Also worth to remember that anyone can get bamboozled, even if you're highly intelligent and knowledgeable in a certain area. Just look at how many cult followers there are in the world.
How long have you spent verifying your own computing platform? However it is, it is never impossible that somebody can corrupt it and fool you about something.
Being Satoshi seems like the exact opposite of a basically worthless fact.
Gavin was just being gullible. Being a good early developer on an important project isn't mutually exclusive with being gullible to social engineering.
Total credibility loss in the BTC community.
I could some how look past his indiscretions: calling himself 'chief Scientist' of an open source project, gate-keeping antics for pull requests, attempted forks with Hearn et al, his involvement with the foundation... He was still critical to the project for many years and not beyond redemption as open source project typically fork into other things for experimentation purposes that grow the project in the long term--Linux distros being a prime example.
But when he went public that he bought faketoshi's narrative it was clear he was beyond help, and that his meeting at the NSA was more than what any of us ever assumed and he was so compromised that nothing could help that anymore.
I hope he is mentally well, and I'm sure he has enough money to do what ever he wants in Life if he just kept a fraction of his coins, but other than I never want to see or hear from Gavin ever again.
The history of bitcoin is a very interesting one. The video series of unmasking satoshi nakamoto from barely sociable is a great first step into the rabbit hole. But i'm warning you, the deeper you go the weirder it becomes.
uhh what?
On Gavin, that's also explained pretty well in the video, also this reddit quote from gavin says more than enough for me (this was under a post named "How Craig Wright probably tricked Gavin Andresen"): "I won't violate people's privacy or repeat things told to me under non-disclosure agreements, so I'm stuck-- I'm not going to say anything more, except I suspect someday the full story will come out (and it'll be made into a movie).
Of course, everything I was told could be a lie, and even professional magicians can be fooled sometimes (ever seen Penn & Teller's Fool Us show ?)."
Sending a message from Satoshi's e-mail is very obviously not proof of identity. Satoshi needs to move coins or sign a message. That's the only acceptable proof.
You claim Adam Back is compromised because the things he writes and does are so contrary to Satoshi and what he believed in that it's the only explanation that would make a universe where Back is Satoshi make sense. I much prefer to believe (with better evidence, btw) that Back is just not Satoshi. Boom, no logical contradictions to resolve.
Also even if he didn't create it, why did he never contribute to or interacted with the project? Why did he create a company that would make something he always wanted to create unusable? He even put this on his wikipedia page in 2007: "He has an interest in privacy technology, electronic cash (of the payer and payee anonymous type)..." and yet he is completely absent from bitcoin from 2009-2013 and sets up a company the completely defies everything that he wanted to create for years? It's completely illogical.
I know most of these arguments are from the video but come on. He is the perfect candidate. And i think you will not get much better evidence when someone doesn't want to be publicly known to be satoshi. But sure there is no 100% conclusive proof so believe whatever you want.
I'm not kidding, here's the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHc81OL_hk4&feature=youtu.be...
While I don't claim to know that Back was involved in the creation of Bitcoin, it's also really hard for me to understand why many people think Satoshi was just one person after all this time.
If anything Hal makes more sense and has way more circumstantial evidence if it was just a single person, but even then I don't think it matters much who was/were the thing we refer to as Satoshi Nakamoto and is actually a cool part of the mythology we've created over the years.
It's like something you'd expect from a Neal Stephenson or Daniel Suarez Book.
Because in the end, they don't matter anymore; it's gone so far from the original codebase that its entirely academic and quite honestly incredibly uninteresting in comparison to everything else that has been accomplished in this community. Though I argue much more could dhave been done if we didn't have to be derailed by this kind FakeToshi BS drama we so all too often in Bitcoin.
But looking into what happened in 2015 with the introduction of blockstream, the core devs and the small block campaign. The massive censorship on all major bitcoin discussion platforms. introduction of RBF. the rise of Bitcoin XT and later classic and unlimited. The major signalling for Bitcoin Unlimited by businesses and miners and its subsequent DDOS attack. The segwit proposal with the subsequent Segwit2X proposal. The NY and Hongkong agreements. The BCH fork (and subsequent SV fork if you're interested in that side). The activation of Segwit and the UASF and anti S2X campaign. The complete narrative change shifting to digital gold, SoV and scrubbing anything related to the title of the whitepaper (p2p electronic cash). and so much more interesting stuff, much of the info can be found on reddit's /r/btc that has been scrubbed from other parts of the internet. warning: many info you will find on the subject will be biased one way or another so try to get info on these topics from different sources and make up your own mind.