There's nothing of substance in the article. I suppose we'll wait and see, but I have no reason to believe there'll be any more accuracy or veracity behind the unmasking that the countless previous attempts. It'll certainly get viewers with articles like this touting it, though.
I don’t know how many other very early wallets have suddenly become active in the last decade, and it could be a complete coincidence, but those wallets being drained is the smallest crumb of evidence that someone’s figured something out in my eyes.
Or, the allegations could be 100% wrong, but someone decided to sell because it will lend credibility to the allegations. (And get them filthy stinking rich, too.)
Qanon had several phases. The original Q was probably a 4chan LARP. The "insider LARP" is a fairly established genre on 4chan, Reddit, and other places. Then it seems that actual propagandists of some kind took it over and turned it into a weaponized conspiracy ARG for Trump and the alt-right. Then it was kicked off 4chan and from there probably ended up in the hands of the 8chan people or someone connected to them.
At least that's a shortened summary of the most credible chain I've seen.
Q never used any real security like a PGP key, so there's really no way to know how many Qs there were or how many times the ARG was ARG-jacked.
The earliest form of a QAnon style narrative being advanced in the public was from Steve Pieczenik, who has a deep intelligence background (involved with the Aldo Moro kidnapping), who was talking about a white hat coup on Alex Jones's show (another source that glows in and of itself) in 2015, a full year before the first Pizzagate drops. I highly doubt it was started as a "LARP" by people who didn't already have deep knowledge of ARGs and psyops.
Maybe. I'm aware of at least a few different ideas about where it came from, but unless somebody confesses it's impossible to tell. It's a giant mess of people pointing at each other and different trails that lead nowhere definitive.
I do think the move to 8chan probably coincided with at least one ARG-jacking. The 4chan "trip code" thing Q was using on 4chan is a joke security-wise but the move to 8chan had no hand-off at all. There was no way to have any assurance it was the same person. (Again not that 4chan is secure.)
A real "high-level informant" with "Q clearance" would have used a f'ing PGP signature or a signed message in a Bitcoin transaction or something cryptographically verifiable.
Edit: the white-hat coup narrative goes back really far in conspiranoid and new-age literature. It goes back at least to the I AM movement, which had a narrative that sounded a lot like Q plus some ascended master woo woo. I AM was a totalitarian cult with fascist-adjacent leanings that was at one point trying to organize a march on Washington, but it never happened for some reason. I think the cult leader died or something if I remember correctly.
There's a tiny bit of evidence for a direct link. There was a video making the rounds a while back of Michael Flynn at some Q event saying a prayer that turned out to be straight out of one of the I AM offshoots. Seems a bit of a stretch though to imagine some old cult trying to launch their revolution a second time. It's more likely that grifters are just pulling bullshit from places like I AM to develop their own grifts.
If you're on the edge of your seat, let me dispense with the suspense: Len Sassaman.
Anybody who's actually looked into this topic beyond reading someone else's theories and nodding in agreement knows the answer to this question. If the documentary is worth it's salt that will be it's answer as well. No other person who would've been connected to cypherpunk and cryptography groups at that time fits the bill better, and he fits it basically perfectly. I'm sure other early contributors also knew this, which is why https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/black-ops-of-tcpip-2011...
I'm really enjoying the multiple confident assertions that it's different people in this thread. Kind of a spoiler for the documentary I guess: it'll be another confident assertion about someone, with as satisfying a conclusion as all these comments.
Yes, you are absolutely correct, but please don't continue to spread this. Len Sassaman left behind family and heirs, and although it is very unlikely that Satoshi's mining keys survived in any form, if this rumor spreads they will never be safe.
It’s so interesting how people are so confident in multiple different people that have known exculpatory issues. Stylometry and code style doesn’t match at all.
Writing stylometry matches close to perfectly, and matches much better than any other proposed person. Double space after period (not uncommon) and a mix of British and american spelling (very uncommon) were the points that sold me on it being him. Disappearance date is compelling as well.
Anybody who has the skills to identify the creator of Bitcoin would not sit on it waiting for an HBO documentary. I'm guessing they're just going to say Hal Finney without any new evidence. Safer than saying Szabo who could push back since he's alive.
