This currently isn't "news," as the paper hasn't been published yet, and none of the disclosed findings are too damning or conclusive.<p>That being said, it's important for two reasons:<p>1.) the paper gets published tomorrow, which will lead to a round of negative press, regardless of the claims' merit.<p>2.) More significant: it highlights what I see as an existential threat to the Bitcoin experiment: a.) the poor distribution of early wealth and b.) the possibility that a great percentage of all Bitcoins are currently held by bad actors (criminals, anarchists, use your imagination).<p>A few things to consider:
1. A list of richest Bitcoin addresses is not a good representation of the concentration of wealth. A single person can have x wallets, just like this Ulbricht character.
2. Bitcoin wealth is often used to reinvest in mining equipment, which furthers one's wealth to a greater extent. Rinse/repeat.<p>Several of the oldest wallets have been dormant for years, which means that this is not hypothetical -- that wealth has not circulated.<p><i>edit made to be clear about "bad actors"</i>:<p>"Bad actors" meaning: unpredictable and possibly having malicious intent.<p>If Bitcoin becomes a more important part of our daily lives, handling commerce ubiquitously, etc.--a single individual with ~10+% of said Bitcoin has enormous disruptive potential. I'm not referring to what said person could purchase with that wealth, but one's ability to manipulate markets.<p>This has never been a big issue, as far as the growth in value of the currency. However, I think this kind of uncertainty could freak out potential institutional investors.<p>Altcoins like Litecoin, PPC, Namecoin, etc - do not suffer as much from this issue because their exposure was far greater than Bitcoin ca. 2009, and the mining competition was greater on the respective debut-dates by several orders of magnitude.
I doubt that the link here amounts to DPR knowing SN personally, or even worse, DPR being SN.<p>Obviously I don't know DPR or SN, but I really doubt that DPR is SN or even communicated with him. The reasons are entirely circumstantial but from what I've read of both of them:<p>- DPR is arrogant.<p>- DPR makes stupid mistakes.<p>- SN is fairly humble.<p>- SN is smarter than DPR.<p>- SN doesn't make mistakes.<p>Is it possible that DPR himself was an early adopter of BitCoins, and mined those early coins himself - giving him the occasion to later transfer them to himself? He might have had to become acquainted with the BitCoin crypto-currrency scheme for some time before he was confident enough in it to use it to protect his own identity, which means he may have been in the first couple of groups of people to download and use the software.
2 possible situations I can think of, based strictly on 'Among their discoveries was a particular transfer to an account controlled by Mr. Ulbricht from another that had been created in January 2009, during the very earliest days of the bitcoin network, which was set up the previous year.':<p>- the bitcoin wallet, although said to be associated with SN, has changed ownership since its creation in 2009<p>- SN purchased something from DPR, perhaps something DPR himself was selling on SR, either a legitimate buy or for some other purposes; SN was just a regular customer in this case<p>In the meantime, I'm eagerly awaiting their paper. Ron and Shamir have previously co-authored another bitcoin related paper titled 'Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph'. There's a very interested overview of it in this Gist: <a href="https://gist.github.com/jgarzik/3901921" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/jgarzik/3901921</a> It appears to have some flaws.<p>I don't know how accurate this statistic is, but the last Gist comment mentions that 22% of bitcoins are held in reused addresses.
It could be Finney buying drugs for his unfortunate condition: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rbd8q/study_suggests_link_between_dread_pirate_roberts/cdlhjlj?context=3" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rbd8q/study_sugges...</a>
I have already suspected the original DPR (who supposedly handed Silk Road to Ross Ulbrich) was Satoshi Nakamoto: <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=bJqRUuX_DuiW2gX36IHgDg&url=https://plus.google.com/100577178258662783679/posts/76UcUX4Py2c&cd=1&ved=0CCgQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNFnAoIXXVhXhepg5CKRvYI6KvfgVQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=bJqRUuX_...</a>
I don't believe that at all. DPR got busted for posting total newbie questions on Stack Overflow, after all - and SN displayed a deep knowledge of secure coding and cryptography!
I'm really eager to see how conclusive the study will be. For now, I'm sold on Satoshi Nakamoto being King, Oksman, and Bry.<p><a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/1785445/bitcoin-crypto-currency-mystery-reopened" rel="nofollow">http://www.fastcompany.com/1785445/bitcoin-crypto-currency-m...</a>
As hard as it is to remain anonymous, how did Satoshi Nakamoto do it? No misstatements that betrayed his identity? No IP addresses that point to him or his location?
Here is the paper - <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/839348-silk-road-paper.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/839348-silk-road-pap...</a><p>via
<a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/2066780/did-satoshi-nakamoto-transfer-1000-bitcoins-to-the-silk-road.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcworld.com/article/2066780/did-satoshi-nakamoto-...</a>
A few transactions went from one wallet to another and this is considered a link... give me a break<p>EDIT I am referring to the article not the yet to be published material