Honest inquiry here - What I don't understand is how people think the identification of Satoshi is "bound to happen". What did the person do wrong, exactly?

Based on how I understand it, if the person did nothing wrong by inventing Bitcoin, no investigation will occur and no judge will sign off on a search warrant to get the ID data. No private investigator will be able to obtain the data either, as ISPs wouldn't just dish out private info like that without a warrant.

Did the inventor of Bitcoin do something wrong to allow for a judge to violate their privacy in a court case? That's the only way I see the info getting out, but is there a crime to allow that situation to arise?

What other (legal or illegal) path is there to identify a person who posted something online?

The space has moved past this risk for a lot of reasons, to start. And it’s hard to understand I think in light of modern (relative to pre-2018/19) widespread mainstream adoption.

But, a long term protection for BTC when it was smaller and tbh anyone’s guess how it would turn out (still is IMO), was: who are you going to haul into senate hearings, court, cryptography export control violations, whatever over BTC?

This happened ample times in the recent past before BTC with digital money attempts and cryptography projects. It’s happening now with mixers on btc and ethereum. It was a real risk to BTC in its own way.

With BTC then and now, there was no real leader though. There were important core devs and industry leads, but no one held true sway like, say, Vitalik did with eth early days.

So it wasn’t so much a firm “did something wrong” risk for BTC’s founder, but more of a concern that the US govt had taken very heavyhanded measures against many similar projects to BTC. As there was no one to target in BTC’s case, this protection played a large role in its early push into staying power.

Also going to color this with CIA had the lead dev at the time visit them to discuss it in 2011. So there was certainly some real sustained attention to it from the start.

Sounds like this person was really smart to begin with. High-level societal awareness caused them to choose the private route, and focus on releasing something for the greater good.

I wouldn't be surprised if this person never even took a single bitcoin for themselves, other than the ones used for code testing purposes. That would create another avenue for people to come after them if it became public that they hoarded some of the Bitcoin for themselves.

This. Maybe, Satoshi saw where it was going, knew it had wings, didn’t want to be the elephant’s plaything in some senate hearing, and bowed out. Sometimes people make things because it’s the right thing to do. Other times people make things because they are experimenting and seeing what sticks. This was a case of both. The right idea, at the right time, without hubris, and without someone to blame or throw in court if the experiment fails.

Satoshi could have chosen a 0 BTC subsidy in the blocks he mined. Or he could have burned all the BTC he mined. But he chose to do neither, leaving himself as the biggest BTC owner ever.

Other coins have been designed in a way where the founders can only obtain coins by mining them in very small quantities or buying them on the open market (mostly by fixing the block subsidy forever).

Or he deleted the keys.

Also can you choose a smaller subsidy? Wouldn’t that be an invalid block?

Yes, the coinbase can be any value from 0 to the maximum, which is subsidy + fees. It has been below the maximum several times in fact.

I mean that “other coins design” part is looking at this aspect from the 2024 perspective of many blockchains many designs existing.

In 2009, calling Bitcoin the only blockchain in town doesn’t even do service to its extreme novelty at the time.

There were no other ideas on how to design, let alone any ideas on what would work long term, and there were no “open markets” for crypto haha.

> I wouldn't be surprised if this person never even took a single bitcoin for themselves, other than the ones used for code testing purposes.

Unlikely - https://coincodex.com/article/28459/satoshi-nakamoto-wallet-...

The value of his publicly-known wallets are well into the tens of billions. Yet Nakamoto has not cashed out.

Maybe he will cash out in the future if his cryosleep awakening will be successful

Allegedly this guy is nakamoto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scienti...

When in 2011 ? You seem to mean that it was unknown by then, but it wasn't : 2011 was pretty much the year when it blew up into the public consciousness, spreading from the likes of Slashdot and Ars Technica into more generalist publications (also causing its first - or was that 2nd? - bubble popping) :

"The Crypto-Currency" - The New Yorker (2011)

https://archive.is/wsbcQ

(I love how I picked it randomly, and the first two subtitles are "Bitcoin and its mysterious inventor." and "It’s not clear if bitcoin is legal, but there is no company in control and no one to arrest.")

I know what you’re getting at but I disagree with the analysis and I’ll try to frame what I mean, which is somewhat the opposite.

I mean the ‘11 visit is indicative of serious attention paid to by serious people very early on relative to the rest of crypto’s history. As in, the founder was right to be cautious.

“Early on” in this case means that outside of tech pubs and curiosity pieces due to the compelling founder mystery, the space was treated as a joke by and large. Like watch Banking on Bitcoin, and imagine trying to convince critics of it at that time that ETFs, crypto aide to Ukraine, 3x nation state adoptions, custody teams at big banks, and so on were all coming. I would just completely disagree if you argued this wasn’t the theme then. So yes, 2011 and intel agency interest is quite early on.

For example, it’s taken 15 years to get tangible regulatory clarity which arguably just starting finally with the ETF.

this is like winning lotto ticket but not cashing it . anyone in theory could have read the article or related ones and bought some, but you would needed to hold

> as ISPs wouldn't just dish out private info like that without a warrant

ISPs regularly sell private data to the highest bidder. Similarly with payroll providers and whatnot (a non-trivial fraction of my paystubs -- not just salary, but withholding, exempt tax status, ... -- are available to anyone with a few dollars; historically, it _seems_ like the only buyers have been employers trying to see if their salary offers aligned with my expectations).

They'll sell anonymized data in aggregate but no, you can't just go to an ISP and buy the user behind an IP without a court order.

They sell "anonymized" data, not just "aggregated". The only missing link is tying that back to a real person (i.e., they haven't solved differential privacy; they've just given the illusion that they're not selling personal data). Tying it back to a real person is easy though because the non-anonymized fields (age, gender, salary, zip-code, ...) are uniquely identifying for most individuals and are available for sale tied back to a real human from other sources which you can fuzzily join the ISP data into.

It's similar to how bitcoin transactions (before mixers and whatnot) were de-anonymized. You have the secret information (an identity), the public information (transaction history), and you're able to fuzzily join that public information to other public sources containing the secret information to also have secret information tied with the original "anonymous" source.

Just to re-emphasize, because I think it's really poorly understood: most "anonymized" data is a few additional data points away from being re-identified.

Data re-identification was already happening in 2006 (just one example below). And now there's exponentially more data available to use for this purpose.

>We apply our de-anonymization methodology to the Netflix Prize dataset, which contains anonymous movie ratings of 500,000 subscribers of Netflix, the world’s largest online movie rental service. We demonstrate that an adversary who knows only a little bit about an individual subscriber can easily identify this subscriber’s record in the dataset. Using the Internet Movie Database as the source of background knowledge, we successfully identified the Netflix records of known users, uncovering their apparent political preferences and other potentially sensitive information.

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf

American ISPs injected tracking codes into their user’s HTTP traffic so they could get paid by advertisers. I would not speak in absolutes about that, especially because anonymizing data is a hard problem which even we’ll-intended people have made mistakes with.

Yes you can, companies have deals with ISPs for individual real-time mobile and home browsing data. If you pay enough it has real names, otherwise it has person id and household id along with other data that makes it easy to associate with the real person or household.

It only takes one person at an ISP to steal and leak the data. I mean, an IRS employee leaked the president's tax returns and is currently in federal prison for it. I imagine the stakes are much lower for just stealing some IP address assignment data from an ISP archive(if such an archive exists).

It only takes one VPN to hide it.

VPN's shift the trust, they don't eliminate the need for it.

Feel free to read the above as:

>It only takes one person at a VPN provider to steal and leak the data.

Perhaps he only communicated as satoshi over Tor.

Perhaps they practiced near perfect opsec.

VPN, their own IP, stealing access, TOR, hacking the routers and APs and cleaning up…

You’ve never played Uplink I see. One doesn’t just hop to one VPN and call it a day…

It only takes one Kape Technologies to unhide all of it.

probably used TOR

Maybe one country jurisdiction thinks he may owe taxes, so they may investigate.

s/thinks/decides/

I don't think it's a legal issue. People want to know who it was and credit where it's due.

Satoshi didn't do anything wrong but distributed consensus was finally solved (or so it seems) and that's a big deal.

Idolization of Satoshi is strong. For that reason alone, if I were him/her, I would disappear. The work is self-evident and the idea a dime a dozen. The execution of it and the fact that it was accepted is what we should be idolizing. Which is exactly what happened. BTC became a thing and was no longer an idea. I reject anyone claiming to be Satoshi because Satoshi would never claim to be Satoshi. ;)

That's why I hope the truth comes out. If say, Satoshi is Len, then Satoshi is no longer a god. He's a regular dude, that suffered like many people and tragically took his own life. There's a lot to unwrap there.

Maybe, we are better off NOT knowing. Having closure could mean the end of BTC. It could mean the end of a lot of things. It could also be beginnings, no doubt. However, like Schrödinger’s cat, it’s best if it’s kept in a state of quantum entanglement.

Quantum superposition

The USG seems pretty intent on implementing KYC across the entirety of the financial system, so it wouldn't really surprise me if they aimed to identify wallets holding large (say, $100 million USD or more) amounts of Bitcoin.

Realistically the threshold will be something like $100.

Would this not be self reported by wallet owners? Because if each transaction uses a unique wallet address, funds are very difficult to connect to an owner. Until they’re connected to a sale to fiat at least?

Yes but my point is more that if the resources of a nation state are at play, they will probably be able to figure out who Satoshi is/was.

Governments are going to argue that the creation of BitCoin and lack of KYC to use it is a major contributor to money laundering.

Dark sarcasm take: there's a large volume of early bitcoin that may or may not be lost forever. The risk of addresses that have gone dark a long time ago lighting up again must have a big influence of any bitcoin evaluation that is at least in part based on reason. Fossilized coins could hugely change the supply/demand dynamic. The documented death of a person believed to be Satoshi would significantly shift that risk assessment. Nobody would know wether the person took meaningful keys to their grave or not, but the risk equation would contain one scenario less than before in the category of old coin flood.

You think it’s a killswitch?

Why do you think they want his identity because he did something WRONG?

I hear your point and it's a valid one. Consider the recent case of Tornado Cash and the Open Source Is Not A Crime movement. Two individuals were arrested for developing open-source code on GitHub. Just last week, GoFundMe shut down the Tornado Cash legal defense crowdfunding. This suggests that the state is more interested in protecting itself from individuals rather than defending their rights. This could potentially set a precedent where inventors or developers of decentralized technologies could be targeted, even if they've done nothing inherently wrong. If interested you can learn more here: https://wewantjusticedao.org/

Tornado cash was doing something illegal.

GoFundMe is a business, which may do whatever it wants. Tornado Cash has no rights to obtain funds though GoFundMe.

Tornado Cash is a protocol which can be used by both good and bad actors. Saying TC was responsible for bad actors laundering their crypto through the protocol is like saying auto makers are responsible for car crashes or Bob Kahn is responsible for all the illegal activities on the internet.

Even if used by "good actors", you're still facilitating money laundering. Which is always illegal. There is no "legal" way to launder money.

The technology behind Tornado Cash could also be used for instituting something like truly fully anonymous group surveys (such as those employee surveys big companies always ask you to take that they claim are "anonymous")

It doesn't have to be used for money laundering, and even if using it to move funds anonymously, that doesn't mean you're money laundering. There are good reasons to not want individuals and state actors whose jurisdiction you're not under to track your financial movements, even if you are reporting your income accurately with your own government.

> even if using it to move funds anonymously, that doesn't mean you're money laundering

The whole point of tornado cash is to "pool" funds to obfuscate who owns what. If your funds get "pooled" with funds from a criminal enterprise, then you become an accessory to that crime. Good luck using your hypothetical to convince a court otherwise.

"I didn't ask where the (other) money came from" is no defense.

What the technology could also be used for is irrelevant. What TC was actually used for was laundering money from North Korea.

So is encryption...

Or like gun manufacturers are liable for crimes!

Oh they've been sued and lost [1]? Maybe not that one.

[1]: https://apnews.com/article/sandy-hook-school-shooting-reming...

Civil and criminal law are two separate things.

“ In August 2022, the U.S. Department of the Treasury blacklisted the service, making it illegal for US citizens, residents and companies to use.” [0]

Regardless of how you feel about it, you can’t deny that they were doing something illegal under US law, and a consequence of that is that the Feds can come down on you, even if the law seems ad hoc and unfair.

