On the second point, no. I think we have a preponderance of evidence for Len Sassaman. He also explains why those bitcoin haven't moved, as well as many other peculiar things. This appears to be the most authoritative research that lays everything out: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.10257v14.pdf
If anyone actually reads that and comes to a different conclusion, I'd love to hear it and why.
The fact it was a whitepaper highly suggests a lifelong academic who has spent their careers publishing papers like these men, not a PHD student.
Also, some of the word choices in the whitepaper and the initial reference to London banks being bailed out again suggest Satoshi is not a native American english speaker.
I like the idea of Paul Le Roux, specifically because his name was redacted in the court docket but the government did the redacting in the PDF wrong
But I don’t find this thread to be very thin. Satoshi being a common name is going to always be an issue, but there are not that many cryptographers in the world.
Hal Finney left his family broke in his wake, after spending the entirety of his bitcoin wealth on treatment and cryopreservation.
I really don't believe Finney would have had access to what would have been tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of bitcoin at the time and left his family in that position.
This is blatantly false (Hal Finney felt confident in that his family would be OK and they were technological savvy enough to work out access to their inheritance), but also, they became a target so I believe that their privacy should be respected.
There are literally billions in those wallets. Unless "Satoshi" is independently wealthy, a nation state, or dead, you would expect that they would have at least taken out some money. I can't imagine that "Satoshi" would have lost all the keys to all of those wallets.
There are many, many ways to lose a cryptographic key. There are none to restore one.
There's also the idea that Satoshi thought he was doing something altruistic and purposely destroyed the keys so he wouldn't be tempted later on... which, if true, he might be regretting now.
It's entirely feasible that the modern Nicolas Bourbaki that was Satoshi have lost a member, or can no longer reach a pooled key quorum.
The argument can be made that not releasing early blocks contributed greatly to the perception that lifted bitcoin and there was never the intent to release them, to which sufficient early members still hold fast.
honestly, i thought we settled on Adam Back as Satoshi:
- adam was extremely active during the early cypherpunk days, when
- he invented Hashcash, which bitcoin cites in its whitepaper and used as its PoW
- he was the first to take Wei Dai's b-money proposal seriously and discusses combining it with hashcash (the 2 core elements of bitcoin)
- he disappeared and reappeared professionally during the exact timeframe of bitcoin development
- his writing closely matches satoshi's (british english + style/punctuation)
- he had no public involvement with bitcoin until he joined Bitcointalk forums in 2013 and suddenly had intimate details of unknown bugs in bitcoin saying "I thought I'd fixed them".
- he started Blockstream with the mission to ensure the survival of bitcoin (funded lighting, paid core devs, etc)
- he recently helped nail the coffin on Craig Wright's case in court proving he was not satoshi, during which
- he revealed the earliest known email correspondence with satoshi
watch the interview were he uncomfortably describes himself
I believe the Reddit OP (and most people in that thread) doesn't even know what cryptography is at pop sci level and they just think anything related to "private key" must be about cryptocurrency.
Stupidest thing I've read for months, even for Reddit's standard.
I think it's a reasonable explanation for the name, but it almost completely rules out these three people as the author of Bitcoin. Using part of your actual name as part of your pseudonym would be incredibly stupid.
Chelsea Manning (nee Brad) was caught almost immediately because she leaked her documents through an account with the username "bmanningfm".
I think back to 2009 and think of the state of opsec back then and I think people could very much use ridiculously traceable names for something like Bitcoin.
Though I think bitcoin Satoshi made a reasonable effort to keep anonymous.
It was probably cunning to use the name of a real person, the Satoshi Nakamoto who lived a few blocks from Finney as it would confuse any legal efforts to go after the bitcoin creator Satoshi.
I mean in court it would be saying I accuse you Joe Bloggs of being Satoshi Nakamoto and Joe Bloggs would be saying no it's the guy in LA who is actually called that.
Money on the line in what way? If they started it, they have a stupid amount of money already. They could gain fame, but after so many years... they don't seem interested in that.
How? Well pushing what seems an alternative to a central bank and banks system, a fully open and still pure finance one. Since no one really trust such actors they choose the FLOSS path publishing a FLOSS project as a mysterious developer who seems to want fight the giants. "Hey, but cryptos are open!", really? Formally yes, while 99% who use them use them via some exchange, witch is de facto a kind of bank not under the national banks laws of course. When a blockchain grow enough essentially no little player can handle it entirely so again it's a big tech natural game, pretend to be open, friendly and innocent "do not be evil", while being of course the contrary.
Eventually banks react an reach some kind of agreement so now the trend is crypto but with a CBDC model, who solve some inter-central-banks problems, give a place under the Sun to big tech and keep essentially anything as usual.
Otherwise I see no reasons for someone to mask his/shes identity in a FLOSS project that's formally innocent and friendly.
I know it always gets shutdown, but I’m comfortable with it being done by the US/CIA[1], especially since Satoshi stopped sending emails once Gavin Andresen met with CIA and « took over » the project.
I anticipate it’ll be unclassified at some point, and then really take off, but not before the US exhausts the ability to try and trace malicious transactions they might be focused on. Also the US owning a bunch of the original bitcoins is in line with owning a bunch of the lower IPv4 addresses which haven’t seem much, if any, activity.
The fact that none of the original BTC has been transferred is more than enough proof that whoever Satoshi is is dead. There's no other explanation, especially after this generationally significant amount of money it's worth.
I still like Hal Finney as Nakamoto, just because those bitcoin have never moved, and his being dead is the best explanation for that.