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A comment on Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto. Parent comment

Re:Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Sato... by SwellJoe on Saturday November 23, 2013 @07:38PM (#6788102)
I agree with you that there's no way DPR is Satoshi. DPR seemed to be learning to code when launching Silk Road. While Bitcoin had bugs (lots of them) to start with, it is not amateur level computer science. It's not even reasonable to assume that a dude who needed help getting curl to talk to a proxy would be competent enough to work with very advanced crypto concepts, and even invent a few things of their own (using standard crypto algorithms, but still, Bitcoin was not tested waters...).

So, yes, SN is smarter than DPR, and vastly more capable as a software engineer.

And, Satoshi wouldn't need Silk Road to be fantastically rich in Bitcoins. As far as we know, he's got a vast swath of the first mined Bitcoins, even if he gave away most of it. (Which is possibly how Satoshi's identity will be revealed...if suddenly there's a new trillionaire in the world in five years...well, might be Satoshi.)

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Re:Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Sato... by irremediable on Sunday November 24, 2013 @06:03AM (#6789314)
> And, Satoshi wouldn't need Silk Road to be fantastically rich in Bitcoins. As far as we know, he's got a vast swath of the first mined Bitcoins, even if he gave away most of it. (Which is possibly how Satoshi's identity will be revealed...if suddenly there's a new trillionaire in the world in five years...well, might be Satoshi.)

Out of interest, aren't Satoshi's coins all held in a small number of wallets, so people will immediately see if anyone tries to use them? Presumably, this would provoke a crash in bitcoin prices.

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Re:Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Sato... by michaelt on Sunday November 24, 2013 @08:14AM (#6789527)
From what I've heard, Satoshi's coins are spread around a lot of 50 btc wallets, and they're not so much known to be Satoshi's as suspected to be hers because there seems to have only been one person mining the blockchain at the start [1].

As other people started running the clients, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell Satoshi from any other miner.

So though Satoshi may never have spent the bitcoins mined when she was the only miner, she could still have mined and spent many coins once there were a few hundred other miners.

[1] http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fo...

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Re:Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Sato... by irremediable on Sunday November 24, 2013 @12:06PM (#6790137)
Alright, I get that Satoshi might have spent those old coins before. But can he/she spend them now without everyone knowing about it?
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Re:Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Sato... by michaelt on Sunday November 24, 2013 @01:34PM (#6790497)
The coins that are known to be Satoshi's (because they were mined when Satoshi was the only one mining) can't be spent without people knowing about it. But the coins that were probably mined later, where we don't know who mined them? Those can be spent easily.

It's pretty likely a fair number of coins belong to Satoshi, as mining must have been pretty easy in the days when people paid 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas.

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Re:Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Sato... by cdelsolar on Sunday November 24, 2013 @11:01AM (#6789891)
she?
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Re:Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Sato... by SwellJoe on Monday November 25, 2013 @05:43PM (#6797630)
Since Satoshi's identity is unknown, it could be a female. Mike Hearn refers to Satoshi as a "he", and he would be most likely to know...but I don't know that Mike ever spoke to Satoshi in any form other than online, so he may not know Satoshi's preferred gender pronoun, either.
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