[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_Cash

Oh this is bullshit and you know it. Another example of "we didn't call it a security so it's not a security"

They weren't arrested for the code. They were arrested for actively participating and profiting off money laundering with North Korea being a customer.

Zero-knowledge proofs are different from public ledgers. That's where the issue comes in to play. The Treasury Department has already given guidance that cryptocurrency mixers fall under Know Your Customer laws and the Bank Secrecy Act, and are required to know who exactly is using their services and how.

It's not "Criminalizing Open Source". You live in a society with laws. Obfuscating classic financial products with tech jargon worked for the first half of the decade.

Y'all are just mad it doesn't work anymore and claim "You just don't understand the technology. You haven't issued guidance on specifics of crypto currency. You can't use hundred year old laws"

Yes, you can use 100 year old laws. At the end of the day, the financial shenanigans of most crypto, exchanges, and tokens are fundamentally the same things that have already been regulated. You just have new words.

You live in a society of variable laws that change at runtime get applied unevenly.

Class templates get applied at runtime based on the heap size/ legacy properties of the initializing task.

If we’re using software metaphors for things that aren’t software, I can pull that card too.

The first half of which decade?

Your pedantism perfectly illustrates my point

Well either that or what they were doing is just obviously illegal and they should be at fault for it.

Tornado Cash was what, money laundering and circumvention of sanctions? Pretty illegal.

These court orders might also happen if someone _claims_ that crimes have happened.

The legal system has to come to that conclusion, which requires an investigation.

Yeah it must be an important claim. That's of course completely unacceptable and illegal. But it is one way such warrants could happen.

I think people who follow / read up on the thing have a pretty good idea who it is but as you say he didn't really do anything wrong. Reasons for anonymity include not having criminals try to extort you and maybe some government having a go over money laundering or people suing for this of that so I think people with a good idea stay quiet to respect Satoshi's desires.

I've got a theory he may come out and donate to a charitable foundation when he's old and near the end.

> ISPs wouldn't just dish out private info like that without a warrant.

ISPs routinely sell such information for money en masse. Police departments are a major buyer, but also ad agencies and others. Plus, bribing a low level employee for access to such records, or directly infiltrating the ISP to get access yourself, is child's play to any determined group.

It is extraordinarily naive, especially in a post-Snowden world, to think that any and all information available to a private company is not also available to, at least, spy agencies of the parent state.

> Did the inventor of Bitcoin do something wrong to allow for a judge to violate their privacy in a court case? That's the only way I see the info getting out, but is there a crime to allow that situation to arise?

This feels like wrong framework/approach. Fundamentaly question here: “is it worth it for somebody?” Economists path to an answer: If for somebody[3], profit[1] of identifying satoshi outweighs the cost[2], it will be done.

[1] profit in very abstract sense. E.g. elimination of (perceived?) threat, aquisition of credible threat to other enemies, political points, money, making an example for others, showing off skills.

[2] “cost” is also used in very abstract sense. E.g. Favor from a known(or compromised) judge, man hours dedicated by FBI/MI6, money, negative press budget after “bending” some rules, risk of getting caught by supriors/underlinglins/press/constituents.

[3] “somebody” - to no surprise - can be anybody/anything. E.g. A corporation, a government, maybe single branch or department, maybe sole individual able to use his government position for personal gain, an employee of ISP, a blockchain historian, most likely Satoshi’s ex.

Important to note: both individuals and governments do break the law when they think it is necessary.

I find at least two credible incentives to find satoshi:

- bitcoin can be used to lounder money, circumvent financial sanctions, so governments want to stop that and make example of it.

- Satoshi, has 1 000 000 bitcoins. That’s a lot of money. a) banal roberies are done for far less. b) CIA or similar might want to know who wields this much resource, friend or foe (especially if its value would grow even more)

How Satoshi can be uncovered I have no idea, but the story of Silkroad owner shows, that minor slipups can be revealed after number of years.

See: Liberty Dollar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_dollar_(private_curren...

It's idle curiosity and research.

Much effort in literature and history is to try to figure out who actually wrote X or who was Y. No accusations.

My understanding is conspiracy people want to know if it was an alphabet agency that developed bitcoin to push a new world order of cashless currency. Or a new way to move money around anonymously and make it easier for governments and their agencies to stay anonymous.

For those curious about the court case it's referencing, here is the context: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/02/07/craig... (https://archive.is/7YyMl)

If you prefer an (outdated but entertaining) podcast:

https://www.alabseries.com/episodes/episode-3-faketoshi-the-...

Satoshi double spaces after periods.

The real analysis is here.

Must be American then.

Or just above the age of 35 or so?

Or if their typing instructor grew up around that time.

You mean 135? The double space thing doesn't exist in the UK.

I must also be American in that case. (Hint: I'm not).

I thought the double spacing was a typewriter thing. Is it uniquely American?

It is not.

I learned to do it because old-school unix vi would identify your sentences better for sentence-based moves if you had 2 spaces after the period. I'm actually trying to unlearn it now because you don't need it for any kind of vim/neovim and I read on some ultrapedantic typesetting website that it's wrong for some reason I don't quite remember now.

In any case it's definitely not specifically American (neither am I) and all the other "forensics" that people are trying based on vocab etc are somewhat of a stretch also. eg non-Americans use "gotten" non British people use "British" English (eg people from Ireland or from former British colonies for the most part) non-Americans use "ize" sometimes for spellings (I could never be bothered to learn the few exceptions needed to spell "ize/ise" words correctly in the British style and worked enough for American companies who wanted US spelling as a house style for my personal spelling to be even remotely consistent and certainly not indicative of where I am from.

As a British person, despite having been taught that the '-ise' suffix is 'proper' English, I have made some effort to unlearn this habit, as it was never really based on any etymological roots anyway. Here's what Wiktionary has to say about it[1]:

  Many English verbs end in the suffix /aɪz/. Historically, this has been spelled -ize on words originating from Greek (for example baptize, Hellenize), while -ise has been used, especially in -vise, -tise, -cise and -prise, on words that came from French or Latin roots (for example surprise, supervise). In the 19th century, it became common in the United Kingdom (due to French influence)... to use -ise also on words that had historically been spelled -ize (hence baptise, Hellenise). However, the... Oxford English Dictionary continue to use the spelling -ize on Greek words, and -ize has always been the spelling used in the United States and Canada on such words.

The whole debate becomes rather moot when it is considered that Ancient Greek didn't use the Latin script, so both '-ize' or '-ise' would have looked distinctly foreign to a Greek author two thousand years ago. Horace so succinctly noted that "Captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought civilisation to barbarous Latium", but he might have been a little less glowing if the orthography of Greek loanwords was as heated a debate in Rome as it is in contemporary Britain!

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ize

Exactly how we learned to do in keyboarding class. It’s still with me after all these years.

My wife double spaces after periods, and although she is a US citizen, she is not a product of the American education system.

My wife is Satoshi Nakamoto.

Now I'm sensing a whole "I am Spartacus" thing happening.

I’m Satoshi and so is my wife.

I didn’t think double spaces after a full stop is an American thing. We were taught that in the 70s back when typewriters were still a thing. And I can’t break the habit today.

I've seen it from various people from various backgrounds. The biggest commonality is age (typewriters) but I've seen it from youngsters, too.

I split the difference as my typing grew up with LaTeX so I want a slightly larger space after a period, but I don't care to type it ;)

I was taught typing on electric typewriters in junior high, and yes 2 spaces after a period.

Which is strange, because my first typing experience was on Apple IIe's in grade school. I don't recall any typing instruction back then, so probably my double space habit comes from the electric typewriter instruction.

The "double space" for typewriters comes from style guides based on typesetting which was based on limitations of the type used in the ancient days.

There's much argument over whether it is proper or not, and if so, how much. See The Elements of Typographic Style or A Few Notes on Book Design - https://mirror.math.princeton.edu/pub/CTAN/info/memdesign/me...

Dr.[space]Pepper is a soft drink.[space][space]This is a new sentence. Actually, "Dr Pepper" doesn't use a period so the point is void, but there's definitely some potential semantic (and display) differences between the periods in (eg) N.A.S.A. and the periods at end of a sentence. Not quite as straightforward as you might think.

The books go into it, and LaTeX has \. for periods that are not sentence-stops (there's even more, as word-breaking and line-breaking come into play, as you don't want to end a line with Dr. when it's part of a name, etc.

There is an inside joke here as well.

I regularly accuse my wife of being Satoshi Nakamoto.

My wife is Satoshi too ! insert two spaced salute

It might be just that he uses Emacs for writing emails. Emacs uses double space after periods by default.

Emacs uses the presence of double spaces after periods as a marker that that particular sequence of text is the end of a sentence. It doesn't insert them by default, but rather interprets their insertion in a particular way.

See: sentence-end-double-space, a variable, and sentence-end, a function, both defined in ‘paragraphs.el’.

Other editors made this same interpretation of existing, common practice.

I heard that Satoshi was Hal Finney (from a good friend of Hal's). Looking at his personal site, guess how many spaces there are after a period:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140403012916/http://www.finney...

I think it's a fair bet that Satoshi is either dead, insane, or the government. Finney checks the most likely one.

The government is a new (but fun) one for me! What's the theory there?

It's a mechanism by which the CIA(or others!) could pay operatives covertly.

I'm pretty sure i read this like a decade ago, but to me it makes sense. Especially given that numbers stations apparently blared out orders into the late 1900s.

Never made sense to me.

Bitcoin is open. Cash is private and anonymous.

If monero was the first currency to come out I would’ve considered that.

Satoshi Nakamoto translates directly unquestionably into: Central Intelligence... Freedom Baby.. Bitcoin!!! Digital money!! iphones!

On this website there are single spaces following periods.

When HTML is rendered, multiple normal white space characters collapse into one, e.g. if you write "<p>Hello it's me</p>" it will be displayed in a browser as "Hello it's me". The source code tells the whole truth.

Haha, HN seems to have removed your demo whitespace. (Even in the source)

This is why back in the '00s my boss forced us to put a space and an "&nbsp;" after every period. Ugh.

View source.

The writing style matches the emails as well.

Yeah, I've always been surprised[1] when people come out claiming to be Satoshi but ignore this very blatant writing style in their own texts. I haven't really interacted that much with them online and both the double spaces and the British spellings struck out to me and a few others years ago.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15917598#15919288

Are all of the digital fingerprints created by Satoshi (emails and posted code) completely untraceable, with no archives of domains, IP addresses, access logs, etc., still in existence that might identify where he was logging in from?

Last I read the domain registration for Bitcoin.org (I think) is the main exposure point.

But, what you raised is why I don’t buy they haven’t been ID’d. Digital fingerprints across multiple forums, and platforms, the logs to find a way in are there somewhere.

I figure it is Len Sassaman.

Len was a Linux guy, Satoshi was not. There's even an email here that says just that, "technically much more linux capable than me."

https://mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/#email-241

I think you’d have to factor in Satoshi’s opsec measures though vs taking them at their word at being bad at Linux, consider SN displayed very capable opsec in other forums.

Len had significant time and topic correlations to many/basically all iirc of the feeder research and projects that clearly fed into BTC. SN also went offline around the time Len passed. Those two factors plus the related details sealed it for me.

Edit - like if I was known to research under Szabo and Finney (iirc) right around the same time BTC launched, was known to advocate to peers to launch controversial open source under pseudonyms, and so on, I’d probably wrap my public persona under “BTC sucks” and my SN persona under “idk linux well,” and so on. Seems an obvious step to take.

I don't think you can fake being blind to unix style when writing c++. The c++ style that grew out of the windows world is kind of unique.

(Although I personally am both a longtime enthusiast of unix-like OSes and a former MS employee, so I am familiar with both ... But I find that to be kind of rare.)

I use almost same style for both.

But that just makes your theory unfalsifiable and uninteresting. For every contradiction you can just say "That's what he wanted you to think!"

Right, it obviously spirals into this issue and others like it.

>I think you’d have to factor in Satoshi’s opsec measures though

Lying about trivial and mundane stuff is a wildly hard thing to maintain over any period of time and, for long-term opsec, more likely to cause issues than not.

Being "linux capable" or not is mundane and vague enough (as well as applicable to enough people) that there isn't really any gain in lying about it but it adds risk in the case that you slip up in your maintaining of that lie 10 years down the road.

There are much more effective ways to resist being identified, which are also easier to maintain long-term.

Well, a lot of other effective things were done as well as you say.

