is saying that http://i.imgur.com/9ngtiK5.jpg http://i.imgur.com/9ngtiK5.jpg is Satoshi?
- Phlarp 12y agoNo, it's saying that this is the guy that has allegedly hacked Satoshi.
- Glyptodon 12y agoGMX has pretty bad security policies, so it's not that surprising to me that someone got access. Last I checked they didn't even require HTTPS.
- matoffk 12y agoTo be fair, very few email providers required SSL before Snowden.
- danbruc 12y agoIf I gain access to such an account, I change the password to something that no one will ever break. Maybe besides the rightful owner by some account recovery mechanism I am unable to disable. But multiple people having access seems a very unlikely scenario to me. Why would you share the credentials (and risk getting locked out yourself)?
- showerst 12y agoThis suggests that they gained access by some mechanism other than having the legit password.
- danbruc 12y agoIn this case GMX would have to have a huge security hole that is not widely known, otherwise mass exploitation would probably quickly trigger alarms. Not impossible but seems also unlikely to me because it must be known to at least a couple of people and I would imagine that the knowledge about such a security hole would spread quite quickly once more than a handful of people know about it. And an inside job by several different people at more or less the same point in time seems unlikely, too. So the most likely scenario to me is still that only a single person broke the password and the multiple-people-have-access-story is just FUD.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- psykovsky 12y agoGaining access to such email accounts is something you often do?
- carsongross 12y agoWhy do I get the feeling that even if this guy gets what he wants, in the long run he'll end up getting what he deserves?
- nly 12y agoI think we've passed the point where even if the original Satoshi steps forward with a PGP signed autobiography nobody will believe it's really him. We like our legends I guess.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoIt would be a credible way to stay unfound, create doubt about every version.
- lucb1e 12y agoGood point. I think his private PGP key and moving some coins around might be pretty convincing though... Even a stupid version of Nakamoto would understand that private keys are kept offline and in safe storage, especially if you made software as complex as Bitcoin. I think I would have thrown away my wallet so that the early mined blocks simply could not be moved even if I wanted to. And in any case, Nakamoto may not be a single person after all.
- mcs 12y agoThe identity could remain unverified for eternity if original keys aren't available, and it's possible there was a deliberate destroying of the keys. Satoshi has said that the losing of coins were a donation to everyone else -- and who else would make a donation to the entirety of the Bitcoin ecosystem other than Satoshi?
- scintill76 12y agoWhy not provably destroy them then (send them to an output that can never be spent)?
- tedunangst 12y agoIf you wanted to throw coins away, wouldn't a better solution be to transfer them to an address like 12345678901234567890...?
- shutupalready 12y ago
- l33tbro 12y agoDo we know for sure that Satoshi actually had a GMX account?
- 3rd3 12y agoThe SourceForge project was associated with that account.
- lucb1e 12y agoI think he wrote messages signed with his private key from there, so yeah that's certain.
- UVB-76 12y agoThe email address in question is the one mentioned in the original Bitcoin paper [1] [1] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
- vitoreiji 12y agoSkype? Sounds strange to me.
- DominikR 12y agoI had a GMX account years ago that was hacked and my password was pretty hard. (I generate my passwords with Keypass) I suspect that this is not Satoshis fault, but that GMX security is really bad.
- dmix 12y agoHave any security researchers checked GMX out yet? Maybe they suffer from a lack of bruteforcing protection ala iCloud.
- flogic 12y agoA keepass password should be prohibitively hard to brute force that way. They're random and fairly long. It's far more likely the attacker found some other route.
- rdl 12y agoRecovery passwords for email accounts are actually kind of tricky, since the standard is generally recover-password-through-proof-of-control-of-email-account. You can do SMS, but then you need phone numbers for users. Requiring "alternate email" is kind of a nightmare. I wish someone could build a "account recovery as a service", with different levels of escalation. It would be fun to spec it out, but I have no time to actually set it up, since it's more a business vs. just some servers.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- kijin 12y agoAgreed. I've been with many different email services, both free and paid, and GMX has never given me any impression as a secure service. It has too much of a side-project-run-by-some-web-hosting-company look and feel. Anecdotal evidence, but there are lots of security-related complaints in a popular (albeit non-technical) review site: http://email.about.com/u/reviews/gmxmail/Gmx-Mail-User-Reviews-Free-Email-Service/Security-Sucks.htm http://email.about.com/u/reviews/gmxmail/Gmx-Mail-User-Revie... http://email.about.com/u/reviews/gmxmail/Gmx-Mail-User-Reviews-Free-Email-Service/ http://email.about.com/u/reviews/gmxmail/Gmx-Mail-User-Revie... I wouldn't be surprised if satoshi's account turns out to have been hacked years ago, and the culprits have been using it to buy expensive electronics with stolen credit cards. After all, the original pastebin said that the account details where already circulating in the black market. Only recently somebody might have realized that this was no ordinary hacked account.
- kazinator 12y agoIs there any proof that any of this is real? Since we don't know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, there is no way to prove whether identity theft occurred to this person. Whoever has control of certain accounts is, for all intents and purposes, Satoshi Nakamoto. Someone who jumps up and down claiming that he is the real Satoshi who has been locked out from those accounts and subject to extortion could be the real one, or could be a liar. There is no way to know whether the incident took place at all, or if it did take place, which of the two people are the real one. It could be a complete hoax perpetrated by a single person, or two people, any of whom may or may not be Satoshi Nakamoto. The real Satoshi Nakamoto could also be a group of people to begin with. Or a very clever dog.
