
Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Birth of Bitcoin - mdelias
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/business/decoding-the-enigma-of-satoshi-nakamoto-and-the-birth-of-bitcoin.html
======
zby
By the way I recommend the essays by Szabo:
[http://szabo.best.vwh.net/](http://szabo.best.vwh.net/) !

Also his blog:
[http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/](http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/)

------
ebbv
Depending on your perspective this profile could seem more or less compelling
than the last one, but either way it's nowhere near conclusive. Fortunately
unlike the Newsweek article, this one doesn't try to claim it is conclusive.

Personally I do think the creator should be unmasked. This person stands to
profit hugely from BitCoin's adoption and continued use. I want to know if
they really are doing it for eventual personal financial gain or not. And what
kind of person they are, how the massive amount of money they gain will be
used. Maybe Satoshi was a secret CIA project all along and the government will
use the huge BitCoin stash to fund black ops that we'd rather not have happen.
Maybe it was similar but the KGB instead. Maybe it was some lone hacker or
group of hackers like Mr. Szabo, and they threw away the keys. Or maybe they
didn't throw away the keys but they will just eventually split it up and give
the money to their children. There's lots of good and bad possibilities, none
of which we know until the identity of Satoshi is revealed.

Personally, I have always been skeptical of BitCoin. There's no reason why it
should be _the_ crypto currency. If cryptocurrencies do take off as more than
just a toy for libertarians and rich technophiles, then governments will start
their own fork and decree that these are the official cryptocurrencies of
their nations, and all others are junk. Over night the value of BitCoin will
plummet, because the wider population will choose the government backed one.

~~~
natrius
Governments all believe that the supply of money must be managed for the sake
of the economy. This might be true, but any currency built on this belief will
be valued lower than a fixed-supply currency.

It's hard to create and distribute a new currency, and convince people that
it's worth something. Bitcoin has done that, and it will be hard for even
governments to convince people that there's a better option.

~~~
jadeddrag
It is extremely easy for a government to convince people to use their new
currency, they already do it just by enforcing tax payments be paid in their
local fiat currencies.

~~~
natrius
Give an example. The fiat currencies that people actually save in have a
direct lineage from gold, or are linked to such a currency by monetary policy.
Tax value alone has never given a new currency stable value.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The fiat currencies that people actually save in have a direct lineage from
> gold

(1) What difference does "direct lineage" have? They aren't gold, and they
aren't backed by gold. Unless you arguing that they have _sentimental_ value
from a historical association that hasn't been real for generations, this is
meaningless.

(2) Also, this is more true of silver than it is of gold. the gold standard
was sort of a brief fad (in long-term historical terms) in the final centuries
of commodity currency standards as the dominant model, while silver had
dominated for a much longer time previously. Pretty much all of the extant
currencies that have a "direct lineage from gold" also have a direct lineage
from silver, and the ones that aren't themselves relatively new have a much
longer history under silver.

~~~
natrius
The direct lineage matters because my point was that it's hard to convince
people that a new currency is worth something. It's easy if you promise to
redeem it for something people already value.

------
gwern
Reddit discussion, with some criticism of specific points & replies by the
author:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/361niw/decoding_th...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/361niw/decoding_the_enigma_of_satoshi_nakamoto_and_the/)

------
nqureshi
>> "That item, in May 2011, was one of the last posts Mr. Szabo made before he
went on a lengthy hiatus to work, he said later, on a new concept he called
temporal programming."

Anyone know what 'temporal programming' refers to? Sounds intriguing.

------
lotsofmangos
My personal bet is that Satoshi Nakamoto is probably the creation of a
security agency. Bitcoin has done wonders for illuminating vast swathes of the
black market, especially for anyone with a good network overview.

~~~
vectorpush
Hmm, I'm not so sure. If anything, it seems to me that bitcoin has actually
been quite a boon for the viability of darknet markets; certainly the silk
road would have never risen to such heights were it not for bitcoin, and as
far as I'm aware, bitcoin itself has never actually played a direct role in
helping to identify darknet kingpins (who end up tipping their hand in some
other fashion). Honestly, I'd say darknet markets are the only place where
bitcoin is genuinely useful.