For me, comes down to that I disagree that the creator of one of the most consequential tech break through that hits at the core of national sovereignty and control didn’t think of a lot of angles to this. Early Cypherpunks, of which SN was certainly one, were a pretty insane/intense crew in these areas.

And to your point about the difficulty of maintaining trivial deceptions long term, well Len passed pretty soon after the initial years.

>didn’t think of a lot of angles to this.

I'm not saying it wasn't thought about. If anything, I'm saying the opposite.

When you think about it long enough, you realize that many of the 'little lies' carry more risk than they are worth. Lying about being "linux capable" falls into that category.

>And to your point about the difficulty of maintaining trivial deceptions long term, well Len passed pretty soon after the initial years.

I was speaking more generally about opsec and lies which aren't worth the trouble and increased risk.

Specific to your comment: If Len knew they would die soon after, there is less incentive to lie about little things like linux capability. If they didn't know they would die soon after, they would care about the long-term opsec.

All interesting points. I think I disagree with the last part due to my original post - nobody knew how this would turn out, but those involved knew projects like this consistently attracted serious State attention.

B/t protect the protocol by trying every possible angle against this sort of “adversary” (which, here in 2024, seems to have worked), versus cutting corners, the comprehensive nature of SN’s opsec seems to imply it’d show up in a lot of small ways like lying about Linux. Analysis of the codebase also had similar findings about attention to detail (“thought of everything” sort of difficulty regarding appsec).

Overall, there’s a good write up on Len as SN worth digging into if the topic is interesting. I also think the ‘11 New Yorker piece got close to the truth.

>versus cutting corners, the comprehensive nature of SN’s opsec seems to imply it’d show up in a lot of small ways like lying about Linux.

I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself poorly, or if we're maybe just speaking past each other, or I'm not understanding you.

You're saying that not lying about linux capability would be "cutting corners".

I'm saying that not lying (in this specific situation) would be the better opsec, and that anyone serious about opsec against government-level adversaries would not bother lying about such a mundane detail because it is all risk with no benefit to opsec. This concept was taught to me at a previous job where the adversaries were of the same magnitude as governments, and I'm confident that anyone seriously into the opsec/prviacy "scene" would concur.

Satoshi was, obviously, careful about opsec. Therefor I do not think they would lie about such a trivial and vague detail such as saying someone else is more linux capable than they are, because it would be a risk to lie about it compared to not lying.

I presume you won't say, but now I'm wondering about who has similar intelligence capabilities to governments...

I know it sounds utterly morbid, but has anyone proposed the conspiracy that Len was "suicided" after his identity was identified by a very shady -- possibly state-backed -- actors . This guy was a walking bag of cash at that point and people have been killed for far less.

Have you considered Le Roux? Someone who had a real motive to create Bitcoin, and who had actually written Windows based crypto software before.

Interestingly, Le Roux added "Solotshi" to his name on his 2008 passport:

https://i.imgur.com/44I9wlL.jpeg

Solotshi/Satoshi.

Gotta love that the embassy stamp is in Comic Sans, it conveys a sense of true professionalism

Given his past it's hard to imagine Le Roux sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bitcoins, even from inside a federal prison.

Given his past it is easy to imagine his keys got misplaced while on the run or met with some kind of "unfortunate accident".

Pretty good incentive to say nothing isn't it?

Not really. He's already in his fifties and faces 20 years in US prison, and then he will probably be deported to the Philippines to spend the rest of his life in prison. I imagine if he had access to billions he would he would be paying mercenaries to bust him out.

You think mercenaries can be bought to 'bust' someone out of an American prison? That is such a ridiculous statement in so so many ways.

ADX Florence? Probably not. Fort Dix? Almost certainly if the price is right. It's more like a glorified summer camp than a prison.

I’ve read the various write ups, and iirc the New Yorker piece and who/the group they pointed and a write up on Len seemed to make the most sense. Fun area, been a while since I dug into it.

Very few projects are created truly anonymously. I believe the Bitcoin creator had a real motive to stay anonymous, and a practical use case that was driving him to make Bitcoin eg transferring large amounts of illegitimate wealth internationally and outside of the banking system.

there’s pretty clear documentation on the motivations for why it was made, but I suppose it could be duplicitous and hard to ever verify one way or the other unless SN wallets became active again.

Eh, you could say everyone involved with Bitcoin was 'duplicitous' then because everyone knew the potential criminal use cases from the beginning.

Len was a Macbook user, but he would not have done Bitcoin on his personal laptop. It's much more likely he used available PCs in a computer lab on the campus he studied/worked at, which were likely Windows machines.

It's also been shown Satoshi (and Len's) activities aligned and they overlapped with a school/academic year.

Here's Len's macbook as proof:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/enochsmiles/449655745/

Fun fact, he was experimenting with email based image uploads on flickr. That was around the time Satoshi suggested they build an image hosting site that accepts Bitcoin.

It's not a leap to assume Len's brain made the following cypherpunk leaps:

remailer (anonymous email) -> image upload by email -> pay via semi-anonymous crypto currency

Len's own bio says, "I have a very strong interest in the real-world applicability of my work."

Also, see https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/77358901774917632 where Len doesn't seem to be a fan of Bitcoin. Not sure what he means by that though.

Satoshi stepped away from Bitcoin in 2010 and handed over the project to the maintainers.

Len started posting about Bitcoin in 2010 (post Satoshi handing the project over).

It seems to me, if Len was Satoshi, he grew distant from the project. Maybe it wasn't the cypherpunk utopia he envisioned. Maybe the wikileaks and silkroad issues weren't what he wanted to enable. Perhaps he wanted to distance himself further from the project.

He was also depressed at that time.

My understanding is around the time SN left correlated to around the time Len’s mental health escalated. That noted, RIP/don’t mean to crassly speculate about what sounded like a talented and difficult life.

yup, agree, also looking how Len writes, he is definitely not Satoshi. You can see on his twitter(Len) - https://twitter.com/lensassaman that he is quite punctual, ie. sentences end with periods, quotation is accurate. What gives it away is every sentence he writes on twitter is one space after the period, Satoshi is 2 spaces every single time. Also seeing the same thing for Hal Finney(https://twitter.com/halfin), so my deduction is neither of them is Satoshi.

PINE (the mail client) had a ^J keyboard shortcut to justify the lines. It's been a long time since I used it, but I seem to recall that it would insert double space after period when you hit that key. It might even have been possible to set it up to auto justify on save/send. I suspect that's why a lot of old (plain text) email had the double space after period and perhaps still does in OSS circles.

I think the default vim justification worked that way too. Around this time I went through a phase of bloody-mindedly using Mail/mailx and vi on OpenBSD while still sending mail through my ISP's SMTP and using fetchmail to grab it through POP3. I would not at all be surprised if cypherpunk types were doing the same thing, even if their main desktop or laptop was Windows and they used single space after period for non-email communication.

Edit to add: I just looked up fmt(1) manpage[0] and it specifically mentions using it to format mails, and that the default is two space after period.

[0] https://man.openbsd.org/fmt.1

The bitcoin whitepaper was written in OpenOffice and it also has double spaces after periods, which doesn't fit your theory.

I don't really have a theory, just sharing my experience growing up being taught to use two spaces, then in the early 2000s consciously adjusting my writing style back to one space, then having my plaintext emails still end up with two spaces anyway.

It's interesting that a document written in a WYSIWYG word processor would have two spaces because I think what originally got me to switch to one was word processor auto corrects removing the extra space, or at least putting blue squigglies in during the grammar check.

I guess my feeling is that although this might be an indicator of authorship, it's not necessarily a smoking gun one way or the other.

There’s a great write up on Len that digs into this style of analysis and others, and that’s what sold me. Worth reading if it the topic interests you, it’s linked elsewhere here I think! Lots of fun spacing, timezone to forum posts analysis, who worked and researched with who…

Hal's personal site has two spaces after a period.

I see one space - https://web.archive.org/web/20140403012916/http://www.finney...

EDIT - really interesting, could very well be Hal, every sentence after a period ends with 2 spaces - view-source:https://web.archive.org/web/20140403012916/http://www.finney...

View source.

Wait, what causes this kind of replacement ??

HTML considers whitespace insignificant.

Well, repeating whitespace. Single whitespace still has significance. If you have two display: inline-block <div> elements, it will make a difference if you add a space (or three million spaces) in between.

Meredith Patterson might know, then.

Just trace its usecases, it leads to both EU/FED exploring a digital fiat and a digital passport, must be someone who has worked with the government

My theory: the CIA/NSA

There is some evidence pointing to a Covad IP address in Los Angeles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29728339

Timezone-wise it'd make the most sense if he was somewhere in the US, since he almost never posted between 05:00 and 11:00 GMT. That'd be between 00:00 and 06:00 New York time.

The top Satoshi archeologist is Sergio Lerner: https://bitslog.com/

Official security auditor of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Maybe HE is Satoshi!

Big brain move, be the leading authority on not identifying yourself.

Made me think of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen

> In the letter, he gave the names of three KGB agents secretly working for the FBI: Boris Yuzhin, Valery Martynov, and Sergei Motorin ... Hanssen was recalled yet again to Washington, D.C., in 1987. He was tasked with studying all known and rumored penetrations of the FBI to find the man who had betrayed Martynov and Motorin; this meant, in effect, that he was charged with searching for himself.

Next step, feed this text into into some nlp/llm and search the web for a match to find who Satoshi is

There's already far more text written by him (as well as code), and there have been run comparisons of it against all the seriously proposed candidates.

A good writer can probably change his/her demeanor and style in writing when changing personas. I'm sure it's hard work, but I'm also sure that practice makes it possible -- at least for some gifted people. It's also possible that Satoshi isn't a single human being, but an organization that can dedicate a lot of effort to this sort of thing.

This guy got famous for doing just that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa

I think he even broke up with his girlfriend through letters in which he pretended to be someone else (if I remember correctly).

Anything is possible, but not everything is equally possible. I consider it most likely that bitcoin was developed by the 3-4 people who still worked on digital cash schemes after Chaum's scheme failed in 1998. Of those, Nick Szabo (with British spellcheck) is the strongest candidate for being the one who held the Satoshi keys.

Alexander Hamilton

Len Sassaman

https://evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c8...

Was Len known to type in British English and use British terms?

As a Canadian who was raised on British English, I seamlessly switch between British and American English when interacting with clients from the US, England, and Canada. This flexibility in language is quite natural to me. Furthermore, for someone who meticulously conceals their identity, adapting in such a manner would likely be effortless and unremarkable.

Cheerio, Later, Take care eh?

In one of the messages Satoshi writes "gotten", which would be unusual for a Brit.

There's also a lot of -ize. My money is on a Canadian, or a non-native-English European living in Britain.

Agreed, “been” would be more typical for a Brit

"gotten" would be less unusual for a Scottish person, although it is usually used in the context of "ill-gotten [gains]" it does crop up now and again outwith that.

The article in the comment you responded to contains the following information:

"Since COSIC was based in Leuven, Len was living in Belgium during Bitcoin’s development. This is salient given that a number of facts suggest that Satoshi was based in Europe...

Satoshi’s writing exhibits spelling and word choices idiosyncratic of British English such as “bloody difficult”, “flat”, “maths”, grey”, as well as the dd/mm/yyyy date format. However, Satoshi also refers to Euros rather than pounds. These clues leave us with a paradox: they suggest Satoshi was European, yet someone with the requisite skillset and exposure to Bitcoin’s primary influences would likely have been American. Much of the Cypherpunk community coalesced conferences and meetups, part of why a disproportionate number hailed from America and especially SF. The jobs where one could have gained cutting-edge professional infosec and crypto experience were similarly concentrated in the US.

Strangely enough, Len used the very same British English as Satoshi even though he was American."

Irish?

yes, the article referenced above referenced several tweet's from Len using Britishisms like "bloody". He was an American, living in Europe. Satoshi also referenced Euros (rather than pounds).

Curiously, in #217 Satoshi used "gotten", which doesn't exist in British English - it's a word that is normally only used by Americans.

I'm British and I use the word. "They've gotten good". Coders in particular have to learn American and a lot of us just use American on the internet unless we're talking in an English (or UK - English, Welsh, Scottish, North Irish) corner of the interwebs.

Or even Cornish! I was pleasantly surprised to find Cornish written across the side of the buses whilst visiting Plymouth. It's not much more than a linguistic and cultural curiosity, unfortunately, with even the excitement of the Cornish Revival being wholly insufficient to reach a critical mass of contemporary speakers. However, if there's just a faint possibility we'll be able to preserve the tradition I'm all for it.

