Given his history as a prolific liar, I find his post to be utter bullshit. Note how he's still lying about things he was caught at: "When the rumours began, my qualifications and character were attacked. When those allegations were proven false". NO - it was established (with confirmation from the schools in question) that he lied about having a PhD from Charles Stuart U. and he definitely does not possess 8 masters degrees. Not to mention other lies about having super computers and partnership with SGI to build more with fake reference letter (all clarified by company as false), etc.
Now, because he knows he can't successfully claim Satoshi's identity and in light of possible charges based on ongoing police investigation (fraudulent use of tax credits), he wants to dramatically disappear. I hope the authorities have his passport(s). His thirst for fame is unreal.
Any psychologist will tell you that most people can't objectively evaluate such criteria for themselves. This is something that is best left to professionals who have experience with people that DEFINITELY have such disorders.
I'm also in the non-believer camp, nor can I fathom why "Satoshi" would initially choose to remain anonymous but then decide to come out. What purpose does that serve?
Whatever the case, all of this drama is really, really bad news for bitcoin as a currency in the future.
This is very true. I have an armchair level interest in psychiatry and psychology. I spoke to someone who deals with real criminals all day.
They said that in their 30 year career counselling criminals and assessing them, they only met one true sociopath. The kid came from a family with $100M+ and was about 20.
They said that this person could convince you of anything to the extent that everyone who had exposure to them had to do so in small chunks so as to not empathize.
This person could cut to the heart of someone's identity very quickly and learn how to manipulate and engineer your response.
Apparently it is one of those things where you are like "Maybe I am on this spectrum..." but if you were, you would either know for sure, or be pathologically immune to the critism. And if you met someone who truly was on it, they would be capable of things beyond most normal people's imaginations.
Why bad news? Is basically irrelevant, now that he has turned out to not be Satoshi. The only way it would be relevant is if one of those early coins does indeed move, because that would drastically affect the number of coins on the market.
While some will disagree, appearances are important. Wright was [probably] trying to claim to be Satoshi to use Satoshi's bitcoins as collateral for something else.
Bitcoin already has a reputation for being used in scams and illegal dealings. This con man being able to convince some major news organizations and bitcoin celebrities doesn't help improve that image.
That demonstrates a flaw of non-technological news organisations, not Bitcoin. The two Bitcoin celebrities had been widely discredited from Bitcoin ages ago. Gavin has not committed in a year, started his own fork of Bitcoin with 3% adoption. Jon has disappeared after starting a bankrupt for-profit "foundation".
I haven't been following the parade of Bitcoin celebrities very closely, but what ever happened with the Digital Entertainment Network Executive VP [1] guy, Brock Pierce?
It's also a matter of needing access to someone's patient history, legal history, family history, etc. A snapshot of someone at one point in time (unless they're torturing someone to death for kicks, or something else really obvious) rarely gives the information needed for an axis II diagnosis.
Not to derail too much but this is the reason people are so overdiagnosed these days. All the criteria are vague, even psychiatrists overdiagnose all the time.
It's pattern recognition, like the other diagnostic fields, but more qualitative due to the human behavior inputs. This leads to larger margins of error, and equating it with tarot reading isn't an apt analogy.
So narcissists (as in people with NPD), if you've never had the unfortunate "opportunity" of being around one, are often incredibly good at convincing people to follow them. Take from that what you will.
People are attracted to self confidence, because most of the time people who are openly confident (down to the minutiae of body language) are in a position to be confident. The ability to simply be insensitive to the normal stresses and worries that would inspire rational doubt can put you in a position to lead.
Of course, you'll be leading with coin flips, and most people will fail. We just pay special attention to statistical flukes who make a lot of money before they flip out.
Steve Jobs in his relationships with friends and family, and his own self-destructive (ultimately fatally destructive) streak screams full blown sociopath and always has. Then again, he might just have been a really shitty person without a personality disorder to explain it.
There's a possible simpler explanation: his work was always priority #1 for him, and he completely buried his head in it, to the detriment of everything else. Of course, now I'm also speculating some bullshit about someone I've never met. It's always interesting to watch people try to label others without having known them. And no, "had lunch with him once" or "heard him speak at a conference" does not mean you know a single thing about someone, their mental state, or their life.
A huge portion of the population is not made up of happy-go-lucky, oblivious-to-the-world individuals, and someone comparing themselves to public figures in some vain attempt to show just how nice and normal their own life is... sigh. There are what, probably over a billion people, that random strangers would label with all kinds of mental illness. If it's that common, most of those cases are not mental illness, - it's just a personality type. Another person having a different personality than your own does not mean something is abnormal about them.
The line between "Personality Type" and "Sociopath" isn't clear. There is even a school of thought that the latter is more rightly one of the former, than a disorder. Personality Disorders in general are difficult, and different compared to something like say, depression or psychosis. One possible reason is that they do not represent true disorder, but as you say, different "styles".
The question then, of when and if society or doctors judge someone to be ill as a result, is an open one. I think maybe in retrospect dying from a cancer he could have probably treated properly, and his various personal and professional setbacks (which he managed to reverse in some cases) paints him as more disordered than different.
My problem with something like "Personality Disorders" is that the definition and categories are determined by people who are deciding what is normal vs. what is abnormal or an imbalance. It doesn't matter if you can observe chemical differences in the brain; why are some common "configurations" categorized as being unbalanced? It's just a different configuration, and who's to say whether it's normal or not?
Labelling the people who do not appear to be afflicted by certain behaviours as normal, and labelling everyone else as something else bothers me. Doubly so when you're talking about something like depression that supposedly affects millions. Having a dismal outlook on life based on how our society operates (capitalism, dead-end jobs, government, lack of community, etc.) isn't a disease; it's just how some people see the world that we are forced to participate in with no choice of alternatives.