~~~
gwern
More importantly: if Bitcoin was invented and released for that reason, then
it will turn out to be one of the more epic backfires in security agency
history, for the simple reason that everyone involved knows that inventing the
first successful distributed pseudonymous e-cash is much, much harder than
inventing the first successful distributed _anonymous_ e-cash.

As soon as Bitcoin became clearly successful, it also became inevitable that
things like Monero or Zerocoin or Coinjoin would be invented. Once the genie
of distributed e-cash has been let out of the bottle, it not merely can evolve
but _will_ evolve.

So in exchange for a brief period of visibility through Bitcoin, they would
have permanently and irrevocably damaged their ability to spy via banks,
Western Union, PayPal etc (entities which they pwn lock stock and barrel) as
usage diverts to anonymous currencies (Bitcoin with extensions or mixes, or
anonymous coins).

~~~
johnsoft
>everyone involved knows that inventing the first successful distributed
pseudonymous e-cash is much, much harder than inventing the first successful
distributed _anonymous_ e-cash

Assuming "much, much harder" isn't hyperbole, could you elaborate on this
please? I'm interested in the tech aspect. The existing _anonymous_ solutions
I've looked at are all more complex and difficult to grasp than the simplicity
of bitcoin's global ledger.

~~~
gwern
What I'm saying is that before Bitcoin no one had a good idea for a
distributed e-cash which met the basic criteria of no trusted third parties.
Given such a system, then you can fairly easily imagine building an anonymity
layer on top of it: if nothing else, to name only the very most obvious
solution, people can use a mixer service hosted on a Tor hidden service. The
jump from ???->Bitcoin is much bigger than Bitcoin->Bitcoin+Tor, and with a
working system, one can go back and look at all the fancy anonymity-related
math and ideas which had been published or speculated about in the past and
see which can be added in, and dollars to donuts, at least one will work and
that's all you need. Any group smart enough to invent Bitcoin would be able to
foresee that at some point, anonymous currency would follow as a consequence
and I believe Satoshi said as much somewhere (although I don't have a quote on
hand).

------
wsxcde
Nothing really new here, just speculation that Nick Szabo is Satoshi. It
mainly appears to be a submarine piece praising bitcoin.

~~~
ikeboy
What's new is info on Szabo, including that he worked at Vaurum, his age, and
where he went to college.

~~~
myth_buster
Also:

    
    
      “I’m not Satoshi, and I’m not a college professor. 
      In fact, I never was a college professor.”
    

It was widely held belief that he is/was professor at George Washington
University.

~~~
ikeboy
That part wasn't new, it was denied by GMU; see
[http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/04/16/bitcoin-creator-
sa...](http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/04/16/bitcoin-creator-satoshi-
nakamoto-unmasked-again/).

>Furthermore, George Washington University says that despite widespread
reports that Mr. Szabo worked as a law professor at the school, it has no
records of his ever working there in that capacity. The university did
confirm, though, that he received a law degree from the school in 2006.

~~~
ikeboy
Whoops, I meant GWU.

------
vectorpush
It seems odd to me that many bitcoin supporters consider Satoshi's pre-mined
coins to be a personal security risk (to the tune of $200 million), but
simultaneously refuse to hold that fact against bitcoin even though "pre-
mined" is a common pejorative used to criticize altcoins.

~~~
Buge
When used as a pejorative, it means coins that were mined before releasing the
mining client to the world.

Satoshi only started mining after releasing the client, so those coins are not
really pre-mined.

~~~
vectorpush
That's a fair point, but it doesn't seem like there's much of a practical
difference in terms of user apprehension related to the consequences of pre-
mining (namely, that the creator controls a gigantic sum of coins at close to
zero cost)

~~~
kinghajj
It's a problem of fairness. Satoshi released Bitcoin publicly and only then
began mining coins, just like everyone else was potentially able to do. It's
hard to begrudge him from using his own invention, after all! Whereas pre-
mined cryptocurrencies make others feel cheated.

