Roberts had grown so rich, he wanted to retire. He took me to his cabin and he told me his secret. 'I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts' he said. 'My name is Ryan; I inherited the ship from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from is not the real Dread Pirate Roberts either. His name was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been retired 15 years and living like a king in Patagonia.'
Picked apart and debunked within hours of being published. A good summary thread:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1reuwq/vigorous_debate_over_shamirrons_supposedly/?sort=top" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1reuwq/vigorous_deb...</a><p>The real story here is how Adi Shamir can get caught up in such horrible published research, not once - but twice now[0]. They keep referring to blockchain.info as <i>the</i> blockchain, and have again scraped the website (referring to 'HTML output') to get their data - even after it was pointed out to them <i>last time</i> that the websites are just a representation of the blockchain.<p>You really have to question just how much the authors understand what they are writing about when they don't even understand the blockchain. This research isn't even worthy of a blog post, let alone being published as an academic paper by a noted cryptographer.<p>[0] <a href="https://gist.github.com/jgarzik/3901921" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/jgarzik/3901921</a>
It stands to reason that Bitcoin's creators would have believed that they needed a killer app as a catalyst to spur acceptance. Silk Road was ideally suited to show off the advantages of Bitcoin over more traditional payment methods. However, Silk Road didn't pop up until nearly two years after Bitcoin was first introduced.<p>This paper is trying to make a connection between a few transactions sent from a very early Bitcoin address to some Silk Road addresses. It is possible that if this early address belongs to "Satoshi" that he was simply buying from Silk Road. Whatever he was doing, the connection is tenuous at best, which of course is the entire point of Bitcoin. DPR is facing a life sentence, so there is a good chance that if he has partners, the feds (and eventually the rest of the world) will find out about them as part of a plea deal.
The important things to note about the relation between DPR and SN:<p>* There was an account/wallet that was created a week after Bitcoin mining 'commenced' in 2009.<p>* SN was known to have been active in the early mining. However so was Hal Finney (inventor of RPOW). They refer to it as the founder's wallet, but I think it would be more appropriate to think of it as the wallet of an early miner.<p>* This early miner's accumulated into it over 77,600 BTCs (mostly from mining operations)<p>* During June 2011 (4/6/2011 - 28/6/2011) almost all of these bitcoins were moved into a second account<p>* On the transaction graph, on one path, 45% of these bitcoins are are transferred to another wallet over the course of <i>late</i> 2012 to new year 2013. On the other path, the remaining 55% is sent to another wallet over the course of <i>early</i> 2012 to the same day new year 2013.<p>* The 45% wallet has a little of its funds sent to the 55% wallet, and then has laid dormant since a month back. In the 45% wallet in March'13, a fifth of the wallet is sent to the 55% wallet. Again, from the 14/9/13 to 23/10/13, another 15% is sent to the 55% wallet.<p>* However, if we look at the 55% wallet, we can see a clear link to DPR's wallet. In March'13, the 55% wallet sends 6 transfers totalling 2.5% of its balance ($1000) to another wallet, which sends this to DPR's account (as we know from the FBI's discovery of the wallet).<p>The authors suggest that all of these accounts belonged to the same person, this same early miner they call the founder. This is a possible flaw in their argument, as there were multiple early miners, Hal Finney being one of them.<p>The transactions that divided this wallet into the 45% and 55% wallets could have also split the ownership.<p>Lastly, <i></i>it's very important to understand<i></i> that while it may not be publicly recorded in the blockchain, these accounts could've changed hands by manually exchanging the private keys, and thus could bring into question the basis of this speculation.
Two really interesting things to me are (1) that it's now possible to have hundreds of millions of dollars worth of assets and not have them seized when arrested; and (2) there's a lot of speculation that bitcoin was created by a government entity and that that's who Satoshi is - what are the implications of that entity funding DPR?
On page 12: "For some reason (mistake? a tracking attempt?) the account received a tiny amount of 1 Satoshi [...] almost a year later on July 23-rd 2012. Its owner noticed this non-zero balance one year later, and emptied it once more on August 6-th 2013. On September 11-th 2013 he received another tiny transfer of 0.0000091, and on November 18-th 2013 yet another one of 0.00011. On November 20-th he sends the 0.0000091 but the 0.00011 is still there."<p>Could these be rewards for transaction confirmations? (Probably not since it's not suggested in the paper, and they're the experts and I'm not).
Direct link to PDF: <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/839348/silk-road-paper.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/8393...</a><p>I never know whether it's allowed to tell people they're dead...
The assumption is that the first blocks were all mined by Satoshi, however Hal Finney was also running the client early on.<p>Bottom line, it's clear why the Bitcoin creators chose to be anonymous.
Just to reference some of the interesting bits to actual transactions/addresses:<p>Satoshi address - <a href="https://blockchain.info/address/12higDjoCCNXSA95xZMWUdPvXNmkAduhWv" rel="nofollow">https://blockchain.info/address/12higDjoCCNXSA95xZMWUdPvXNmk...</a><p>Satoshi -> DPR transfer - <a href="https://blockchain.info/tx/cdcaaa0ff1446d41aae5d32c23da1ff3353765ebaf26ffd32ab912948645c08f" rel="nofollow">https://blockchain.info/tx/cdcaaa0ff1446d41aae5d32c23da1ff33...</a>
" Ulbricht grew up and went to high school and middle school in the Austin, Texas, area. "
source: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-ross-ulbricht-the-brilliant-alleged-mastermind-of-silk-road-2013-10" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-ross-ulbricht-the-brilli...</a><p>(the owner of the bitcoin address in question):
" Dustin D. Trammell Lived in Austin, Texas " (and has since 2002, when Ross lived there)
source: <a href="https://plus.google.com/116073269295024509653/about" rel="nofollow">https://plus.google.com/116073269295024509653/about</a><p>Study debunked, nothing to see here, move along eh? Probably just a big coincidence and they never met or knew each other yet were working in parallel and Trammell's exact coins happened to end up in Ross's hands. The FBI will be all over this soon enough.
If Satoshi sent coins to the Silk Road as the authors suggest maybe that was to take advantage of the mixing service. It seems like he or they would want to cash at least some of these out.