I don't buy into this mental illness craze that is sweeping across developed countries. When you have 10-20%+ of people popping pills for one thing or another, something is wrong. It's ridiculous. All the sheeple just take the word of experts who decide what is what. As a society we put far too much faith in these experts, taking their best-guess research and believing in it as if it's factually known to be accurate.
tldr; Our current understanding of the brain is nowhere near complete, and treating people for problems that may not actually be problems based on our limited knowledge bothers me.
>There's a possible simpler explanation: his work was always priority #1 for him
The thought he knew more than doctors about medicine. That has nothing to do with work being priority #1, it's entirely based on your head being up your own ass.
>and his own self-destructive (ultimately fatally destructive) streak screams full blown sociopath and always has.
I think there was more narcissism than sociopathy.
Sociopaths have a sadistic streak. They enjoy fucking with people's heads, lying to them, and destroying them. Nothing on earth makes a sociopath happier than the knowledge that they've screwed someone over.
They're actually more like human relationship trolls - from the "soft" versions who enjoy lying and cheating, to the much rarer dangerously criminal types who enjoy torture.
Narcissists simply don't care about other people. They don't enjoy torturing others - they don't think of them at all, except as an occasional inconvenience, or (ideally) as a source of praise and limitless support.
The Jobs dedication to getting noticed by the world for being "insanely great" combined with his tendency to use employees and customers to build up his self-image without being interested in them beyond that seems more like classic narcissism to me.
He decided not to undergo actual clinical treatment for his cancer until it was too late, instead relying on new-age stuff to heal himself for the longest time.
I wouldn't go so far as to call this behavior "full blown sociopath" but it definitely shortened his life. I don't know what the stats are for refusing cancer treatment, but I think they're fairly low.
Whether a person is honest or whether a liar, they generally trip over themselves to cough up the proof that they say they have, if they actually have it.
"Too many people didn't believe me, so now I will NEVER show the proof, so there!" --- that's completely transparent bullshit coming form a grown man. If it was a nine-year-old girl, I might continue to believe, due to accepting the drama as emotionally genuine.
Why would anyone want to acquire 8 masters degrees? Usually one is enough. Some people get two which makes sense for them. By three you've surely proven that you can learn and replicate stuff and don't need to go to any more exams to prove that. You're better off getting other qualifications.
Perhaps the Satoshi show is his way to convince Australian tax authorities of diminished capacity to lessen the penalties for his fraudulent acts? A sociopath grasping at any lever that could work in his favor.
I still haven't seen anyone write what those fraudulent acts are exactly. Since Craig Wright (let's not call him what he isn't) apparently has several companies, these should be some clue about that?
There are articles that do so (https://www.nikcub.com/posts/craig-wright-is-not-satoshi-nak...). The gist is that Australia via their tax authorities pays R&D credits in cash. Wright set up a corporate vehicle funded by the transfer _on paper_ of Bitcoins that are not proven to even exist. He used these to mostly buy software from himself and claimed a AU$3.1m R&D cash tax refund.
(3) Pay off tax authorities with VC to avoid going to jail; swap angry tax authorities for angry VCs. The former are criminal charges with nasty penalties, while the latter are civil and/or easier to defend criminal charges. At the very least you've kicked the can down the road.
I'd read of that elsewhere but wasn't sure. Here's to hoping both countries have adequate agreements to facilitate shipping him back home to face the music.
The UK does have a history of shipping criminals off to Australia...
In all seriousness though, I hope he does get sent back to Australia. Everything he's done fits with someone who is grasping at anything that might get him out of has last con, and unfortunately for him, his last con involved a government organization that will want its money back.
Okay seriously, is anyone contacting the authorities to see if this man is still alive? I do not know who to contact or what his location is. His "blog" post sounds like a suicide note - I've had the misfortune of reading others, and there are telltale signs - and it doesn't appear that anyone is taking steps to see if he's okay.
Maybe he is a liar, maybe he's Satoshi, who gives a shit at this point when the jaded comments make it sound like we've been invaded by 4chan.
This post reminds me of a tactic abusive people use to prevent their victims from leaving them. When confronted with their bad behavior, they apologize profusely and pretend to feel remorse for their actions to the point that people worry about them. Once people feel adequately sorry for them and are distracted from their bad behavior, they go right back to doing what they were doing.
But the giveaway that shows it's all fake is that they never really get to the root of the bad behavior and do anything to fix it. In this case, Wright still hasn't admitted that he isn't Satoshi and doesn't have the key to the genesis block.
I've seen this behavior far too many times from my ex--I'm not going to give in to it here. Sure, someone should go check that he's not going to kill himself. But that should not for a second distract from the fact that he's a liar and a fraud, and this is likely just his latest ploy.
To be certain, it is; it's a textbook tactic used by abusers who themselves suffer from some neurosis. Abusers sometimes do, after threatening it so much, anneal themselves with the constant threats and their perceived ineffectiveness, actually follow through as a final, "I'll show them!"
Either way, it is a loss of life. I do feel better knowing that his safety (or, at the very least, status as a living, breathing human being) is confirmed. I also think he needs help, real professional help, to overcome whatever is pushing him in this apparent downward spiral.
Of course, he could just be some asshole trying to get airtime or to socially engineer access to Satoshi's funds. Maybe Satoshi had a psychotic break, and he (as Satoshi) is the result of it? Point is that we have only the evidence that has been shared (by him, the media, former colleagues) in a very haphazard way. It's easy to get wrapped up in theories and plot twists when there's a level of anonymity between us and the subject of our conspiracies. We simply do not know. Maybe we won't ever know.
Hopefully the next step for him begins a path to peace, rehabilitation, restitution, acceptance or any combination thereof.
My ex did the same thing and it's pretty shitty, but it still deserves serious attention. The best route is to call the cops and ensure they get proper medical attention if nothing else for a strong jolt to reality.
I don't think she would be alive now if I hadn't made that call.
All of this wouldn't be that much of an issue if we weren't so pathologically curious all the time, the press wouldn't have any "story" whatsoever.