Whatever happens the pasties will live on forever.

It does exist (in that British people are aware of the US usage and "ill gotten gains") but sounds like a clueless person talking, or a child, so unless deeply exposes to American English nobody would use it themselves. I'm beginning to, but only after 30 years in the colonies.

Hm. Listen some more! We use it in the US Midwest routinely. Had gotten dehydrated. Have gotten bit by that issue. We've gotten the flu around here pretty frequently this winter.

Then there's misbegotten, begetting, begotten.

mixing British and American English is also common for European non-native English speakers

You shall know by the assembled slang what series they watch

> Len Sassaman

It's not him, no double spaces in his writings.

There is a great book and/or movie just waiting to be made about Satoshi. Such a great story.

Broaden "Satoshi" to the creation story of Bitcoin, and there already are; Banking on Bitcoin is a good one.

Banking on Bitcoin is such a useful explainer of the space and its implications. Not a lot of that content around anymore.

No one has a good ending!

Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency

by Finn Brunton

Small blockers in shambles

If you want a detailed look at all of the Satoshi evidence (circumstantial and others), check out this paper:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.10257v14.pdf

If you want the TLDR; the meat is the "Candidates" section about Len Sassaman and the original Bitcoin paper's references (in particular, how Len was the only person with the right skill set, in the right place, at the right time to even get a copy of the referenced work).... among a mountain of other circumstantial evidence.

Oh, I'm excited to read this! Once or twice a year I take a trip down the rabbit hole on Satoshi, and my personal conclusion after the last couple of trips has been Len Sassaman.

The one thing that bugs me is that the original bitcoin paper, while amazing, doesn't seem like it was written by a PhD candidate. It cites just eight related works, and the W. Dai citation was famously added only after someone else suggested it, because Satoshi reportedly didn't know about it. A typical paper by a PhD candidate will cite dozens of related works, and Len Sassman would certainly have knowledge of dozens of related works off the top of his head.

^ I think you'll enjoy the paper's deep dive. It goes into the references deeply!

Yeah, I like this bit: "The bibliography of the whitepaper discloses a stunning paucity of knowledge about historic precursors... at the time of writing the Bitcoin whitepaper; this may either indicate a lack of interest in compliance with good academic practices, a disrespect or personal aversion against certain pioneers, or a sheer unfamiliarity with the state of the art..."

Edited to add: I didn't realize until now that Sassaman only finished his master's degree in 2008. Based on some of the work that I see from master's students (albeit none as brilliant and passionate as Sassaman) with thin lists of references, this makes Sassaman a more likely candidate in my mind.

Academics are overly verbose with citations, because they are afraid of offending a colleague or reviewer by omitting their work. One of the worst things you can possibly do is forget to cite the work of your anonymous reviewers... and there is no way to guess who that might be ahead of time, so you cite everyone.

An anonymous whitepaper has no such constraints, so you can just cite what is actually necessary to explain your point, and nothing more.

lol sorry to bug you but couldn't reply to your post from PFA thread 71 days ago. ordered a vintage woolrich crewneck that was supposed to be 100% wool but instead was the 85-15 wool-nylon blend. seems like what you were talking about, with nylon as scaffolding rather than hydrophobic outer shell. safe to assume PFA-free?

No problem- If it’s not marketed as stain resistant or waterproof it should be PFAS free.

appreciate it! thanks!

Anyone have a TLDR summary of what is interesting in this very long page?

Just chitchat during the development of bitcoin. You can understand a lot about how bitcoin design choices came to be from Satoshi own reasonings. The white paper doesn’t spell these out in detail

I guess specifically I'm curious how this would be relevant/useful in the court case mentioned.

> The VPS has 320MB RAM, 50MB of which is currently free. There's also 500MB swap space.

Every MB counts!

I found those specs really curious as I worked in webhosting (even rax which is in the thread) and we didn't have anything near that low for a vps, but reading further I guess they're using some random fly-by-night webhost that doesn't even have a cPanel or Plesk license or anything for the user to self-service, they base all of their pricing on linode and you have to call/ticket in to manage your site.

I don't know the background of satoshi, etc (of course) but that's a $10 vps and they're complaining about running out of memory, etc in the thread.. Why so cheap? Dedicated xeon servers back then were 80-250 and vps filled every other price range.

And if they just need to compile a python widget on linux with a desktop WM... we had the technology to do that locally in 2009..

> Why so cheap?

It was an amateur open source project hosting a simple site for project collaboration, in an era before the FAANG bubble in engineer salaries. I think $10/month for a hobby thing is about right.

Also recognize that this was still in the "OMG how did computers get so fast" era. Our intuition about the time was still colored by the 486's on which we'd all installed Linux for the first time (or the Sparcstations we used at school, same deal). Even today a 100+ MHz device still "feels fast" to me, and recognize that I write audio firmware on 400-800 MHz DSP cores.

I mean, I just said I was in this business back then. I was probably 22 and making a whole $40k in my first "real" engineering job at Hostway, then Hostgator, then Rackspace, etc. And I owned multiple servers. A $40 VPS was not a big ask in 2009. I absolutely didn't make FAANG salary nor did 99.9% of our VPS customers. We used to stick 1-3k customers on one $350/month dell poweredge.

We had millions of customers with VPS of various pricing and traffic and businesses.

> Also recognize that this was still in the "OMG how did computers get so fast" era.

I'm so confused by this statement. I've been in datacenters since 2005, if we ever had a "omg fast cpus" moment anywhere in that time line it was when AMD Epyc came out around 2016 and we could push massive PCIE bandwidth for vfio/etc. Beyond that we've been sitting on various 2-4ghz xeons for 25 years. I'm confused on the 486 comparison. I had a 486 when I was 8, 31 years ago.

TWO THOUSAND AND NINE 2 0 0 9

"Before the SV balloon in salaries".. dude, we're talking under a $100/month... In 2009. Your comment makes it sound like this was the yesteryear of computers, like 1988 or something, this comment has me so confused.

The entire thread is them talking about putting a tiddlywiki+phpbb on a VPS. This, aside from LAMP/etc stacks were the most common hosting product sold and were usually $5-10/mo plans. I have a feeling they're actually using one of those scammy "free" webhosts you used to be able to get off of somethingawful, etc. that would disappear after 2 months and were probably CSAM vectors.

It's just a very strange level of frugality, which is mentioned in this HN thread elsewhere. It sounds like they were only using donations to move forward, nothing wrong with that, just interesting how low skill/researched their infrastructure stuff is for someone who seemingly can create a thing like bitcoin.

You lost me. You asked why someone would rent a bottom tier hosting solution in 2009, and I told gave you an answer as someone who was paying somewhere around that for hobby projects at right around the same time. I mean, I'm sure you're right in some sense that there were better choices, there always are.

But this wasn't a weird choice at all, unless you want to inform it with a BTC quote from 2018 or whatever.

I was just rhetorically reflecting on how strange it was that those specs is what they were using when they clearly aren't a 12 year old child or Russian warez slinger who can't get a VPS elsewhere and can afford something beyond a free or $10/mo VPS, WHILE they're arguing about how they're running out of memory on the VPS when compiling. And .. I assume that they're technically savvy since they created bitcoin, although I have absolutely no idea what that entailed.

Those specs for a VPS are absolutely pathetic even for 2009 era Xeon computing. I had quad xeons poweredges with 128gb+ ram under my desk as workstations when customers stopped paying their bills in 2009 when I worked at Hostway. VPS were leased with either dedicated cores or shared cores, shared probably around $20-40 then dedi core $60-250+. Datacenters either used Vmware g/esx or Virtuzzo.

I worked at all of the largest webhosts in the USA (not Hetzner etc in Europe) from I think 2005-2015 so I'm pretty familiar with that era of hosting. The guy who owns the webhost they're using can't even spell his competitor Linodes url/name. It's like they went to some random IRC channel and picked whatever free VPS host they could, which is a horrible idea. Whoever owned that VPS could absolutely figure out who these people were and interact with any file on their system he wanted to. I bet if someone tracked down whoever is the in that email talking about his webhost, they could track that email thread back and figure everyone out. But fraud at webhosts was absolutely rampant back then so there is the possibility the entire group faked their identities if they even HAD to identify at a fly-by-night webhost (narrator: they didn't).

When we took down Windows + Linux servers for CSAM, warez, fraud, etc we'd often log into them before wiping them and they'd have IRC, ICQ, etc open on the server and we'd be able to take down an entire group by going through their logs/etc that were still on the server.

$7.99 at HOSTGATOR who back then was the biggest (outside of godaddy) budget webhost barely got you a free shared cPanel account on a server with another 2000 customers to lag your site down. It was basically an sftp account with a cpanel login, that's it. The webhost in question here doesn't even give them a login, they have to communicate and have things done by their "customer support" (probably a call center India full of sysadmins, they were huge back then).

A $9.99 VPS in 2009? oof.

Even more to the point of this thread, it shows that the tech/operations/infra skills of that team are .. not very impressive. One guy didn't know linux at all and the "Linux guy" is the one picking a free VPS at a shady webhost that can't even compile his code. So that takes a lot of SRE/types off the "who made bitcoin" list. And this wasn't like, "Linux is super rare" world. It was 2009. I had been using Linux since the 90s when I wasn't even 10. We had hundreds of Linux sysengineers at each of these companies and we had no problem hiring them.

2009 hostgator SHARED (NOT! vps/dedi) pricing, $7.95, although they didn't have VPS back then so can't compare that. A dual xeon dedi is $219/mo, IIRC VPS started around $30-60 whenever that got added.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090204225207/http://www.hostga...

https://web.archive.org/web/20090202120204/http://www.hostga...

I think you are overestimating the skills of a couple of math nerds working on a hobby project in their spare time. Even working at a tech company with professionals who are paid to write computer software, a lot of people don't know much about operations. Heck, I had been in the industry for 10 years by that point, including one as a sysadmin, and I wouldn't know where to get webhosting because I was never employed to do that kind of work. Most people in the tech industry (and even more so for people in tech-adjacent academia) only really have deep knowledge in one or two areas of specialization.

That is absolutely ridiculous. This was 2009. We had just started the recession and everyone who lost their jobs was opening up wordpress blogs and everything else. That's why Hostgator sold for $300 million 5 years later and made Oxley a fortune. 2008-2010 was the absolute largest webhosting boom that we've **ever** had. SO many webhosts started post-2008 to pull in that market. The webhosting market is absoultely dead nowadays.

Your grandma probably set up a blog to get some adwords revenue. The entire market was based around WYSYWIG website theme guis and wordpress. Nothing techinical required until you need a vps/dedi.

Once again, I worked in the industry. I am very familiar with the types of mom and pop customers who were buying $9.99 sharing hosting accounts. I spent a LOT of time on the phone supporting people.

Regardless, if they AREN'T skilled in infra/operations, like I said that they aren't - then whats your point? You just corroborated that they're not skilled in infra. So thanks for repeating me? We have a group of programmers who are so unskilled with operations/infrastructure I *know* they aren't SRE/infra types. That was my point. Satoshi or Hatoshi or whoever clearly wasn't an operations person.

If you consider someone technically skilled in linux when they don't know ANY webhosts or are willing to use a free webhost as ... technically skilled then we are absolutely not going to agree. That is absolutely pathetic, insecure, and stupid to do. Do not EVER use a free webhost. You shouldn't need a PHD in Debian to understand the implications of some random person/company who doesn't even charge you remotely normal fees having access to your super secret bitcoin code.

You were a linux sysadmin and didn't know any webhosts/dcs? Did you not work on apache/nginx? If you did you got your .htacess configurations from webhosts. You probably got your ~/.ssh/config from webhosts tutorials. You probably learned postgres/mysql through webhost tutorials. You probably learned systemd/etcd/etc from webhost tutorials. You absolutely learned iptables through a webhost tutorial.

Almost *EVERY* single linux tutorial from the 1990s to the 2015s was some sort of "Set up a LAMP/WAMP stack for a Bookstore company."

