The Satoshi Affair

It&#x27;s worth your time (and extremely entertaining) to read Sarah Jeong&#x27;s twitter commentary on this piece. She does a really nice job of highlighting all of the places where basic journalism, asking for outside expertise, or really any shred of skepticism and tough questioning would have killed the story:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;sarahjeong&#x2F;status&#x2F;744950977090838528" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;sarahjeong&#x2F;status&#x2F;744950977090838528</a>

&gt; &quot;the palm trees were throwing summer shade onto the concrete walkways – ‘Tailor Made Office Solutions’, it said on a nearby billboard – and people were drinking coffee in Deli 32 on the ground floor. Wright’s office on level five was painted red, and looked down on the Macquarie Park Cemetery, known as a place of calm for the living as much as the dead.&quot;<p>Ugh, it&#x27;s like wading through a New Yorker article. Less paying by the word please.

For those who don&#x27;t know, this long article was announced by LRB exactly at the time Wright successfully fooled BBC (1) (2) O&#x27;Hagan had actually spent a lot of time with Wright, believing he&#x27;ll be able to report about historically important moment and person. I&#x27;m glad O&#x27;Hagan kept the courage to finish it and publish it for it surely gives some insight on how the scam developed, even if he doesn&#x27;t understand the details of it, he can report on the human side. May 2016 it was:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lrb.co.uk&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;02&#x2F;josh-stupple&#x2F;satoshi-baby&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lrb.co.uk&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;02&#x2F;josh-stupple&#x2F;satoshi-ba...</a><p>&quot;Andrew O’Hagan has had exclusive access to Craig Wright for the last six months. His forthcoming piece in the LRB will look at the myth of Satoshi and the journey of the man who claims to be him.&quot;<p>1) How Wright never proved anything: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dankaminsky.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;03&#x2F;the-cryptographically-provable-con-man&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dankaminsky.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;03&#x2F;the-cryptographically-pro...</a><p>2) In detail: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nikcub.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;craig-wright-is-not-satoshi-nakamoto&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nikcub.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;craig-wright-is-not-satoshi-nak...</a>

Here is the most plausible explanation of who Satoshi is IMO: a team of people tasked by (most likely) a government agency with developing a crypto-currency as an experiment.<p>The project is over, the people involved in it are probably bound to secrecy because the work was classified. They cannot spend a satoshi of the original bitcoin because that would be theft, probably a felony, possibly treason, who knows - either way that bitcoin and all the keys belong to their employer, not them, so you will never see anything signed by &quot;Satoshi&quot; to prove who &quot;he&quot; is.

Nobody wants to believe they were conned.<p>Check this out: the link in which Wright uses to say he can&#x27;t prove he&#x27;s Satoshi or risk going to jail, appears to be completely fraudulent: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcoinist.net&#x2F;uk-law-enforcement-sources-hint-at-impending-craig-wright-arrest&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcoinist.net&#x2F;uk-law-enforcement-sources-hint-at-imp...</a><p>&quot;Editor’s Note (5-6-2-16, 2:43 AM EST): The SiliconAngle piece cited in this article was produced by an impostor site posing as the real SiliconAngle. This source article does not appear on the real SiliconAngle website, and was not written by SiliconAngle reporter Collen Kriel. Bitcoinist would like to apologize to SiliconAngle and our readers for any confusion. To ensure that you are reading articles produced by the real SiliconAngle, make sure you are using the correct URL: www.siliconangle.com.&quot;

I stopped reading in the 4th line... <i>&quot;They were looking for a man named Craig Steven Wright&quot;</i>. I&#x27;m not going to spend more minutes of my life reading about an scam artist... Enough is enough.

I still don&#x27;t understand why people so desperately want to find out who or what is behind Satoshi. It could be a person, it could be multiple persons, but what&#x27;s to gain by identifying someone who gave the world something that&#x27;s generally found useful, and all they asked for was privacy? Either you trust it or you don&#x27;t. If you do not, what secret entity could be useful to be discovered behind the Satoshi identifier for you to trust it more or less?<p>I mean, for instance, I&#x27;m unaware of people trying to identify all members of the PaX team.<p>EDIT: For a community that asks for privacy in many instances, it&#x27;s interesting we support the search to uncover what&#x27;s behind the Satoshi identifier.

An entertaining read if you&#x27;re into the cryptocurrency space, but all of the claims contained within must be viewed with extreme skepticism.

Sign with the genesis block key or fuck off - seriously the articles and claims aren&#x27;t novel anymore. The breadth of delusion and nonsense is staggering - it&#x27;s impossible to imagine that anyone of significant name in the field (e.g. Diffie, Hellman, Chaum, Shamir, Rivest, Adelman, Zimmerman etc.) would propose any other kind of proof.

There are so many believable candidates for Satoshi, it&#x27;s hard to know which one to pick. For another just as credible example: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;06&#x2F;08&#x2F;i-just-invented-bitcoin&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;06&#x2F;08&#x2F;i-just-invented-bitcoin&#x2F;</a>

Towards the end of the 1st section we find an interesting strategy for getting through airport security - have an accomplice just behind you who causes a fuss at just the right moment.

I think what people need to understand is that he can both be satoshi and fail to provide proof, its not a binary. Factors affecting the outcome could be sociopathology, mental illness, ulterior motives and others.

Strangely opinionated intersection in an otherwise pretty entertaining article:<p>&quot;&quot;&quot;(Like the governments they despise, bitcoiners deal – when it comes to ideas – in ‘white papers’, as if they were issuing laws.)&quot;&quot;&quot;<p>Not sure if the author read it but the original paper is structured more like a regular journal paper than a traditional white paper.

Is Craig Satoshi? Maybe. To say that he definitely is is to be an idiot. But to say that he certainly isn&#x27;t is equally dumb. If it&#x27;s a con, it&#x27;s a pretty good con. If it&#x27;s not, than this story is accurate. But the people who are saying a complicated a complicated situation is as black and white as &quot;sign the block or fuck off, you&#x27;re not Satoshi&quot; isn&#x27;t thinking. In a world of lifeless robots, it would be that simple. But it&#x27;s not, and we don&#x27;t. A man who has the identity may not want to prove it. But a con artist would do the same.

Given people appear unable to let go of the desire to find Satoshi, maybe it&#x27;s for the best that the media believes they&#x27;ve found Satoshi.

Satoshi needs to launch bitcoin 2.0 with appropriate changes. That would kickstart a whole new era and with his cred it would carry massive adoption.

This might be part of the reason he still wants people to believe he invented all of this:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-bitcoin-wright-patents-idUSKCN0Z61GM" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-bitcoin-wright-patents-idU...</a>

Satoshi whoever you are and wherever you are..please never ever be found..your gift to the world does not need for your life to be under the spot light..the gift speaks for itself, quite well.

George Orwell said there are some people you can fool all the time. What he didn&#x27;t mention: those people are all LRB readers.

It seems like Wright is attracting more and more (overly credulous) journalists to perform fawning bio pieces on him in lieu of the only evidence that will ever actually conclusively convince anyone. This evidence, unlike the several hundred thousand extraneous words here, also happens to be something that is extraordinarily simple to provide: cryptographically sign a message that we can all verify. He has not provided this single, legitimate proof to the public and worse yet he has provided fake proof that shows a deliberate willingness to deceive. Moreover, he seems to have demonstrated a willingness to exploit journalists&#x27; and the general public&#x27;s lack of understanding about cryptography. This seems diametrically opposed to the spirit of the technology he allegedly gifted to the world - Bitcoin.