It's us angry monkeys who are the creators of this kind of behaviour.
At least on HN let's concentrate on the technology FFS.
AFAIK none of the current "blockchain" tech has managed to successfully introduce a robust "proof of stake" system versus the wasteful "proof of work" yet - and that's just one of the many problems we need to solve.
Essentially the whole Internet is broken so unfortunately we cannot even seriously talk about the significant scalability issues which AFAIK all of the current decentralised crypto state machines still suffer from out there on the githubs...
Yeah, this basically the reason I still click on most Trump stories I see, even though I strongly disagree with the guy and know a lot of what he says isn't true.
Once you know it's a tactic you can't allow yourself to fall for it anymore or you'll end up trapped, regardless of what the final outcome is.
However it's not right to go around guessing that someone like this guy is using that tactic and ignoring what could be a serious cry for help when you have no idea if he's an abusive person.
Sadly, this type of behavior is also the hallmark of a master manipulator. Given his track record of deceit upon deceit (lied about PhD as confirmed by university, lied about supercomputer as confirmed by SGI, got caught backdating PGP key, multiple acquaintances in Australia on record about his sketchy business practices, etc. etc), I'd guess that the emotion here is significantly less than genuine.
That said, I agree that if I knew the man, or had any idea where he is then I'd feel compelled to check in on him. But it sounds like people have checked in on him and he's OK [1].
But I'm guessing it's just more showmanship and more attempts to distract from the fact that he has no proof he's who he's claiming to be.
I saw the post within a minute of two of it going up and also read it as a suicide note. I reached out to everyone I knew and heard back indirectly through someone else that he's ok.
He's also updated his homepage in the last few minutes.
Despite knowing just how much of a manipulator Craig is I think it's worth erring on the side of caution here.
Thank you for letting us know. Whether he's a lying asshole or not, I've learned the hard way to take someone seriously when they seem to be threatening self-harm, even if they've been insincere in the past. Someone who feels the need to lie so much isn't exactly neurotypical, and depressive thoughts with suicidal ideations often go along with such a compulsion. Better safe than sorry.
Side note, but I've thought about this and wondered the same thing. Where do you keep 500M? In your house on an offline hard disk that can be stolen? In a safe deposit box? This is a true data backup scenario where too few copies and you're in trouble and too many and you're in trouble. Especially since a copy that was found without your knowledge could ruin things before you knew.
In your head. Or rather, you encrypt all your super secret private data with a good password that you never write down, and copy the encrypted archive everywhere.
This assumes your encryption scheme is perfect and will be for the life of the secret. With 500MM it would take you a minute to move or spend it so you have to protect against someone getting the secret and being able to break it in 10 years or whatever.
Its an interesting problem. Paper wallets can be encrypted with a password, which is one step. Using multi-sig is another. Having canary addresses is yet another way. Of course in this case not all of those are an option since the goal seems to be to not move them at all.
But have too few redundant copies and you lost access to it forever. Or travel to various countries opening bank vault accounts is sure to put you on CIA/NSA/othersuchagencies' radar. $500M is interesting enough for them to poke around I bet.
Or of you loose access to a country for some other reason you're screwed as well. Also, if you're otherwise not well of spending 10+ thousand to land the secrets in several countries is not an option either
Probably because there are enough people who would still claim that he's not Satoshi. They'd just say he stole the signing key or something. There are already some saying that it was a colleague who he's taking the credit for, it's only a small leap for conspiracy nuts to jump to the theft idea.
Of course, it's vastly more likely that he is not Satoshi and he's just trying to save face.
At this point he's had a week of having everyone he knows hounded by the media. It might have just been a slip of the tongue/party joke he just rolled with and didn't expect to get this big.
When your every action gets a Guardian article it can be a scary time for anyone. Especially those who've not experienced it before.
How does flying two prominent bitcoin devs to a 1:1 meeting you constitute a "slip of the tongue"? He has experienced it before -- last year when he tried the same thing.
Yes, certainly we should sympathize with this person who is behaving in a confusing way.
Even if he made a calculated decision to manipulate the news media here, the blame must be shared by the journalists who promoted the story, and to an extent, the portion of the audience that was simply looking for an easy answer and a satisfying resolution.
At the end of the day, the whole lot of us should be responsible for being skeptical enough to prevent a destructive person from turning their personal issues into a global crisis.
Many people stepped up to debunk this story quite readily. It was the mainstream media that was really exacerbating the situation.
I understand this, but there's also the dimension where his actions, whether true or not, are also damaging other people (Gavin's reputation is on the line).
We'd all be more worried for him if he wasn't so blatantly causing harm to other people's reputation.
Obviously he could suffer from severe mental illness, which combines elements of harming others and self harm, but as a society I think we should worry more about the person being harmed (ex. Gavin).
Gavin's reputation is on the line because he is a security researcher, and he was duped by a not-very-convincing crypto scam. It's not a big deal to me; I wouldn't hold it against him much in, say, hiring. But whatever damage done to Gavin was done by his own choices. I'm not going to rush to feel sorry for him, either.
@bwilliams, yep, and that's why I said "I understand this". We should help him. But we should also help, if not more, Gavin and the others who's reputation is on the line without much fault of their own.
Why not handle the the thing that seems to be pretty pressing right now instead? Reputation can wait until someone can confirm one thing or another. It's just kind of calloused otherwise and I'm sure someone whose reputation on the line would agree.
Gavin said that he expected Wright to immediately post public proof equivalent to what he'd seen in private. When that didn't happen, he started expressing doubts. I don't think he ever intended his post alone to be treated as authoritative proof.
Yeah he made a mistake. But smart, even skeptical people get conned into making those kind of mistakes all the time. In the end, it's a lot of drama with no real harm done.
"But, as the events of this week unfolded and I prepared to publish the proof of access to the earliest keys, I broke. I do not have the courage. I cannot."