This sounds like a blatant lie. or you should've been nowhere near systems. You didn't know Geocities? Angelfire? Tripod? Godaddy? Linode? DigitalOcean? Rackspace? Hostway? The Planet? Liquidweb? 1&1?? Hetzner?? Or any of the tens of thousands of local datacenters we had to rack servers in? You were a linux admin who literally had never had their own server hosted somewhere? Where exactly did you get PRODUCTION experience to become a sysadmin? I learned linux over IRC but I absolutely had tens or hundreds of servers throughout my growth. A HUGE amount of us #linux people had eggdrops/shells even when we were little kids.

If you don't know any webhosts then what exactly were you hosting in the datacenter where you were a linux admin? What, 80-90% of servers in a datacenter are linux servers running a webserver probably. And if you're doing that you're doing exactly what webhosts are doing, except they put a nice little cPanel/Plesk portal in front. I think you're using "linux admin" a bit loosely here or our skills are astronomically far apart.

This is some strange weird whitewashing of an entire era of computing that some seem to know NOTHING about, WHILE arguing with someone who was in the trenches at that time talking about EXACTLY what they did for a living. But no, please have a random hackernews person who wasn't involved in webhosting whatsoever describe to me the industry in 2009.

Anything to play devils advocate. You people are making it sound like this was the wild west and webhosting was so hard and complex back then in the yesteryear of ... 2009.

cPanel was founded in *1996*!!

Rackspace was founded in *1998*!!

Hostgator was founded in *2005*!!

GoDaddy was founded in *1997*!!

I don't really understand your hostility here. When I was a sysadmin, I was working on Windows NT and Digital UNIX systems, and we were taking the radical step of moving some of those systems to Debian. There was no hosted website, it was on-prem IT. In subsequent jobs I developed software that ran on various versions of UNIX/Linux, but they were on-prem installs too. By the time I worked in a company that had a SaaS offering, there was a whole team of people dedicated to setting up the operations side. I wrote back end application code, why would I ever need to set up a LAMP stack? At another company I did admittedly set up Apache and do a bit of PHP programming as glue to a Java back end, but once again... on-prem installs for enterprise clients.

I think you are seeing the world through your own lens of being an expert in web hosting. Sure, every software developer who used Linux before knows how to navigate a shell, and most software developers working in SaaS 15 years ago knew how to spin up a local web server. That doesn't mean they knew the names of every company offering web hosting services on the public internet, especially in America (assuming these Bitcoin devs were European), or that they knew about cPanel or Wordpress or whatever other PHP content management system. It's a completely different area of expertise.

> It's kind of fun to read about the state of "VPS hosting" from those days. Lots of downtime. Unexpected reboots.

Absolutely not my experience from those days, VPSs were rock-solid for me.

Maybe they were trying to save money. There's another quote where Satoshi suggests being frugal:

> It might be a long time before we get another donation like that, we should save a lot of it.

> Absolutely not my experience from those days, VPSs were rock-solid for me.

Likewise, my personal toy VPS actually dates back to 2009 and the only unplanned downtime it's ever had were when Linode was one of the targets of one of those big DDoS waves a few years back. Even then it was online and working fine internally, just limited in its ability to reach the outside world.

The VPS itself has been rock solid and in 15 years the only times it's not been at least trying to serve whatever I have on it have been when I've rebooted it for updates.

I found several interesting exchanges, such as around/after email #212.

Blast from the past.

Really interesting

I just assumed "Satoshi Nakamoto" was an alias for a small group of people all working on the same code base/idea.

That seems unlikely. The original code base was fairly small and very much reads like one person was responsible for writing it. Also, the more people who know a secret the less likely it is to be kept.

This is true, but having multiple people involved makes it every difficult to pinpoint one true source. Plus, when I say multiple people I mean 2-3 or 3-4. Not like a big operation. And if these small number are so paranoid about privacy and identity that they invented Bitcoin, I would expect them to be able to keep a secret.

I just find it hard to believe there isn't a single soul walking on this planet right now that has any idea who Satoshi Nakamoto is/was.

Satoshi seems to have delved in the dark art technique of print output debugging: https://github.com/Maguines/Bitcoin-v0.1/blob/2c7a4c9bbb793c...

Alright put me on the suspect list

Satoshi having the foresight and discipline to take careful measures that would enable him to keep his identity secret, and succeeding to do so up to this point is almost more impressive achievement of his technical skills than bitcoin.

Even back in 2009, it was difficult (impossible?) to operate online without leaving tons of digital footprint, and we can guess that for sure state-backed actors tried to identify him and probably failed. Unless of course he was a state-backed actor(s).

> probably failed

That's silly. The fact that you don't know who somebody is says nothing about what some "state-backed actor" knows. If anything, I'm fairly confident that some people in NSA/CIA know who he is for a decade at least, and "probably" have it written in some documents that will long outlive you. Of course, this is as proofless statement as you saying that they "probably failed" to figure it out, but what you are saying basically amounts to "it is so unlikely for this to happen, so it's such a miracle it probably happened!" A more reasonable thing to say would be "it is so unlikely for this to happen, so it probably didn't happen".

> That's silly.

That's unnecessary and a bit childish and devalues the rest of your reply

I think you are over reacting.

I would argue that saying "childish" is just as unnecessary as saying "silly"

>That's...childish

That's unnecessary and a bit silly and devalues the rest of your reply

There are limits on secrets lifetime that's highly dependent on number of people in it. Someone even tried to calculate a formula

In democratic societies it's very hard to keep a thing secret that involved 10+ people for 20+ years.

Well, the Manhattan project is a good example of something that remained secret from the public for far longer than any formula would predict, given the gigantic amount of people involved (though of course other state actors knew about it long before).

I guess it depends on your definition of "remained secret from the public". For example, Kodak figured it out pretty quickly after the first tests because the radiation particles in the atmosphere were carried from the Southwest US to their factories in Rochester, NY, and affected their film production.

This is Grimes' "On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs" (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0147905).

Bummer I was excited for a scholarly paper by Claire Boucher.

If that calculation was completely wrong, how would anyone know? We never get a perfect snapshot of the world to compare with.

What that stat really says is any conspiracy involving 10+ people, if the details manages to stay secret for 20 years, will likely never come to light.

With the US at least, it can probably be loosely tested by comparing declassified records (50 years on) with program size at the time.

The details of the Teller-Ulam design are still quite secret despite being known to several hundred people for 50+ years.

It took ten years to find Osama Bin Laden, which we can fairly assume had a lot more resources directed at it.

You seem to falling into this common trap of intel agency omnipotence when we have plenty of examples to the contrary.

yep, they absolutely use propaganda’s to achieve a scarecrow effect. Remember all the info they fed journalists about bin Laden hiding in networks of underground caves? Then it turns out he is hiding at a family members house with all his relatives?

You seem to be falling into this common trap of confusing "finding a human's body hiding offline in mountains of Pakistan" and "figuring out the name of a guy thinking he is shitposting anonymously on the internet" (and that if we assume that the "shitposting guy" was just that, and not some remarkable researcher with some very specific skill-set, and also not affiliated with any 3-letter agency in the first place — which is hell of an assumption as well).

(Also, doesn't matter, but just for the record, I don't recognize your assumption as "fair". It's not like a I deny it, it's just way too many assumptions for a discussion involving more unknowns than any real factual information at all.)

Why do you assume state-backed actors failed to identify him?

I would guess he is probably known with a high degree of certainty to at least one nation's intelligence but that publicizing that knowledge and the documentation of it is not in anyone's interest.

I would assume that his entire identity is a little more than a cutout for a U.S. state intelligence agency.

This. I assume Satoshi is nation state actor. Most likely the US.

What makes you think the US would be motivated to hamstring its own Federal Reserve, or threaten the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency?

I don’t think bitcoin is some sort of intelligence thing, Occam’s razor, it is probably just a dude. I mean, what was his big feat of secrecy? Writing a paper needn’t necessarily leave a big footprint.

But! Bitcoins are too clunky to threaten the federal reserve really. And, a system that is widely understood by laymen to be anonymous, but is actually pseudonymous and inherently traceable, seems like Christmas for intelligence and police organizations.

The funny thing is, crypto is actually good for the dollar.

USDT/USDC are far easier to acquire than actual USD in third world countries. There’s a separate economy built up in Africa, Phillippines, etc. that operates entirely on USDT.

You can see this in the price of USDT vs USD in these countries - USDT commands a premium.

Crypto via coins like USDT means that Nigerians increasingly want to work for USDT, not Naira. Bad for Naira, good for the USD

Tether has to be backed by USD-denominated reserves for that to work. If it's actually backed by something else (or nothing) then all that value is going somewhere other than the dollar

Silver (#8 asset in the world) is also "clunky" but it is close to being surpassed in market cap by Bitcoin (#10 asset in the world).

A large part of that value is derived from a market cap based upon the stability created by the dormant coins, like gold sitting dormant in fort knox used to stabilize the USD value.

It really does seem like an intelligent design passes Occam's razor more than "oops i conveniently formatted that harddrive then disappeared"

What makes you think that Bitcoin poses any threat to the dollar or the Federal Reserve?

It’s no threat at all for the foreseeable future. Make no mistake though, over the next decades, the core idea is an existential threat.

If a currency like Monero with further developed scaling and privacy features is able to gain a foothold in developing nations, and enough off-ramps are set up via decentralized exchanges like Bisq and through direct acceptance for goods and services, then it is difficult to see the spread stopping between nations with reasonably free Internet, especially as factions within each government will likely have some direct interest.

The US dollar will be least threatened, the longest.

Privacy features in a currency are a double-edged sword. It means that the money is very difficult or impossible to recover in the event of theft, fraud, or even user errors. It isn't a risk most people want to be exposed to.

That’s not an issue to replace cash, which shares the same flaws. But yeah, you don’t want to have your savings in monero (or in crypto, tbf).

However for decentralized people to people transactions, monero may have its chance.

Physical cash is typically used in face-to-face transactions, which somewhat reduces the risks. The scenarios in which a digital version of physical cash might make sense are few and far between. To suggest that such a currency could one day threaten the US dollar dominance is absurd, in my opinion.

> To suggest that such a currency could one day threaten the US dollar dominance is absurd, in my opinion.

Since I’m far from a crypto bro, I wasn’t suggesting this ;)

I don’t even own any crypto.

Sure... I was alluding to OP's comment, not yours.

My bad

I completely agree with you. And you're assuming that a crypto network even exists that could support that kind of transaction volume, so the reality is even more absurd.

Monero for instance is optionally transparent using view keys, which allow read access to incoming but not outgoing transactions.

As cryptocurrency already requires the safeguarding of a private key or a custodial partner doing so, and generally do not accept rollbacks on the base level, there isn’t that much added drawback to making strong privacy default.

Spitballing here… it could have been a test to see how easy they could get a digital currency into common use. The idea of a digital currency offers the Fed a lot of advantages… no money laundering, traceability, etc. it could actually advance them if well executed, not threaten them.

Does the fed employ a lot of cryptographers? I feel like people expect the U.S. gov to be omnipotent when the last 20 years have been just fumble after another

While not omnipotent, the NSA does hire a huge amount of mathematicians and has a budget in the tens of billions. Most of what they do is also behind (extremely) closed doors.

Seems like a very poor fit for the Fed's needs outside of a honeypot for people actually trying to launder money.

Has bitcoin done either of these laughable things within any plausibility?

Bitcoin? No. But if you're asking whether digital currencies (which share a lot of the same underlying characteristics) might transform the global monetary landscape, well, they already have: 11 countries have issued CBDCs, and another 130 are actively exploring them as a more convenient alternative to USD for international transaction settlements. Several of those are in advanced pilot stages. No one with serious ties to the US financial system finds this to be a laughing matter, I assure you. The dollar is by far the currency of choice in trade invoicing (more than 50% of total trade) and foreign exchange transaction volume (almost 90% of the total) globally (Moronoti, 2022). This also means that US settlement authorities and financial institutions are involved in finalising most global transactions. If two countries have CBDCs, then they in principle would have the ability to settle transactions between themselves with near-instant finality, potentially bypassing the current dollar-based system.

I think we can safely expect at least one major CBDC-based cross-border payment system to launch by the end of the year. Soramitsu is the most promising candidate IMHO. A prevailing theory is that foreign corporations that operate domestically within a country will need to create accounts with a domestic central bank for CBDC payments to work efficiently. If this becomes a reality, the status of the dollar's "exorbitant privilege" will be up for immediate dispute. Its geopolitical hegemony over global finance won't be swept away overnight, but it will suffer a major blow. Only time will tell how serious.