- l33tbro 12y agoI agree. Definitely seems like a troll. Mot sure what they'd gain though, apart from a bit of internet attention. Maybe the real Satoshi is somewhere rolling his eyes at all this.
- Estragon 12y agoThe BTC address they posted has already seen over 3 bitcoins pass through it. That's worth a little. https://blockchain.info/address/19pta6x1hXzV9F5hHnhMARYbRjuxF6xbbV https://blockchain.info/address/19pta6x1hXzV9F5hHnhMARYbRjux...
- georgemcbay 12y agoThe sourceforge "vandalism" was widely reported enough that while it was "reverted" prior to me seeing it live, it seems to have happened... but everything else I've seen since (which could very well not be everything... I haven't been following super closely) requires me to believe in either easily faked screenshots (the article this discussion links to mentions possible photoshopping, but it is even easier than that to just use developer tools to modify the number of total emails a site is displaying prior to screen-capturing) or 3rd party reports with no details (eg. the Peter Todd tweet where he says he got a forwarded 2011 email but doesn't really go into specifics). So my belief is there was some kind of incident here, but it is impossible to determine exactly what the scope of it was compared to the high likelihood of a lot of follow-up trolling.
- moyix 12y agoAssuming what's in the article is true, I suppose it's only a matter of time before a torrent of the mailbox shows up. I have to admit that if I had access to that account, I wouldn't be able to resist the urge to clone it via POP3/IMAP – it seems strange that if "multiple people" have access to it none of them have done this.
- tempestn 12y agoAs the article states, if this person had really wanted to profit, a far easier method would have been to use Satoshi's identity to manipulate the price of Bitcoin. Either he didn't, in fact, realize that opportunity (despite his claims), or he has other motives besides simply profiting from the hack. (Or something more complicated is going on.)
- Element_ 12y agoTo "use Satoshi's identity" would require his pgp key (at a minimum).
- nmjohn 12y agoExcept when people want to believe something or have fear (of losing mass amounts of money) of something, they tend to act irrationally. He wouldn't be able to convince myself of his identity without one of his private keys, but there are thousands of people who would have latched on, and then once those people start confirming the story it only convinces more people and so on, in a snowball effect.
- tempestn 12y agoAnd even if you don't believe it, you still might sell your BTC, fearing that others will.
- tempestn 12y agoYou don't think his email alone would be enough to at least bump the price? I bet if you sent emails to a few select journalists from an account known to belong to Satoshi, implying that you will begin offloading coins, you could easily cause the price to drop. I'm sure there are other ways too. Even if they thought to authenticate his identity, which many wouldn't, they would still write something up about it, and the speculation alone would have an effect.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- knodi 12y agoThe thing is do you really want to play with fire??? Before the end of next week its very likely this story is going to have a tragic ending.
- nickodell 12y agoIf you really found the identity of Satoshi, wouldn't it make far more sense to contact him privately and blackmail him? He's got, what, one and a half million bitcoins?
- Aqueous 12y agoPerhaps out of some twisted sense of honor the individual in question feels that blackmailing such a mysterious and (among hackers) revered figure would be unseemly. Although if this account is true it seems like he might be blackmailing him anyway.
- WatchDog 12y agoWhen you are dealing with someone who potentially has access to hundreds of millions of dollars. Blackmailing then in public might be a way of protecting yourself from having an "accident".
- Flenser 12y agoHardly, now everyone knows he has the satoshi's dox he's at more risk than satoshi of being kidnapped and tortured to get at satoshi bitcoin.
- nickodell 12y agoThere are ways to anonymously contact someone. Buy a prepaid cell phone. Hire a lawyer under an assumed name. Send a letter, but put a fake return address.
- Jerry_Magie 12y agoI've always thought that most people "in the know" know that Nick Szabo (well the guy going under that name) had something to do with bitcoin in it's early days. If you read his blog from 1999 onward, I think you will come to the same conclusion. I think the whole "who is Satoshi Nakamoto" legend really masks a lot of the facts
- zcucumber 12y agoSo it's the same guy who tried to extort Roger Ver?
- exit 12y agoif this comes out would it prove that no government agency was behind the creation of bitcoin?
- ben0x539 12y agoHow could a hypothetical revealed Satoshi Nakamoto prove he wasn't working on behalf of some government agency or other?
- kostaaaas 12y agoif you work in the cardreaderfactory.com you can search for old receipts of 420$ and check the contact info ...
- d0ugie 12y agoWhat a degenerate display of "hacking." Some man (or a group, whatever) gives the Internet something remarkable and a bit historic, but wishes to remain anonymous. So instead of respecting that wish we have people like this, also wishing to remain anonymous, attempting to hunt this man to shake him down for payment using that man's own creation! That's closer to repugnance than to irony in my book.
- tokenadult 12y agoThe repugnant thing is that there are a lot of things that are best kept secret, but there is a "hacker ethos" (yeah, not followed by all hackers) to disclose everything. Or at least everything about the other guy. Often enough, privacy really is the main consideration in deciding what to disclose and what not to disclose. Sometimes keeping secrets is beneficial for everyone.
- swalsh 12y agodude could make way more money sending fake emails from the account as satoshi, creating a scandal and profiting.