Lol, he doesn't have the courage to do the one thing that will remove any doubt about him, but has enough courage to announce to the public that he's a coward and a broken man and likely a fraud on a planetary scale...
At this point his mental health is clearly not good. If he really believes what he writes, he has delusions on a clinical scale which should be addressed before he does something he might regret. If he doesn't believe it, he is a consummate fraudster, a danger to the community, and should probably go to jail.
No kidding. Unlike the Newsweek fiasco, this person publicly identified himself as Satoshi, so expectations of proof are reasonable. What courage is he talking about? He already announced.
Courage of admitting he lost control of his con game. The only way is to keep plowing forward with more lies and more diversion, no matter how childish and stupid.
At the end of the day every con artist is also a desperate, lonely and broken on some level. There is probably a tiny dose of truth in what he said at that level. In other words he is not sorry and broken for lying, he is sorry and broken for being caught red handed at his own game.
Suppose Craig just took a rational bet that did not pay off.
Craig, hoping Satoshi to be alive, provided an opportunity for Satoshi to move some of his own Bitcoin and have Craig become Satoshi in the public mind. But Satoshi, did not bite.
My (non-provable) theory is that Satoshi is not a person but a team, now defunct, that was tasked with developing a crypto-currency. They are probably more scientists/mathematicians/economists than they are software developers, which would explain the very sound but not exactly elegant initial code.
It would also explain the silence - the project is over, the team is probably bound to secrecy because this stuff is classified.
The only time Satoshi spoke out (edit: and we don't even know that it was authentic, see discussion below) was to help the poor bloke who was mistaken to be Satoshi and his life was being ruined, and that was probably a collective decision by the former team members, it was the right thing to do.
This is a different case - Satoshi speaking out wouldn't help in this case, Craig sounds like someone in need of help from a professional psychiatrist or psychologist, http://www.drcraigwright.net/ almost sounds like a suicide note. I feel sorry and worried for the bloke.
> no, the forum account was hacked to make that claim. It wasn't by Satoshi.
Are you sure, I wasn't aware of that?
Edit: the "I am not Dorian Nakamoto" was on March 7 2014, the account hack on Sept 8 of same year. It doesn't prove it conclusively. In fact the hack may well have been done deliberately, for a (kind of) plausible deniability (i.e. now you can't tell whether it was the real "Satoshi" and thus there was no provable breach of secrecy).
And the forum account hadn't posted for five years before that. There's certainly no conclusive evidence that it wasn't Satoshi, but there's also no conclusive evidence that it was, and strong reason to believe the account could have gotten hacked because it did indeed get hacked a few months later.
The only sort of confirmation that I could find on that claim was that the original address was unused for over a year so was then available for registration by a new user, this was then used to allow a password reset on another account. I believe this was the gmx and vistomail accounts.
Good point. But on a second thought - signing it might have been in violation of whatever secrecy requirement, possibly a crime, under this theory we will never ever see anything signed from Satoshi.
I wouldn't be surprised if we never know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, and his coins remain forever out of reach. I bet they collectively decided to throw away the keys, so to speak.
Satoshi at one point made a calculation on what each unit would be worth if the entirety of the world's money supply was bitcoin. I don't know if he believed that that would be possible, but it wasn't as if someone made this to settle up with friends after a pub crawl and it suddenly took off.
With that view of the big picture I would be surprised if someone would throw away what may be the most valuable numbers in history, let alone the only proof that they created it while purposefully remaining anonymous.
On the contrary, I think that they might have had enough insight to see how potentially disruptive it could be if one person claimed all of those coins after bitcoin had attained widespread adoption. It also keeps someone from being able to claim the Satoshi Nakamoto "persona," which I think could only be self-serving. I don't think Satoshi revealing himself could ever do the world much good. One of the tenets of bitcoin is the lack of a central authority or leader.
If this is a classified government project of some sort (and again, I have zero proof of that, it just "seems" that way), then we _might_ know in, like, 100 years, perhaps. Depends on what country/agency is behind it.
This seems implausible to me to the point of absurdity. I don't mean that to be rude, just, it doesn't fit for me at all. Why are you so convinced it's a government / intelligence community project? What objective would it have? How would they benefit?
If being considered Satoshi ruined some other guy's life too, isn't Wright's claim that he is Satoshi but he just chickened out of irrefutably proving it semi-plausible?
Dude's a liar. After everything else he has done this is the simplest step which requires no extra burden on him. He has already claimed to be SN, the only reason not to follow through is because he cannot and could never have. Therefore he is just another pretender to the throne.
And let us not forget that the doctorate degree that he's bragging about so much that he put it in his domain is completely made up, as discovered by Forbes when they asked the college about it.
Why is there even an argument? It is not rocket science to produce a signed message with a key, the reference software can do this trivially. Until that is provided I don't see why anyone should entertain the possibility. Anything else is just theatrics.
To those of you who have never known a conman or someone with borderline personality disorder, this behavior might seem odd. To me, it's like looking at a picture of a dog and going "oh that's a dog!"
The best indicator for me was, instead of providing something right away, saying you will provide it "soon," and then waiting for the inevitable excuse when it doesn't happen.
Not just the excuse, but making themselves into a martyr SPECIFICALLY as the excuse. This type of person can never simply say they can't do something, they have to be larger than life even when failing to do something.
It's hard for me to believe that he's backing out of his promise to provide stronger evidence because the pressure is too much, because the pressure of being known as a fraud is a lot worse than being known as an inventor.
Some of the website is still in archive.org, but will probably disappear soon. Any snapshots before May have already disappeared. Might help for folks to download the old posts before they disappear from the web entirely.
Frustratingly, it appears the main screenshots from the Sartre post (showing his original 'proof') have already been removed from archive.org.
I entertained the possibility that he would not be able to weather what would come next from his claim, so I managed to save the 7 screenshots for the Jean-Paul Sartre, Signing and Significance blog post.
