I don't know that creating an whole new currency can be considered a "practical solution" to the need of having to move dirty money around. Surely there must be easier ways to achieve that goal and with a higher chance of success as well.

For him an encryption/programming expert it might of been. There were posts back in 2005 about how to design a 'bit gold' and he was already jumping through hoops to launder money to gold bars through hong kong with all kinds of problems. The motivation was there.

Most hackers I know write software for pretty much any other OS because of how much easier it is than writing software for Windows, not because they're uppity. Some may be ideological purists, sure, but I think you'd be very hard pressed to find a hacker that says the developer experience on Windows is easier/nicer/better than the developer experience on Linux or MacOS.

People who write open source windows software are looked down upon. Your typical hacker especially in the 90s/00s - Microsoft was the evil empire.

What do you mean _was_?

If Microsoft was a person it would be a psychopath: befriend you for economic benefits and crush you when that is the more convenient option.

It's a private company who has actively pursued monopoly by buying its way into the educational system and strongarming any competition in the OEM off the shelf OS market, literally making it damn near impossible to avoid it.

It's goddamn scary how the public sector seems to believe Windows, Word or Excel are the only professional alternatives and are necessary for society to function. Why aren't we writing in LaTeX or R on Linux? Because a very powerful market force has bought the truth and will embrace or extinguish any sane opposition.

Fuck Microsoft and fuck Bill Gates. They are evil.

Yes, thank you. Case in point, this is how you are looked upon by the community as a developer of open source windows software.

It is 50/50 for me between Carmack and Torvalds. 2/1 if you add Satoshi.

Neither of them have demonstrated any significant knowledge of the extremely sophisticated, cutting edge crypto and anonymisation tech involved.

Is it that extremely sophisticated tho? I think both of them could crack that very easily if they wanted to

The conversation was about hackers (presumably great) in general.

But Linux is the most secure OS! /s

Yes, but, really, the very pragmatical nature of Le Roux somehow makes me doubt he would have left the initial wallets untouched all these years. He is an interesting character, for sure, but does not seem the kind to not use a big lever at his disposal.

La Roux has been in custody since Satoshi disappeared.

If any part of it was converted to any non-distributed security, then it would likey be confiscated along with interrogation to get the rest.

Is there evidence that Le Roux used Bitcoin? Certainly he had a use for it. But the author of the Mastermind looked into this idea and didn't find any evidence for it

How could he? In 2012 Bitcoin was very niche and everyone was still very skeptical about it.

I went deep into the PLR rabbit hole because I too believed that PLR could have been Satoshi. The one dagger to the heart of the theory is that PLR lived in the Philippines at the time. If you line up Satoshi’s posting times with PLR’s local time zone, you’d have to assume that PLR was posting from 4-9ish in the Philippines.

> you’d have to assume that PLR was posting from 4-9ish in the Philippines.

Ok? Why is that a dagger in the heart? My most active posting times are 4-9 and I don't even know if you're talking AM or PM because both work for me.

You mostly sleep between 9pm and 4am?

Yes. Pretty normal sleeping hours.