You don't say why a CBDC would be a more convenient alternative to USD for international transaction settlements. A CBDC is simply a digital version of an existing currency. It isn't nothing new, since bank deposits already allow digital transactions with any currency.

You're missing the point. The reason the dollar is the global currency of choice is because it offers the infrastructure for any two parties to settle a transaction. The existence of CDBCs for wholesale purposes has the potential to fundamentally change that. Central banks could directly settle transactions between themselves in local currencies via dedicated corridors that bypass the dollar settlement system. That would mean more diversification of currency pairs, with increased liquidity for currency pairs that do not include USD.

> It isn't nothing new,

It is though. The infrastructure to support cross-border payments with CBDCs is bleeding edge stuff. The term floated around in obscurity for a while, but it's only been in use since 2019 or so. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_CBDCs_by_country

The USD doesn't have a technological monopoly on cross-border payments. Before the introduction of the euro, European nations were trading with each other using their local currencies just fine.

Moreover, CBDCs are ill-suited for internation trade, or for any kind of trade, because they're cash-like. They're intended as a substitute for physical cash.

The speculative currency crises in Europe during the 90s helped drive the adoption of the Euro in the first place. It's a bit outside my ken, but I do wonder if Italians of a certain age would agree that the older system worked "just fine."

I think reasonable minds can disagree about whether CBDCs are any more or less suitable than the alternatives (which seem worse to me in some respects, and certainly are worse in others) but either way, the world's central banks are singing a similar tune in unison right now. Like it or not, the macroeconomic tailwinds favor a more decentralized approach to cross-border settlements and we'll soon have infrastructure to enable this at massive scale.

Again, that's simply not true. You can't point to a single instance where CBDC infrastructure has enabled or improved wholesale international payments that were impossible or otherwise costly to do before.

Give it until the end of the year. These systems are new. Legal and logistical frameworks are being created around them. Southeast Asia will have a streamlined import/export relationship with Japan by the end of the year. Where it goes is from there is anyone's guess, but there's a lot of momentum for this to be the first of several major events over the next 2-3 years.

Hypothetically, getting those who hate "the feds" to record their transactions on a public ledger would be criminal intelligence coup even bigger than when FBI's "Encrypted Phone" platform became popular with criminals[1]. In this hypothetical, the FBI would hack/subvert/operate their own mixer service and eliminate uncooperative services, so that all money-flows are transparent to investigators.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/fbi-s-encrypted-phone-p...

Not all cryptocurrencies use public ledgers. Bitcoin was the first, but it was always intended to add privacy tech - see MimbleWimble.

Zero knowledge proofs and other strong privacy protections are available on more modern projects. Some ledgers are entirely dark, granting a decent anonymity set.

How many of those cryptocurrency were created by Satoshi Nakamoto, the subject of the thread's speculation? I was speculating on the why a 3LA would have created Bitcoin, specifically.

Others like Monero also have mysterious origins. I don’t think Satoshi was behind the design even in part, but it’s one theory.

I’m pointing out that even if Bitcoin was the creation, the introduction of this concept and class of data structure is much more important and will have more lasting impact.

Surely any government agency would have considered the feasibility of new alternatives with similar designs.

For the same reason it created tor. For cover. And to move assets beyond enemy lines?

The Bretton-Woods paradigm was already in collapse at the advent of bitcoin due to the corresponding growth of the US trade deficit as the US stopped producing/exporting and began massive consumption from the east.

The USA is in a debt spiral spending $659B on interest on debt annually (13% of tax revenue) while running larger and larger deficits. This cannot really be escaped, and it's impact on inflation is becoming unavoidable.

For when it isn’t?

To move assets to agents without a trace?

Or a GPU manufacturer. ;)

Or a nation state where energy is very cheap and people can live anonymously over the internet ie. Russia or China.

What makes you think Russia or China make living 'anonymously over the internet' easier than other places?

About energy: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price... says that China and Russia both have lower absolute household electricity prices than eg the US. But they are higher when compared to average incomes.

Those in China essentially have a get out out of jail free card for hacking. Just like we do for Chinese targets.

Any rich Chinese could've banked on cryptocurrency. Also, the poor in China and Russia are very poor. While the rich and middle incomes could easily afford energy prizes.

I don't know about China but Russia is a maffia state in disguise where a criminal rich club runs it with Putin. The middle class (those living in St. Petersburg and Moscow) need to be kept happy enough as a kind of unwritten deal between Putin and those people.

> Those in China essentially have a get out out of jail free card for hacking. Just like we do for Chinese targets.

What does this have to do with inventing Bitcoin? And what does it have to do with living 'anonymously over the internet'? Btw, you can try hacking into Chinese targets and getting caught, and seeing whether you face any legal repercussions.

But, what does any of what you say have to do with inventing Bitcoin?

Especially as you say, if you are rich in China or Russia, more likely than not you are on more than friendly terms with the ruling clique. So what do you need cryptocurrency for?

> Especially as you say, if you are rich in China or Russia, more likely than not you are on more than friendly terms with the ruling clique. So what do you need cryptocurrency for?

That is the conundrum isn't it. It is being marketed as some kind of liberal utopia but right now it can be used to work around the (quite massive) trade blocks. It really works both ways, but there's one group who love it either way (albeit also the more anonymous successor): criminals. What is the most criminal country in world (not relative to size)? Russia. It isn't even a country it is the Russian maffia in disguise as a country. If you you look at who benefits, it is also a deeply isolated country such as North Korea. And Bitcoin / PoW is a great method to get rid of your excess nuclear energy which is a fit for China. All have a motive.

> Btw, you can try hacking into Chinese targets and getting caught, and seeing whether you face any legal repercussions.

If I were very good at this and would enjoy it I'd work for some Western secret service. Very decent paycheck, morally on the better side of the spectrum, and well imagine having fun at work.

> The middle class (those living in St. Petersburg and Moscow) need to be kept happy enough as a kind of unwritten deal between Putin and those people.

That used to be the case, but not anymore. What are they going to do, exactly - protest on the streets? Since 2011, all that gets you is a beating and a fine (and now worse). Leave? That's economically infeasible for many who have already invested into property and can't easily unload it for reasonable money; people who thought the trade-off worthwhile have already largely left after 2022.

Until they're drafted. Then they flee, become unhappy. Putin ain't drafting there (yet). He is practicing classic divide & conquer like NKVD did during Great Terror and Holodomor.

Vader (father in Dutch) put it well in Cloud City, talking to Lando: I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.

Once they are drafted, it's too late to flee. And the person being drafted does, of course, become unhappy, but again, so what? They don't have any ways to express their displeasure that affect people in power there.

It used to be that "mothers' committees" held more sway, but those have also been mostly subdued now. Thing is, once you get to a certain point, civil protest just doesn't account for much, and people there simply aren't organized enough for meaningful violent resistance - and besides, most of them live too good a life to risk their neck engaging in such.

Those countries want way too much control for a decentralized currency.

The control in place, esp in China, allows for the ability to very well track Bitcoin. Also, what do you think Russian criminals use to stay under radar, also given sanctions? Monero seems a great candidate. Unlike its predecessor it provides anonymity.

Even though you are joking he didn’t anticipate Gpus or ASICS at all. The paper says “one cpu one vote”.

Still a dumb idea even if it managed to hold. One CPU one vote is it's not even as "fair" as $1 one vote, because it isn't a bare CPU that does the hashing, but the necessary power, space, cooling and network connectivity as well. The result would have been no different than if GPUs never came into the equation: people in a position to buy an extravagant share of mining resources, no matter what form factor they came in or how they approach the problem of calculating hashes, would always have had a massive and self-amplifying advantage getting started in the network, being awarded more coin bases and controlling more of the leverage over liquidity than anyone else. in the process creating the basis for a shadow banking system even more inscrutable and free from accountability than any central government or bank could hope to be.

The meme of crypto people claiming to be fighting against the central banking or currency is cynical to put it mildly.

I think you massively understate this advantage. Those with existing resources have advantages in nearly every endeavor possible.

This can only be mitigated, not prevented, and not likely in the first example of a currency outside nation state control, which was unthinkable previously. It’s a possible option for evading asset seizure or hyperinflation from a despotic government to not insignificant numbers of people already. One step at a time.

Ethereum 2.0’s proof of stake eliminates the ability of the biggest actors to stockpile and control supply of hardware, while also providing stronger security and massively reducing energy use from mining.

On its face, directly staking coins over accurate security validations makes the problem even more obvious, but the result is that the rich accelerate their ownership slower.

You may be well served by speaking with some of the very well intentioned people working on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero. From my experiences the majority of them do believe they are bettering the world, as do most who work in open source anywhere, and they continue to strive much more for that reason than any indirect personal enrichment.

A GPU vendor would of course try to avoid being too obvious.

The inevitable rise of GPUs and more specialized hardware was being discussed by Satoshi and others on bitcointalk around early 2010. Just my memory as a source, or you can see some discussion of emails between Laszlo Hanecz who bought the 19K BTC pizza and was GPU mining and Satoshi.

Wasn’t it 10k btc for 2 Papa John’s Pizzas?

Typo, thanks

I've always figured some intelligence agency figured out how to reverse SHA-256 by calculating hash collisions on a global scale while wresting some capital and power from the international banks in one move.

IMO you have way too much faith in state agencies' ability to keep secrets. It's information the world would like to know, so it's a hard secret to keep. On top of that anyone with access to the keys of big wallets would be very tempted to just use them. This doesn't seem like a situation that can be kept secret by a mid-sized conspiracy. If this was a state project, how many people would have to know about it and still keep quiet, despite all the advantages of not keeping it quiet, or the risk of leaks?

It'd be tough to get three people to keep this quiet. The dozens that would have to be involved at an intelligence agency, if this is really a project that was started in one of them? The specifics would have leaked by now.

> It'd be tough to get three people to keep this quiet

Incompetence fallacy and impossibility complex. Just because something seems difficult or impossible doesn't mean it is. Especially when it's the most logical explanation. People often like to think the government is just a bunch of incompetent bureaucrats. Yet the U.S. government is the most powerful entity on earth. There's not a single reason to believe that any large number of government employees could keep a secret on the level of Satoshi's true identity.

Honestly somebody should put a bounty to be paid of course in BTC for definitively identifying Satoshi. With enough incentive I’m sure can be figured out. Recent AI improvements should be able to be used to scan all his/their writings and code.

Isn't there effectively a multi-billion dollar bounty on finding out who Satoshi is and deploying a bit of "Rubber-hose cryptanalysis"?

All three good candidates for Satoshi are beyond said cryptanalysis: Sassaman and Finney are dead, Paul Le Roux is in a federal prison and it is not known to the public where, even without Bitcoins, quite a few people want him dead so the feds are not going to make it easy to get access to him.

If you dig a lot you will find a footprint. There is evidence that there was a small core team and that satoshi may not be a single person, if it is, he is most likely to be Wei Dai. The other likely alternative is of course the hypothetical state-backed actor.

Wei Dei is one of my suspects too, mostly because of Crypto++, but not only.

Why do you suspect is Wei Dei, was there any reveals regarding this in the lasts few years?

What is the rationale behind a state creating BTC?

Fund or obfuscate funding for programs they want but the public or political appetite doesn’t want to know about it.

That's already what black budgets are for. And funding drug cartels.

Moving money in/out of places which are hostile to USA. Paying assets in hostile locales.

I'm pretty sure the US can already do both, and that neither of those would be easier with a US backed cryptocoin.

Literal American cash dollars (which tend to work everywhere, even anti-American regimes) under the table would be more secure. But then assets in other countries are probably just paid through shell companies in those countries with local currency or something.

And Tor?

Similar possibilities.

I have a pet theory that the smart people at the NSA are aware that politicians with 4 year terms aren't effective at long term financial planning. The current debt situation coupled with the last ~30 years of mostly loose monetary policy has set the US up for serious problems if it doesn't come up with another world-changer like the ICE, electric light, or internet. Hence, Bitcoin is a hedge industry could embrace against a failing dollar.

I know the US isn't solely or originally responsible for those, but boy it sure ran the ball a long distance.

As far as the US government is concerned, this primary effect of Bitcoin and other crypto is a weakening of their ability to enforce sanctions and prevent money laundering.

If Bitcoin was a government program, it probably wasn't the US government. I'd guess North Korea, Iran, Russia, etc. One of the countries heavily bothered by US-led sanctions, or at least one that doesn't already have an important ~global currency to disrupt.

It seems to have grown mostly in the English-speaking world to start with, but that doesn't seem like a fatal flaw of my theory.