Even better if the coin is moved to a burn address that looks something like 1IWouldAnnounceMyselfThisWayJaNVN2.
Or just use the privkey from the genesis block to sign a message "In the very unlikely event that I ever decide to reveal myself, it will be through a message similar to this one" -- and then post it anonymously somewhere.
The only blamable thing in this story is that the so called mainstream media are not technically knowledgeable enough to "scientifically" check their news sources. Good thing, all the nerds around have exposed the scheme in such a short time, I like this era !!
>In December 2013, a blogger named Skye Grey linked Nick Szabo to the bitcoin's whitepaper using a stylometric analysis.
All that, and the NS/NS: Nakamoto Satoshi / Nick Szabo. :)
I assign a low probability to the proposition that Nakamoto is other than Szabo.
Suppose Nakamoto isn't Szabo. Why the various similarities? They could be deliberate: Nakamoto isn't Szabo but another researcher who not only runs with the same ideas, but mimics the elements of writing, duplicates the timezone of activity and so on. Even chooses the letters N and S for his pseudonym to tantalize people with the hypothesis that he is Szabo. The problem under this hypothesized scenario is that Szabo would almost certainly have cried foul: "Hey, world, this Bitcoin Nakamoto dude is ripping off my research without crediting me at all!" Secondly, why would someone who wants to create a digital currency system based on Szabo's ideas go to the trouble of creating all these irrelevant similarities.
On the other hand, there is the why: why wouldn't someone who obviously knows a lot about security an privacy issues not put more effort into building plausible deniability? Maybe Szabo simply doesn't care about having anything near air-tight claim that he isn't Nakamoto, and so just let himself be sloppy. Perhaps he actually wants there to be all that circumstantial evidence, and is biding his time until the right moment to admit that he is Nakamoto, at which time with just some small piece of proof, it will be iron-clad to everyone.
It is interesting to note that the only Satoshi-existence scenario whose probability improves with each passing day, is the scenario in which Satoshi / the "Satoshis" is/are dead (unless you think Bitcoin was the first great invention of hyper-advanced AI, of course).
Figuring out whether anyone actually knows who Satoshi is/was becomes more interesting than waiting for the person(s) to show up, because it will never happen in a death scenario. One thing we have gained from this bizarre circus is a sign that neither Gavin nor Jon know who Satoshi might be; who's left? Who might know?
If Satoshi is dead or not an individual person, then who owns his bitcoin? If Satoshi is dead, then his property would be subject to the probate laws of his home country. Can the bitcoin of a dead person be recovered if they don't make arrangements for it in their will? Or will blocks of bitcoin become inactive over time as their owners die?
These are some great questions. Given a long enough timeline, it's possible (probable?) that nearly all private keys will be lost. It's funny that Bitcoin seems to have built into it its own demise: mortal people.
I think, its more like version 0.1 of what's possible. I can foresee the existence of wills on the blockchain. e.g. 'move my coins to my inheritors public key, in 10 years, unless I overwrite this will, with something else'
In fact bitcoin's cousin, Ethereum, is all about digital contracts.
But there could be cases, where people lose their keys or die, without making a will. We can easily foresee, that in this case software could accommodate cases, as exceptions, where identity is otherwise attached to the public key.
Smart contracts may sound cool at first but like many things with bitcoin they are mostly a solution in search of a problem. In the case of wills, the blockchain doesn't address any of the real-world problems typically surrounding them. In most legal cases the problems are not the actual terms or recordation of the contract but in interpreting and executing the contract. Real world events are very rarely dictated by the types of simple binary conditions that can be represented in a smart contract, and the gap between the real world and the blockchain is wide enough to fit a skyscraper through.
I agree with you that there is a wide gap between Bitcoin/Blockchain tech and real world. Won't contest that.
But a will contract can be put on the blockchain, and its a step forward, IMHO. Just today I learnt about OverStock's t0[1] trading on the Blockchain using colored coins (which is supposed to bring down the settlement of stocks to T+0 from T+3. Just stating this example as a case of progress enabled (or made possible) by the blockchain.
Likewise, Blockchain will make wills better i.e. enforceable and crisp via a program hence more specific. But as of now, its not a replacement for judiciary definitely. That's why I said its like version 0.1 of what's possible.
Bitcoins can only be distributed if you have the private key for it. If satoshi dies and leaves the keys for his heirs, then its just a normal asset. If the keys are gone, then that money is unrecoverable, just like burning cash.
So Bitcoin could conceivably be 'burned' faster than new bitcoin can be made. That might be great for a collector's market, but sounds like a bad plan for a useful currency.
It is? I thought there was a minimum usable denomination, called a "satoshi", that was something like 0.0000001 BTC (I don't know the actual value). Or is this really just a convention enforced by the current clients that can be easily changed in the future?
It would require a hard fork to increase the data storage for the number field from an int64 to an int128, but doing so would be uncontroversial (way more so than the current debate over the block size). It could be programmed to take effect at a certain block # from several years out, by which point almost everyone would be using a version of the software that would support it.
We're not anywhere close to it mattering yet, though; it's several decades out.
You are absolutely correct. One bitcoin is 100,000,000 satoshis. Transactions are denominated in integer values of satoshis, so it's not possible to subdivide a satoshi.
One satoshi is currently worth about $0.0000045, though, so there's still plenty of room left for inflation.
I wonder about this. It's seems like the most likely scenario. But... from my understanding Satoshi made appropriate effort to pass on the Bitcoin project before he disappeared. So unless he was leaving to commit suicide, I don't think he _has_ to be dead. (he == she == they)
That would be an interesting play. It's the harder road. The man would have to do an awful lot of creative laundering to be able to use the btc without attracting the attention of revenue folks, though.
The two paths are:
1. Come out as Satoshi and be regarded as a genius. Deal with whatever the consequence of holding btc are, be they currency or assets.