Adam Back. Ever notice how anytime anyone mentions his name as possibly being satoshi they get buried? Not a coincidence. Plus Adam had no work history during the dates that Bitcoin was created. Had created the system that bitcoin is based on and never produced the emails of him and Satoshi that supposedly existed. Remember the first email from Satoshi mentions he got "your email from Adam Back". Google also manipulated the search engine results for "Satoshi is Adam Back" for years and basically censored the results for that query.. The list goes on. He is the most obvious candidate and likely the reason he was chosen to head core (I mean he literally wrote hash cash which is basically Bitcoin version 1)
It is absolutely not Adam Back. The bitcoin protocol is not based on Adam Back's work (though Adam loves to claim otherwise). When Adam came to the bitcoin scene in 2013, he harbored some very large misconceptions about the incentive structure and capabilities of bitcoin.
No. Satoshi IP leaked in LA when Back wasn’t there. Back’s stylometry is way off too. Those two should be enough for you to figure it out with some digging
I assume a person like Back is familiar enough with opsec that he could intentionally change his writing style, and also "accidentally" leak his IP, (via a VPN), when he is somewhere else in the world.
He would have also had to mimic another cryptocurrency researcher's stylometry that ended up matching far better. Which do you honestly think happened:
A: Back is Satoshi, mimics X (who has many other reasons to be Satoshi) for hundreds of emails.
B: Back isn't Satoshi, X's stylometry matches Satoshi.
Without taking a position either way on who Satoshi is; Yes, of course he would have.
Clearly 'Satoshi' intended from the outset to obfuscate their identity.
Given that axiom many behaviours become probable, including referencing a true identity (or three*) in the paper.
* Satoshi could, of course, be Yet Another Nicolas Bourbaki with a shared voting key of sorts; that's an easy explanation for relative silence over the years if a group cannot or will not reach consensus on action.
Unless there is hard evidence, I'd consider this a waste of time. I don't know the purpose of "revealing" Satoshi if he's someone who doesn't want the attention.
Proof, something that people can observe and recognize as true, not just circumstantial evidence. They should avoid repeating the Dorian Nakamoto situation.
I know the general public sees Satoshi as somehow the mastermind behind Bitcoin even now, but they aren’t. Bitcoin is open source, being maintained by a team, and its current implementation is the result of a community effort. It’s built on the crucial work Satoshi did, but arresting them or charging them or anything of the sort won’t magically change anything.
To the general public who’s never interacted with open source communities before I’m sure this is very exciting and so it’ll definitely impact Bitcoin’s value (maybe that’s why those early wallets were drained?) but I can’t see it actually impacting the future of Bitcoin or any other coin.
I wish they’d respect Satoshi’s privacy, but I’m also super curious to know who it is.
There's historical interest here and in some case, the fate of the "1 million Satoshi bitcoins" depends on who the creator is. If it was someone like Finney who passed away a decade ago, it's extremely unlikely that those coins will ever be recovered/spent.
Users flagged the post correctly, since the article doesn't actually include the critical bit of information that it's dangling.
The actual (new) content of this article can be summarized as "TV special soon to be released", which is not an intellectually interesting story. Perhaps the show itself will contain interesting information, and if so, the community may find something to discuss about it then. On HN, there's no harm in waiting. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
There's also the aspect that Satoshi speculation is one of the most-trodden topics in HN history, so a new story has a pretty high bar to clear to count as interesting.
Disclosure of an inventor for Bitcoin is spectacularly technically interesting!
I've been deploying continent-wide distributed industrial systems and writing, theorizing and producing prototypes for scalable digital money since before 2009 (when Bitcoin was "invented"). It was a gobsmacking breakthrough then -- and it has only gotten more interesting, as we discover the profound insights of its "inventor", by watching other nascent cryptocurrencies and other distributed systems make mistakes that Bitcoin's "inventor" somehow knew to avoid (UTXOs vs. account balances, I'm lookin' at you..., and that's the least of them).
For someone to ex nihilo solve byzantine fault tolerant global consensus w/ robust authority-free rejection of sybils? And then go dark for 15 years? Any non-trivial semi-reliable claim of identification (see: HBO's skin in the game) is automatically almost the most technically interesting claim this year!
So, for some religious (see: beliefs based in faith in a narrative rather than observation, hypothesis and testing) "expert" to "Flag" this post as uninteresting is pretty much the opposite of the credo of the HN of the decade past.
HN seems to have become the "mainstream media" of the technical world -- interested only in findings acceptable to righteously-aligned cultists, boring to everyone actually observing interesting and novel facts about the technical world.