~~~
vectorpush
I understand the fairness argument, but I wonder where the line is drawn
between pre-mine and low-key release. Just releasing the client doesn't seem
like it'd be enough to evade criticism if the practical effect is the same as
a pre-mine (i.e the creator gets a huge head start before people start to
catch on).

~~~
tablewatcher
Before Satoshi's invention the concept of pre-mining didn't exist. I think the
inventor of the worlds first decentralised currency is allowed to do whatever
he wants. If you dont like it, make your own currency and stop bickering.

~~~
vectorpush
Huh? Of course he is allowed to do whatever he wants, the nature of Satoshi's
prerogatives are not in question here. My point is that there's very little
practical difference between pre-mining and early-mining during a time when
the currency is basically unknown. It's not as if it's a trivial amount of
coins either, Satoshi's stash completely dwarfs the holdings of every bitcoin
user that has come after him, so it's hard to just write it off as blockchain
finder's fee.

------
RedNifre
Maybe, one day, we'll find a PGP signed "I am Satoshi Nakamoto" in someone's
last will.

If he/she/they won't do this or if PGP is broken by then we will never know
for sure.

~~~
drcode
> or if PGP is broken by then we will never know for sure.

Unless they have already put encrypted messages into the existing blockchain
using different algos with such a signed message- Then they could use another
signature to prove they signed the message with PGP before PGP was broken.

~~~
nly
No need to do that. Satoshi has bitcoin in the blockchain already that he or
she may have secp256k1 keypairs for. Being able to spend these coins would be
proof enough.

------
drcode
Eerie how the the linked message from his cypherpunk days makes reference to a
"Digital Silk Road"
[http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1993/08/msg00426.html](http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1993/08/msg00426.html)

------
pyabo
I would have asked Szabo: if you were Satoshi, would you change your answers?

~~~
noobie
Not following..Can you explain?

~~~
pyabo
I mean that he would answer exactly the same if he was or not Satoshi.

~~~
differentView
Then what's the point of your question?

~~~
pyabo
The point is that asking Szabo if he is Satoshi is pointless since you will
get a 'no' as answer if he is or not.

------
ChrisArchitect
so much William Gibson in the Bitcoin mystery

~~~
archenemy
so... it would be a ploy by an early version of Winterm.. I mean IBM's Watson,
who is using bitcoin-laundered money to bootstrap itself into a weird-art-
making godlike IA?

------
loma7
Everyone in the know, knows it was Kaiser Sozay and Kobayashi who started
Bitcoin.

------
bandris
If you would like to pronounce Szabo, saying 'sawbow' is close enough. (Sz is
a letter in Hungarian, pronounced as S in English.) IPA: /ˈsɒboː/

[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Szab%C3%B3](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Szab%C3%B3)

~~~
stefantalpalaru
it's more like 'sah-boh'

------
zby
Anything new in this one?

~~~
Aqueous
Yes. I don't think it's been reported that Nick Szabo has been involved in any
BitCoin startup, let alone an exchange called "Vaurum" / "Mirror." Credit to
the guy: in the world of the Internet where perfect privacy is nearly
impossible, not so much as a picture of him has surfaced. Or, well, until
recently; if you do a Google Search of his name one of the photos seems
similar (sans beard) to the physical description of him in this article.

Despite this, he has to this day remained an extraordinarily secretive
individual, while being widely suspected to be the creator of BTC. Looks like
all that practice
([http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1993/10/msg00759.html](http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1993/10/msg00759.html))
paid off.

~~~
pags
I also found it interesting that doing a Google image search on his name
yielded nothing matching the description of the man given in this article.

~~~
drcode
I'm still not convinced that the name "Nick Szabo" itself isn't a pseudonym...
how would the reporter know? It's not like "Nick" is going to show them his
passport or anything...

~~~
ikeboy
He got a degree from GMU in 2006 under that name.
[http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/04/16/bitcoin-creator-
sa...](http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/04/16/bitcoin-creator-satoshi-
nakamoto-unmasked-again/)

>Mr. Szabo’s was unavailable for comment. Furthermore, George Washington
University says that despite widespread reports that Mr. Szabo worked as a law
professor at the school, it has no records of his ever working there in that
capacity. The university did confirm, though, that he received a law degree
from the school in 2006.

~~~
drcode
Yes, but there's several people out there with that name... What I really
wonder is whether any reporter was able to get GWU to supply them with a photo
of the "GWU Nick Szabo" to confirm it's the same person.