2. Burn your own rep and be regarded as a nut, then struggle to live off your btc fortune.
Some people are weird. It's all fun to think about though.
This whole "controversy" is incredibly boring. The real Satoshi would be able to prove it easily. Prove it, or STFU and we can move on from the who is Satoshi mystery?
There is no evidence to believe the post reflects upon his real emotions, and since the man is untrustworthy[0], the post cannot be taken as evidence about his emotional state.
[0]:Whether he is willfully or maliciously deceptive is irrelevant. Even if he has the best of intentions, his behavior is still untrustworthy.
I don't know, but based on the last line I err on the side of caution. People don't react well to world-wide humiliation. I agree that he is completely untrustworthy and can't be relied upon to give an accurate representation of his own mental well-being.
Thought experiment: Suppose Satoshi, whoever it is, is still alive somewhere in the wild. But he doesn't have his original keys (hard-drive failure with no backup, apartment fire with no offsite backup, etc etc).
He could still have access to his PGP private key, which would be a strong data point. It could be possible that someone stole this key though, so this alone wouldn't completely prove his identity.
If he had the foresight to know he might want to prove his identity at some point in the future, he could have embedded the hash of a message into an early block (using the public keys of coinbase transactions). The message could say something like "Satoshi Nakamoto is <real name>. <salt>". In order to prove his identity, he'd just have to reveal the contents of the message (he'd have the make the salt something he could memorize so that it wouldn't be at risk of being destroyed by a fire). Ideally he'd encode this message hash in multiple early blocks (using a different salt in each message, so that the hash is different each time).
I think anything like the "knowledge of the content of private emails" is flawed. Satoshi's email account was hacked, so most of his "private" emails are no longer private (supposedly he didn't use PGP for most of his private correspondence).
A Bitcoin private key is only 51 characters when expressed in the Base58 format that Bitcoin uses. Here is an example private key expressed in such a format: 5Kb8kLf9zgWQnogidDA76MzPL6TsZZY36hWXMssSzNydYXYB9KF
If I were Satoshi I totally would've committed it to memory. I have more random characters than that memorized for passwords to various accounts.
Or, even easier, have a smaller simple password, and then be able to reconstruct them using an algorithm that your remember, e.g. SHA256(SHA256(SHA256("correct") + "horse battery") + "staple").
According to that awesome analysis[0], he was backing his stuff up pretty regularly (every five days at first). I would find it very hard to believe that someone with the wherewithal to make backups is not making an off-site copy of those backups. I haven't met many people that make backups but only store a copy locally. History is rife with horror stories. It's a good question though. Specifically there might be things only Satoshi knows among some of the original adopters (but clearly Gavin is not one of those people, if he was fooled by Crazy Craig).
I believe that David Kleiman was the one with the Satoshi keys, they were kept on an encrypted USB. He died unexpectedly in 2013, and his brother took the USB. Nobody knows how to unlock it.
If I were to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he is Satoshi, this note still doesn't make any sense. Removing all doubt that he at least controls the keys is almost trivial.
It's very interesting that he asked the media to send coins to one of Satoshi's Bitcoin addresses, and that he would return them. All of Satoshi's original coins are Pay-to-Public-Key, whereas the BBC's money was sent Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash (P2PKH). This means that Craig would have to present a signature along with a public key that just has the same hash as the Satoshi public key, not a signature for Satoshi's public key itself. I think he is banking on finding another key with the same hash, as a final desperate attempt to forge his identity.
If Craig Wright did indeed purchase the supercomputer which was placed at number 17 on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers in November 2015, perhaps its sole purpose was to do a collision attack. Although as with other claims, it is uncertain whether he did buy this computer (SGI deny it was bought from them but concede that it could have been bought on the grey market[0]).
For those of you who haven't had firsthand experience with truly weird habitual liars, this is exactly what it's like... not saying Wright is a liar but he hasn't differentiated himself from it.
What you're trying to do here is to project your hatred for Bitcoin using fraud as somehow representative of the ideas embedded into Bitcoin, which have nothing to do with that fraud.
I'm sorry, but only the people that feel the need to follow something as some kind of religion or philosophy really need to attribute the adjectives "hatred" or "love" to some kind of technology.
The rest of the world at large (EDIT: that knows about bitcoin as sub intended by the rest of the sentence) that is not part of the bitcoin cult, looks at the thing for its technological prowess - or lack of it - and mostly sees it as a cryptographic experiment gone right and a financial experiment gone very wrong.
Don't speak for most people. Most people know nothing about Bitcoin just yet. Can you be more specific about where the financial experiment of Bitcoin has gone wrong and why?
It's quite telling that you don't want me to speak for other people but just in your answer before projected your irrational feelings about bitcoin on me and on what I feel or don't feel for bitcoin (so that we get straight, I don't "feel" anything for a technology, that doesn't make sense).
When I referred the world at large, I referred the world at large that already knows bitcoin, not the world population. And from those, most of them obviously didn't get in bitcoin (in fact the ones that did get in bitcoin are pulling out as can be clearly seen in the volume of bitcoin transactions since 2014).
And it is a clearly failed financial experiment because:
5 - Complete unregulation keeps meaning high scale theft and complete unreliability of bitcoin markets (MtGox and many others)
All in all, the world at large - in this case not only the ones that know bitcoin - clearly understands that the financial system needs more regulation not less, and yet, you put bitcoin in the table with is utter lack of regulation and try to claim its a great thing that will solve the world's financial problems but you don't give absolutely no sane argument or metrics about how it is doing that. And that was exactly my original point.
I'm absolutely fine if the world at large doesn't use Bitcoin. People who understand the value of it will continue using it. And the fact that bitcoin is used for illegal purposes marks it as a success, rather than a failure. You see value in governments, regulations and monetary systems controlled by central banks. I see value in the absence of those. I think Bitcoin is an enormous success in that it gave people who value the latter an instrument to actually exercise their beliefs. No one is forcing you to use Bitcoin and no one ever will and that is the best thing about it.
