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.<p>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).
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?<p>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.<p>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?<p>What other (legal or illegal) path is there to identify a person who posted something online?
For those curious about the court case it's referencing, here is the context: <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/02/07/craig-wrights-high-stakes-legal-battle-over-bitcoins-origin-and-copyright/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/02/07/craig...</a> (<a href="https://archive.is/7YyMl" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/7YyMl</a>)
Satoshi Nakamoto <satoshin@gmx.com> wrote:<p><pre><code> > 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.
</code></pre>
I wonder who these donors were.
Satoshi regularly took two spaces after a period. He uses vocabulary tied to British<p>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)<p>I don’t think it really matters who created it. If you read the political story of bitcoin things look a lot clearer.<p>“The Blocksize War: The Battle Over Who Controls Bitcoin's Protocol Rules” is a good entry point
I love this mystery and I’m so grateful for it.<p>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 <i>do</i> anything special.<p>But satoshi…
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?
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)
The top Satoshi archeologist is Sergio Lerner: <a href="https://bitslog.com/" rel="nofollow">https://bitslog.com/</a><p>Official security auditor of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
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.
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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>So Satoshi would have increased the block size by now.
Interesting Satoshi's spelling of the word "favour" instead of "favor" in "I've been putting it off in favour".<p>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.
Genuine question, if you are satoshi and not insanely media shy, what would be a real concern for not divulging your identity in 2024?<p>You are rich enough to manage any security, tax or legal hits that you need to manage.<p>Furthermore due to BTC being completely mainstreamed, the credit you will get for inventing btc would be epic.<p>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.
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.
If you want a detailed look at all of the Satoshi evidence (circumstantial and others), check out this paper:<p><a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.10257v14.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.10257v14.pdf</a><p>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.
"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."
> The vast majority of gold sits unused in vaults, owned by governments that <i>could care less</i> about its prettiness<p>No!! Not you, Satoshi!<p>(emphasis mine)