The same could be said for Tor and onion routing, which was a US government program.

Tor was created to allow contacting people securely from within restrictive regimes, wasn't it? Doesn't seem like the same thing to me. The US has a history of free speech advocacy, not of encouraging others to be able to spend money freely.

It's also a big government though, it is quite possible that some part would have driven something like Bitcoin for its own reasons. It just doesn't strike me as very likely compared to the alternatives.

Most likely, in my estimation, is still probably it being started by non-government to be clear.

Trust me, If USA's economy collapses, no amount of bitcoin will save you. Nothing will

On 21/08/2008 Satoshi claims he was not aware of Wei Dei’s “B-Money” paper.

On the other hand, if they were Wei Dei, they wouldn't exactly say "Ah yes of course, I wrote this paper but don't use that name, use Satoshi" but they would of course say "Oh I didn't know, I'll put a reference to it in my paper".

True, but then Satoshi’s foresight is unmatched.

How would Satoshi know that people would scrutinise their emails 16 years later

> There is evidence that there was a small core team and that satoshi may not be a single person

"Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead." - Benjamin Franklin

It seems highly improbable that a team of any size would have been successful at keeping this a secret for this long, let alone not wrestle for control of vast BTC wealth.

I would assume such a team would understand that very well, and would cut itself from that wealth by relinquishing access to the wallet

I think this is a very naïve interpretation of human nature, one supported by zero history.

I find the theory interesting that the creator (or creators) ended up in jail and plan to rug as soon as they're released.

State backed actors in the West don't go on a hunt without orders. Who would be so interested to order his identity discovered? And for what purpose?

They found Bin Laden who didn't allow anyone of his associates to come within 50 km of him with an electronic device.

We will only find out what FBI/CIA is capable of when the Justice Department orders the identity of Satoshi to be discovered.

Ughh, it's somewhat important to national security who's behind a multi-trillion dollar shadow market larger than most national economies

Is he? He cannot move those amounts.

You all know Satoshi Nakamoto translates exactly to Central Intelligence... Sell all your things and invest in bitcoin. its annonymous, tho (social security number required to buy a piece of bitcoin)...

We got him, look at the map! See the 50' no-radio circle in the middle of that city? He's there.

Sometimes a lack of signal is a signal itself.

Read again, of his associates. He lived in a village, among other houses and people with phones.

he's a human. only 7 billion of them

> Unless of course he was a state-backed actor(s)

I'd be even more impressed if some state had the foresight to come up with Satoshi

Well, one of the theories I fancy is that we know that Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto worked on a classified defence project, now it is almost impossible that he was the creator of btc, however there is a chance that a group of security service hackers who interacted with him while he worked there were inspired by this eccentric persona and thus decided to adopt his name as a joke when they were thinking of made-up moniker.

Hal lived literally a few blocks from Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto for 10 years.

Hal was also the first person who Satoshi contacted, the first person who mined, and died (ALS) a little after Satoshi’s final public correspondence.

I read somewhere that Hal was running a marathon at roughly the same time Satoshi was active, but damn, Hal must have been involved.

He's probably dead. My two top picks for who Satoshi might be are Len Sassaman (died 2011) and Hal Finney (died 2014)

There's little point in unmasking somebody who's already dead - their ability to influence future events is gone. So even if state intelligence surveys knew who it was, there'd be no benefit to unmasking it.

Hal's final words to his family lead me to believe that he was not the creator of bitcoin.

Spare us a search please. The top results are final forum posts, not words with his family.

Looking again, he _mentions_ what he told his children, but it's written on Bitcoin Talk.

> "My bitcoins are stored in our safe deposit box, and my son and daughter are tech savvy. I think they're safe enough. I'm comfortable with my legacy." [0]

It doesn't invalidate that he created Bitcoin, but what he wrote over the years sounds much more like a devoted hobbyist who was far from extremely wealthy, for example taking a public bus to UC Santa Barbara to do his research [1]. Once afflicted with ALS, he became an avid ALS fundraiser. For someone in 2014 with 1,000,000+ BTC @ ~$500 per, and trying to be anonymous, I doubt whoever Satoshi is would have taken the path that Hal did.

[0] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0 [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130625223546/http://www.noozha...

Thank you!

I know a few people with net worths in the 100s of millions (largely early Google employees, or founders of tech companies), and that sounds exactly like them. Honestly that's exactly what a well-adjusted rich person sounds like - they are "comfortable", "safe enough", and make every effort to downplay their wealth. (In the Finneys' case, they have particular reason to be circumspect because they were swatted and extorted for Bitcoin.). Most wealthy people are very quiet about their wealth; the Trumps and Musks are exceptions that disproportionately impact peoples' perception of what a wealthy person seems like simply because they show up in the news all the time.

This would also neatly explain why the Satoshi coins have not moved.

Or why Hal Finney was cryopreserved. :-)

Are you sure he's not cryptopreserved?

He couldn't upload himself to the blockchain because Ordinals hadn't been invented yet.

In the future someone steals his frozen head to scan it and try to recover the Satoshi wallet keys...

in the real real far future you don't need his head, but maybe a single hair or a bone? Assuming every DNA cell keeps all memories or perhaps like a chicken running with a cutoff head maybe if his hands to be reconstructed, given enough time over a keyboard he would finally "twich" a password? Just thinking out loud...

What.

I don’t see any reason to believe this is remotely feasible, ever?

You have played too much assassin's creed. DNA determinism has not been realistic ever.

Assassin's Creed thing is more like ancestral memory. DNA determinism is more of a Dune thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technology_in_the_Dune...

You need to read a middle school biology textbook

Paul Le Roux also fits. He had the crypto knowledge and the coins haven't moved because he is in federal custody. He was also quite good at opsec.

I don't know his story, but I had a little chuckle at the juxtaposition of "quite good at opsec" with "in federal custody"

One probably has to be perfect - not just good with opsec - to maintain anonymity from the government. The FBI has multiple side-channels, such as agents physically tracking if you're home at your "super-secure" 7-VPN computer when your Internet persona is active online

You can be good and yet the heavy hand of the law still gets you. They got Escobar and "El Chapo" Guzmán too. And his operation was smaller than either of those fine gentlemen's.

You can be perfect 999 times and still get fucked by that 1 mistake.

999 people can have a little opsec error and 1 person can still have perfect opsec.

It's a riveting read https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind/

He created truecrypt for his, well buisness. But are there any other indications, he also did anything towards cryptocoins? This is the first time I heard of this theory and so far I really doubt it. Satoshi seems to have been one tinkering alone and in peace with his concepts. Le Roux seems to have been more involved in action, too busy to create bitcoin.

Aside from his background as someone actively promoting encryption, Satoshi stopped posting just before Le Roux was arrested.

Szabo is also a contender, apparently.

1. https://bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/nick-szabo 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37794025

Unless of course, the NSA or other government agency created bitcoin.

Bitcoin didn’t succeed, define “succeed” however you want, but because of how it was marketed. Bitcoin is the OG shitcoin.

If there is one thing we can all agree on: NSA isn’t good at marketing. This whole thread is evidence of that.

I can’t believe we haven't figured it out yet.

- What about the email at gmx.com? Can an insider get into it?

- Access logs with browser agents and ips?

- White paper writing style and code analysis and heuristics.

Didn't he also register bitcoin.org?

Not sure, whois showing:

Registered On: 2008-08-18

Expires On: 2029-08-18

Updated On: 2023-10-31

I'd be determined to stay anonymous if my life's work was a currency for pedophiles too.

Well, Craig Wright tries very hard to unmask the creator(s), by pretending to be Satoshi.

I won't agree... I think it was much easier in 2009 to operate online completely anonymous. The video surveillance was not prevalent – just pick some crowded places with free wifi randomly, don't use a cell phone, wear some sunglasses and a surgical mask, use a clean generic browser agent, use a usb-stick linux distro which will not be able to save anything on the hard drive and have some hacked proxies in another parts of the world ready to entangle your traffic routes - state actors back then would be scratching their heads forever trying to solve such a case.

How do you pay for domain names?

with skimmed cards bought in disguise for cash from a local hotel receptionist, of course...

satoshi understood well that the centralised state-backed global payment systems are the strongest rivals to the true independence of a human being, so invention of bitcoin was an obvious move

It's super obvious from his writing his first language is English. Most likely Hal Finney.

I used to think so too, but the case for Len Sassaman is similarly strong.

What is the strongest evidence AGAINST Sassaman?

His wife doesn't think it was him (https://twitter.com/maradydd/status/1364325186372304904?t=yY...) and the original Bitcoin code/executable was Windows based whereas Sassaman was known to Mac/Linux

Those are weak pieces of evidence.

Meredith appears to be telling the truth. She didn't say Len wasn't Satoshi, she simply said to the best of her knowledge he wasn't. That doesn't mean he wasn't working on it covertly.

One of Len's best friends (Bram Cohen) knew Len was posting pseudonymously on the cypherpunk mailing list but never knew what handle he was using. Also, when Bram was about to release BitTorrent Len tried to convince him to do it anonymously. It's not hard to believe that Len would have done it secretly; even from his wife.

Furthermore, Meredith can't be 100% trusted. When Satoshi handed the project over to the maintainers and stopped posting to the cypherpunk mailing list in late 2010, Meredith tweeted, "Bitcoin isn't ready for prime time yet, according to its creator. Interested people can help finish it, though!"[1]

Satoshi never said those words publicly or privately-- so it's a curious thing to say.

As for the computer...

It's likely Len used university computer(s) for the development as the commit times and communication line up with an academic schedule. It's likely the university had Windows computers. Plus; it's one way to isolate the environment and reduce the chance of information leakage (could have even been a Windows VM).

[1]: https://twitter.com/maradydd/status/12163582133276672?t=dk8C...

The C++ coding style is also very much the way a Windows developer would write C++ code. Not the way a Unix-y C++ developer writing on Windows would write.

I always figured based on the code and the emails that it was an older Japanese developer. I've emailed 100s of them over the years and they do all typically write similar in English, they mix a lot of UK/US-ism, and often their English is really good, like I wouldn't know they weren't a native English-speaker until I just caught on to how they wrote. (Speaking is an entirely different issue, many of them cannot speak English in person very well or make obvious grammatical mistakes they don't make when typing.)

Windows is also very pervasive among developers.

Coding is quite subjective. When I examined the early bitcoin code (the one Satoshi wrote and shared). The C++ code looked pretty sloppy and amateur-ish.

The comments were odd and not standardized (randomly using four //// sometimes, etc). The use of 4-6 random new lines between sections of code was awkward. The way the code was organized, folders named, etc.

The code itself was a mix of hungarian-isms. It felt very academic-y to me... like someone that did most of their coding in university as a teacher or phd candidate (little real-world coding).

There's a podcast (name slips my mind...) where the host asked Bram Cohen if he thought Len was Satoshi and he doesn't outright say yes... To paraphrase, he basically answered, "I can't say for sure. It seemed like he (Len) lacked the C++ knowledge.. but his programming got a lot better since I last seen it... so I don't know. It seems to be the most likely scenario would be Len doing the brain work and someone like Hal doing the coding."

But, isn't that sorta what happened? Satoshi had 169 commits and Hal basically took over and cleaned everything up. Satoshi didn't do that much coding, and the coding he did do was done over 1.5-2 years (as he stated in the cypherpunk mailing list).

I'm curious, what is the stylistic difference between Unix and Windows c++? I don't know it.

Yet she tweeted about Bitcoin in 2010! if true seems like a hugely important evidence.

Yes, the university had Windows computers... and they also had the FT in the building where Len worked

Also, from what I can see, he didn't use two spaces after a period.

The biggest thing that bugs me about the Len Sassaman theory is that the original bitcoin paper, while amazing, doesn't seem like it was written by a PhD candidate. It cites just eight related works, and the W. Dai citation was famously added only after someone else suggested it, because Satoshi reportedly didn't know about it. A typical paper by a PhD candidate will cite dozens of related works, and Len Sassman would certainly have knowledge of dozens of related works off the top of his head. There should be a whole section citing the literature and enumerating the ways in which the proposals and findings in the paper are novel contributions.

They style of dissertations is dictated by the program not the authors style.

Genuine question, if you are satoshi and not insanely media shy, what would be a real concern for not divulging your identity in 2024?

You are rich enough to manage any security, tax or legal hits that you need to manage.