So when you say that for a "fact" the system is constrained to 7TPS, you are intentionally ignoring most bitcoin transactions, which are off-chain transactions at exchanges. That's not just oversight that's deceit.
You are telling us is that there is no problem with the bitcoin protocol because the problems with the bitcoin protocol can be solved by not using the bitcoin protocol.
Weird, I don't see side chains in specified in the protocol or implemented in the source. It's almost as if side chains are an ad hoc attempt at a solution to a problem inherent to Bitcoin.
7 transactions per second is just a tuning parameter though, it's not a fundamental flaw in Bitcoin. The problem is being attacked from two angles right now: The release of segregated witness and increasing the block size.
The real question is, what is the maximum real throughput of the system if we could adjust the tuning parameters to be as high as possible? It's well north of 7 but I bet also well south of, say, 1,000.
You're demonstrating confirmation bias by trying to redefine a payment network flaw as a "tuning parameter", so if you want to actually discuss something, make a case rather than spinning it as something else.
A clip from The Simpsons is not a very compelling argument.
Setting the number of blocks at 2,016 per two weeks is completely arbitrary, as is setting the block size at 1 MB. None of these are "fundamental flaws" because they can be changed. They're hard-coded constants that can be changed in code in a trivial amount of time. The hardest part about changing them is getting consensus on the change and the time it takes the change to roll out to most of the clients on the network before cutting over. The existence of altcoins that have changed these parameters is proof that it's not a technological flaw.
A technological flaw would be some kind of vulnerability in ECDSA or SHA256 that would allow people to spend other's Bitcoins. Now that would be a fundamental flaw that would destroy Bitcoin over night. But coding constants that can be changed, and as time goes on, most likely will be? You are seriously over-dramatizing things.
All I'm getting from you is flippancy, Simpsons references, and strawman arguments. You have failed to make your case at all. If what we are talking about is a fundamental flaw, then every program you have ever written is fundamentally flawed, because I'm sure they've all initially had bugs in them that were much worse than what could be changed by adjusting the values of constants.
The simpson clip is an explanation why I find your comments hilarious, not a claim or basis for an argument. Serious question: is English your first language?
The block size can't be changed because a small number of miners control it, and they stand to profit from the increased transactions fees resulting from the increased competition on smaller blocks. It's tragedy of the commons.
This is a fundamental flaw with Bitcoin- that the people who control the software can also benefit from inhibiting transactions per second. For a payments network, it's not going to get more than 7 tx/s, until someone else is in control. Other enthusiasts have reconciled this by looking to bitcoin as smart contracts, or to side-chains.
But you can continue to spin this as good for bitcoin or as "payments tuning parameter" propaganda if you like, just understand that I'm going to laugh at you for it, cydeweys.
It took you three comments to finally say something coherent. Bduerst, you need to work on your communication skills. There is much room for improvement. HN is not reddit. Do not make low value comments here.
You argument that miners will always want small block sizes is flawed. Miners stand to benefit a lot more from a widely-used functioning currency than one that fails because it is incapable of scaling. They want Bitcoin to succeed in the long run, because a lot of them hold a lot of Bitcoin. Particularly, there is little reason to keep block sizes small for this reason because while the average transaction fee might go down, the total number of transactions in a block will go up, with an overall neutral effect on total transaction fee. Additionally, the vast majority of a miner's reward still comes from the block reward, so miners don't care too much about transaction fees yet.
Segwit is already close to rolling out and block size increases could happen in the medium term. Or, if all else fails, there's always side-chains and altcoins. The fundamental technology (blockchain) is fine, even if a particular implementation of it with a specific set of tuning parameter values happens to stagnate. I don't foresee that happening though, as the incentives for everyone in the ecosystem are aligned for Bitcoin not to fail, and if limited transaction volume truly starts changing that, then changes (beyond what's already on the current roadmap) will be made.
You still didn't answer the question. If English isn't your first language, then it would explain why what I wrote isn't coherent to you.
You're making the same fallacious assumptions about miners that people do about individuals in tragedy of the commons. You think that the individual cares more about the system rather than their own rational goals, but they don't.
The same resource economics that apply to international fishing also apply to bitcoin - both the fisherman and the miners care more about personal gains than they do about the system as a whole. They don't restrain their profit because you project your idealism onto them.
And it doesn't matter who promises what - there needs to be a consensus for the change to happen, and that's why bitcoin is flawed. The previous four forks to fix this block size failed, four times, which is evidence to back this up.
You can keep spinning the flaw as a speed hole though, it's pretty entertaining :)
Too bad it only works for transactions, not users.
LN is one of the better side-chain ideas to date, but it's still a bunch of I.O.U.s that have the bitcoin bottleneck. With LN, two people can reasonably send hundreds of thousands of transactions to each other, but hundreds of thousands of people cannot reasonably send two transactions.
And then there's centralization, off-network volatility, etc. issues as well. Side-chains are still not a viable fix for the blocksize issue.
The top ten results of "bitcoin purpose" on Google concur that in it's current implementation, in how the community and business world view and use it, Bitcoin is meant to be an electronic currency.
The FTC recognizes it as a commodity, something that can be bought and sold. In it's current incarnation, it is the equivalent of bartering with baseball cards in lieu of cash.
If your point is true, then the purpose has been abandoned for the popular and current realization of Bitcoin as a means of electronic monetary value transfer.
I personally followed development and the community from the time it was introduced. It was always pitched as an 'anonymous' electronic currency.
>The FTC recognizes it as a commodity, something that can be bought and sold. In it's current incarnation, it is the equivalent of bartering with baseball cards in lieu of cash.
The US government has a stake in the failure of non-state-controlled currencies, though, so this isn't really evidence of anything.
It's evidence that it is popularly interpreted as something that has value and can be traded. So is money. I really can't care any less than I already don't if Bitcoin is or isn't a legal currency.
The point is it isn't commonly purported to be a 'settlement layer' but something else entirely.
I don't disagree with anything you've said. It's just that the government classification doesn't support (or refute) the point because the government isn't a disinterested party.
Your prejudice against "Bitcoin community" is quite telling, given the fact that it took the Bitcoin community less than 2 hours to disprove the supposed proof and very few in the "Bitcoin community" would consider Wright one of their own.
Gavin appears to most likely be a victim here, not a fraud. He made an enormous mistake in not requiring public proof before he posted, which he has since admitted.
It seems to me like the community's reaction to a fraudster was remarkably productive, outside of Gavin / Matonis getting suckered.
The guy sounds like a pathological liar and narcissist. Amazing so many were sucked in to his bullshit. The journalists involved should be embarrassed as they look like utter fools.
Tin-foil, but if I were Satoshi and wanted to remain anonymous, and some journalists started snooping around, one way to shut them down would be to publicly post a "proof" that seems technical enough to get the reporters to run out screaming "we got him!" but falls apart once more technical people start investigating...
If you treat the "proof" falling apart under scrutiny as evidence that he is Satoshi, then to remain consistent you must treat a strong proof which holds up under scrutiny as evidence against him being Satoshi.
To be clear, I don't believe my tin-foil conspiracy is true, and honestly it doesn't matter one bit to me if Craig Wright is the inventor of Bitcoin.
That said, I never said that his "absence of evidence that he is Satoshi" is actually "evidence that he is Satoshi". In fact, no one has provided any real evidence either that he is or is not Satoshi.
Again, assuming that the real Satoshi wishes to remain anonymous, but is on the verge of discovery anyway, he may have a difficult time "proving" that he isn't Satoshi, so his next best bet might be to sidestep proof entirely and instead play a kind of mind game to throw off the investigation. So conservation of expected evidence doesn't factor in, because he hasn't "proven" anything one way or the other, he's basically gambled that internet ridicule will achieve a desired goal.
> if I were Satoshi and wanted to remain anonymous,
That discounts the fact that nobody would be able to figure it out. You did though, and I've heard that theory before as well.
Then also unless real Satoshi issues a statement saying "I am not this guy", people will always keep an eye on this clown. Always watching his moves and suspecting him.
Now, maybe if he was the real Satoshi as your are claiming he should then issue a statement that he isn't. That'll surely misdirect things a bit. "We've heard right from Satoshi that this isn't Satoshi, so ok, just a crazy guy". But then again, same trap, that is what Satoshi might be experted to do if he was hiding and trying to misdirect the public. And we got another twist in the spiral and so on...
Well, this tinfoil theory is assuming that the leaks several months ago putting him on the map were actually legitimate and he didn't have a choice about it.
I suggested this from the start. A simple transaction from Satoshi's account to an agreed upon 3rd party is all that would have been needed to prove his claims. Claiming to not have the "courage" to perform this simple verification is just ridiculous.
I really wish Satoshi comes out from hiding before he (or the group) is dead (assuming he is not already); otherwise it will forever take #1 position on those listicles sites ("The top 10 mysteries of all time; You really want to know #1")
Nobody here should be surprised; we knew Wright has been engaging in pathological behaviors for years now. The question is how Gavin will handle the damage to his reputation. I feel bad for him.
.. or an attempt to bolster the flames of a dying media spectacle that keeps your name up at the top of the news feeds.
I hope I'm right, I hate the idea of a guy being driven to suicide; even more than I hate the idea of him social engineering media outlets en masse to self-promote.
The subsequent modifications to the website lead me to believe that the chances of this being a suicide note are really low. But everything leading up to this leaves me confident that he will continue to "do something dumb", just not suicide.
"There are very credible people besides Gavin and Jon who still think he is Satoshi - people who are privy to other information and whose judgement I respect."
I think it was clear to most people that "angry monkeys" was a metaphorical figure of speech, not a serious assertion regarding the ancestry of humankind.
We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of 'Satoshi Nakamoto' for the week.
But all the decision of that Satoshi have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting.
these stories about bitcoin are like those long drama's/soap operas/ Tween Peaks, I dont know anything about because I didnt have time to put up with it. Only women..
One thing that gives me a little pause and makes me think maybe he is telling the truth (even though all other evidence and logic says he's a fraud) is that the real Satoshi has not put out a statement calling this guy out as a fraud.
When the Dorian Nakamoto stuff happened the real Satoshi put out a statement saying he's not Dorian. That wasn't that long ago.
If he did that you'd think he'd step up and say he's not Craig Wright either. But maybe he did the previous one because he felt Dorian was being victimized whereas Craig Wright has made a mess of his own design.
> is that the real Satoshi has not put out a statement calling this guy out as a fraud
And what about the inverse? If he is Satoshi, why didn't he just put out a signed statement saying he is Craig? Satoshi seemed perfectly capable of producing valid signatures (and he could do it without a 25-page blog post).
Stop giving him the benefit of the doubt. He couldn't produce a valid signature. He couldn't move old coins. He couldn't explain the blockchain with anything more than an amateur understanding of it (his article describing mining had at least 2 major factual errors I could pick out in the first 2 paragraphs). When he realized he couldn't keep the charade up, he gave up. It's really that simple.
Like I said all evidence and logic leads to the conclusion he's a fraud, but it is a bit strange that the real Satoshi has not commented on this when he did on the Dorian Nakamoto stuff.
I'm sure the goal of such step is exactly this -- to leave some room for doubt. The conman was moved in a corner during last few days, it was the only logical step left. It's only few commands to prove that you really poses the original key, no need for drama, screenshots and buggy scripts.
Now, because he knows he can't successfully claim Satoshi's identity and in light of possible charges based on ongoing police investigation (fraudulent use of tax credits), he wants to dramatically disappear. I hope the authorities have his passport(s). His thirst for fame is unreal.