Furthermore due to BTC being completely mainstreamed, the credit you will get for inventing btc would be epic.

The least of it would be noble prize in economics. You will literally be a living cult leader like no other in history. Think of all those BTC fanatics finally meeting their leader. See the way Elon fanatics follow Musk and multiply that by 100.

I believe Satoshi was a cypherpunk and a remailer dev. Cypherpunks had a history of doing things anonymously on the mailing list and even trying to out one another (a sort of game).

Furthermore, as a remailer dev Satoshi was all too familiar with what happened with the penent remailer[1]. He knew such services will become a legal target by the powers that be. This is why Satoshi even said we "kicked the hornets nest" when Wikileaks/Silkroad began accepting Bitcoin.

He knew the powers would be coming.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer

Most people don't want to be cult leaders. Unless they are an attention hungry person (which we can safely rule out at this point) they have nothing to gain from making their identity known. And I assume the tax authorities might be somewhat interested in their bitcoin stash...

Not wanting the lifestyle that would certainly come with it like harassment, being recognized constantly in public, drawn into lawsuits, controversy, the market hanging on his every word, swatting, etc.

I would imagine security is one argument. There are plenty of people and groups out there who have lost large amounts of BTC and who would like to believe that satoshi has the power to restore them or otherwise manipulate the currency.

I don't think he will need to worry more about security than say Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Annoying, but certainly doable with the money he has.

But I can imagine that can factor in for lots of people who are risk averse and don't like the burden of having 24/7 tight security around them.

> You will literally be a living cult leader like no other in history. Think of all those BTC fanatics finally meeting their leader. See the way Elon fanatics follow Musk and multiply that by 100.

Didn't you just answer your own question? What sane person wants that?

It is almost strange to read that they are handling the project as something very big and important. At that time it was absolutely not obvious that it would become big and mainstream.

There was a lot of resentment towards bailouts at the time and making an alternative system

Many people would have been passionate about their quests towards a solution. Many people still make redundant things without knowing the hurdles involved and are just as passionate. I have a client thinking they are going to “bank the unbanked” with a mobile app not using crypto at all, in 2024

One reason why Satoshi would have been extremely passionate is because they had solved one of the unsolved problems of computer science up until 2008 which was the Double Spend Problem, and 2009 was his first production implementation of it called Bitcoin

so you have a person that was seeing everything that the field of computer science had touched over the last half century, and knowing a solution for a unsolved aspect that prevented it from touching other industries and seeing how expansive that would be

The Double Spend Problem was not unsolved in 2008.

The likes of Wei Dai, David Chaum, and Stephan Brands had working anonymous "digital cash" cryptosystems solving the double spending problem within a federated banking model in the late 80s and early 90s

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/mone...

yes and bitcoin builds on top of that, I believe the white paper may cite that effort, it cites W Dai’s b-money paper from 1998

The bitcoin white paper specifies that this is a solution without a trusted intermediary

the first line of the abstract entails not using a financial institution

I agree that ‘unsolved’ was inaccurate, I try to also say bitcoin 2008 is one implementation and essentially all distributed ledgers are following this branch of solution

additional solutions remain evasive

> To think about what a really huge transaction load would look like, I look at the existing credit card network. I found some more estimates about how many transactions are online purchases. It's about 15 million tx per day for the entire e-commerce load of the Internet worldwide. At 1KB per transaction, that would be 15GB of bandwidth for each block generating node per day, or about two DVD movies worth. Seems do-able even with today's technology.

So Satoshi would have increased the block size by now.

Based. Small blockers forced themselves into bad positions to keep control.

"I've been at full-time work lately, and will be until the end of June, so I haven't had that much time to work with Bitcoin or my exchange service. I have a working beta of my service though, and a few weeks ago made my first transaction: sold 10,000 btc for 20 euros via EU bank transfer. Maybe I can make it public soon."

I'm sure it's a dead end but you'd think this would be an interesting avenue of investigation. Wouldn't think transaction be pretty obvious in the blockchain? Did the owner of those 10,000 btc ever spend them? If so, it'd be interesting to see if any of the wallets in the spend chain are something public, like someone asking for donations or something.

That message was from Martti Malmi to Satoshi.

I love this mystery and I’m so grateful for it.

Growing up we had DB Cooper and Deepthroat - interesting and compelling stories but those guys are famous only for being anonymous. They didn’t really do anything special.

But satoshi…

and banksy!

That’s no secret anymore, is it?

That's news to me! What did I miss?

His identity has been known for quite some time. His first name is Robin, and he used the alias Robin Banks for a while, which eventually became Banksy.

But also Banksy is something of a collective effort, with people like 3D from Massive Attack apparently occasionally collaborating.

"Banksy" is now a group of artists, but the original is believed to be Robin Gunningham. He is named as a co-defendant in a lawsuit against Pest Control (the company that sells and validates Banksy art).

Thanks!

Sorry but what is "Deepthroat" - I only found p0rn underneath, what is the "Deepthroat" story you been growing up with? Obviously aware of DB C.

I'm pretty sure Satoshi is German.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6562461

So Satoshi used: Japanese pseudonym. German email domain. British English and a US Timezone.

His ability to generate entropy in his identity is significantly underrated.

Recent and related:

Bitcoin Inventor Satoshi Nakamoto Emails Revealed in Court - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39474691 - Feb 2024 (2 comments)

Satoshi Nakamoto <[email protected]> wrote:

  > There are donors I can tap if we come up with something that needs 
  > funding, but they want to be anonymous, which makes it hard to actually 
  > do anything with it.

I wonder who these donors were.

Le Roux is my guess, and Satoshi was referring to himself.

Is there a website listing people that Satoshi definitely could not be? That it seems would be more useful to our evergreen "Who is Satoshi" discussions.

Add me to the list of "definitely not Satoshi".

Just a few billion more to go.

Nice try, Satoshi.

How would we really rule anyone out?

in the case of Craig Wright - Bring a multimillion dollar court case to prove it.

Interesting Satoshi's spelling of the word "favour" instead of "favor" in "I've been putting it off in favour".

The use of "favour" instead of "favor" is a clear marker of British English or other Commonwealth varieties such as Australian or Canadian English. This spelling is not used in US English.

I thought use of British English was already a known thing. As is double spacing after a full stop.

Also uses "optimising" which is British.

Australian too, fwiw. One general way to distinguish UK from Aussie online is we (Aus) use metric for everything, (kg, KMs, cms) and UK don't (stone (?), miles, feet)

At a glance the emails felt very Australian to me before I checked these comments, but I didn't do a thorough read.

Any idea if it's used in Canadian English?

have never seen anyone point out this incredibly obvious (or obviating?) point

Autocorrect has been a thing since the early 90s.

In many European countries it is common that the default English wordlist is British spelling.

The usage of British English as an identifying factor seems ridiculous to me. Faking such a thing is extraordinarily low-hanging fruit even for a bumbler. Letting slip some regional red herring is quite literally the easiest misdirection I can think of)

He's also fairly inconsistent. He occasionally uses -ize endings, e.g. "realize". He also uses some language that is more prevalent in North American English, e.g. "sucks", "gotten", "chump change" and others.

Someone attempting to use British English to obscure their identity would know to use words like "maths" and "flat", as he did; not as many people however are aware that British English doesn't (typically) feature the word "gotten", which he used on multiple occasions. To me, this lends to the theory the BrE was a misdirection.

(As an aside, he's inconsistent in some other things, like "e-mail" versus "email", "TOR" versus "Tor", and "double click" versus "doubleclick".)

Satoshi regularly took two spaces after a period. He uses vocabulary tied to British

There is a famous British cryptographer called Adam Back, who is also the inventor of the proof of work method laid out on the paper “hashcash”. He also leaves two spaces after a period (or used too)

I don’t think it really matters who created it. If you read the political story of bitcoin things look a lot clearer.

“The Blocksize War: The Battle Over Who Controls Bitcoin's Protocol Rules” is a good entry point

> Satoshi regularly took two spaces after a period.

So did I, for a long time, because I was taught that way in typing class. And so were millions of other people. It's how it was usually done on typewriters. It supposedly made the text easier to read.

It has fallen out of fashion now. I eventually switched to one space once I realized things were going that direction. I'm not sure if I had switched by 2009.

So I think this just tells you that Satoshi is probably old enough to have been taught the old rule.

I will say, I did enjoy reading abriosi's assumption, though. As I get older I get more aware of the things I just "took for granted" that everyone knows (because nearly everyone in my generation does know it) are really just generation-specific.

Like when I learned most kids can't read cursive anymore. Or that, for a long time, my use of "emoji noses", :-), really dated me (and I still think it looks better with a nose than without!) So I admit I had a similar chuckle with the idea that putting two spaces after a period was a unique characteristic! Even well into the PC era, 2 spaces was the norm before proportional fonts became widespread. And I still had a heck of a time moving to a single space because it just looked so weird to me.

Adam Back is far too jealous of Satoshi inventing Bitcoin. He put, “Bitcoin is HashCash extended with inflation control” in his Twitter profile for years after he got into Bitcoin after initially dismissing it when contacted by Satoshi. Back definitely isn’t Satoshi.

The perfect ruse. /s

And too greedy. Why would he be doing this weird startups and marketing schemes if he already had all the money?

Yeah, there are many, many reasons why Back is not and cannot be Satoshi. These emails also provide more evidence that Satoshi was what would later be called a “Big Blocker” in favor of on-chain scaling and minimal tx fees set by nodes independently (though likely converging). Back is famously a Small Blocker who employed all the major Small Blocker devs with Blockstream, which ended up effectively controlling Bitcoin Core. Thankfully, we still have Bitcoin Cash following Satoshi’s intended path for scaling.

Even if this is correct (which it probably is) it doesn't matter because bch is worthless because it doesn't have the name bitcoin. Whoever controls bitcoin core controls the meaning of the word "bitcoin" so if the bch people never find a way to wrest back control from the blockstream people then this whole thing is just irrelevant. History is written by the victors, etc

That perspective is valid, but it’s not mine. BCH is bigger than Bitcoin circa Satoshi’s days already. I’m honestly not too concerned about it. The Bitcoin that I became interested in still exists. It just isn’t called BTC/“Bitcoin” anymore.

Also Bitcoin SV (SV for Satoshi's Vision).

And Bitcoin ABC.

There are so many to chose from.

There are, but SV and ABC (now called eCash/XEC) also made departures from Bitcoin that I feel are pretty significant:

BSV: completely removed any concept of a tx spam cap and encouraged use of its blockchain for random data storage. Neither of these are things Satoshi supported. Its spiritual leader is also a charlatan.

XEC: changed both the mining algorithm and added in a "dev tax" on block rewards. The dev tax in particular is something I don't imagine Satoshi would have supported, or he would have added it himself from the start.

But to each their own.

Bitcoin SV is the Craig Wright-backed crypto that is pretty different from Bitcoin, and is only "following Satoshi's intended path" if you actually believe that hack is Satoshi

May the longest chain win.

Two spaces after a period just means you learned on a typewriter. I still do it.

Hah, HN shrunk it down to one space.

Actually, the browser did. Your double space is still there in the page source. :)

(I still do it, too, and mine is also there.)

I learned on a PC, and we were taught that way initially also. I still think it makes sentences easier to read, so still do it. Though usually on mobile it's .nn because that's where my thumb always wants to land.

I think you're spot on.

Plus, the use of "colour" (with u) and reference to something as "rather Neanderthal"

Adam Back, who when asked how to scale Bitcoin while waiting for LN answered that we should let a "local technology expert" setup a tab.

Just, no.

I love reading this stuff. 2010 is when i found out about bitcoin and wanting to learn about it was what took me from someone who played around on linux to someone who could write software and then ended up finishing a CS degree after.

Reading this reminds me of what I originally loved so much about the tech scene at the time. I haven’t been able to find that spark for a long time now unfortunately. Maybe im just looking in the wrong place but i feel it is hard to find another community like the early bitcoin one.

Totally agree on this. It was the true hacker spirit back then

The Ethereum community still is.

I'd see the innovatio is there but you have to search carefully amid the graft.

Satoshi Nakamoto means "Central Intelligence" but the people here are probably VERY FAMILIAR with CIA trends.

Bitcoin has no leader.

> The vast majority of gold sits unused in vaults, owned by governments that could care less about its prettiness

No!! Not you, Satoshi!

(emphasis mine)

Despite the British English elsewhere, "could care less" is a particularly American error. I think that's noteworthy.