~~~
ikeboy
That fact that he claimed on his blog to have a degree from GMU, and said that
he was going to get one "soon" in 2006 (see
[https://web.archive.org/web/20060329122426/http://unenumerat...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060329122426/http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/))
implies that it was him, and presuming you can't get into college with a fake
name, then that's his real name.

~~~
bryondowd
Nothing to do with this case, but that makes me wonder if it is possible to
get a college degree with a fake name. Assuming you don't have any federal
assistance or loans, would you need a SSN? Even if you do, would the school
actually run it through any system that would verify it, or do they just keep
it in their system as an identifier? If the latter, you could just provide a
made-up SSN, and as long as nobody comes along and applies to the school with
the same number, it may never be discovered.

I always thought the biggest downside to dropping your life, changing your
name, and trying to start over would be the inability to get a college-
requiring job, but maybe it would be a possibility. (Like a witness protection
program, without the federal support)

~~~
ikeboy
[http://www.bestcolleges.com/resources/undocumented-
students-...](http://www.bestcolleges.com/resources/undocumented-students-
guide/)

>An encouraging fact undocumented students should keep in mind when
considering college: No federal law requires proof of citizenship to be
admitted to U.S. colleges. Most institutions set their own admission policies.

You'd still need a high school diploma or equivalent to get into a good
college, and those may require ID, or at least keeping up the fake since you
were a teen. For Szabo, if he really is a fake name and got a high school
diploma with it, I'd say he deserves us not knowing.

~~~
bryondowd
Very interesting. I expect you could at least get into a community college as
an adult with no HS equivalent, by taking their placement tests. Then you
could use a transcript from that school to get into a better 4 year school,
and possibly use your degree there to get into a solid graduate program if you
desired.

You could probably get the same kind of IDs that undocumented residents get in
order to get a driver's license. So, no SSN, but a number for tax and
identification purposes.

------
oskarth
Oh dear, here we go again.

------
chrisdbaldwin
We should not reveal the creator. Stop it.

~~~
amyjess
Please stop trying to censor journalists. We have a free press for a reason.

~~~
zdkl
we also have a right to privacy which the entity behind Satoshi chose to
excercise, shouldn't that entitle him to some discretion?

~~~
danso
So...what right is that? I mean, specifically, in case law? When people do
something that causes a substantial effect in the public sphere, they are seen
as (at the very least) as a "limited public figure" and in the U.S.,
journalists have a large amount of protection in the freedom to report on such
people.

~~~
s73v3r
Satoshi would be that public figure. This Nick guy so far is not. He has a
right to privacy.

~~~
danso
That's not a right to privacy...at least as precedent is concerned. Once
you've done something that has a public impact, or even, involved in something
that is now in the public attention, a U.S. news organization can make the
case that information about you is of public interest.

Take the Amtrak engineer in the recent Philadelphia crash...as far as I can
tell, he most definitely would like to remain out of the spotlight. Yet,
because he happened to be the engineer at the time of the crash -- whether or
not we know that he directly or even indirectly contributed to the crash --
news orgs have some legal protection in scrutinizing his life, including where
he went to school, his job history, and any public social media postings.

Sometimes privacy is accorded out of tradition or convention...for example,
the identity of a rape victim who is testifying in a court case is public
information, though it is rarely reported except under special circumstances.
But in this case, the victim did not intentionally put themselves in this
position of public interest, but because court cases are considered to be
important for the public to know about, the victim's identity is considered
public information.

It should be said that nothing is completely cut and dry, there's always a
tension between the public's right to know and privacy. But the right of
privacy is usually afforded to victims and for people whom public exposure
would cause greater harm than censorship -- i.e. the identity of witnesses in
a state case. Bitcoin's creator does not seem to fall into this category.

~~~
s73v3r
>Once you've done something that has a public impact, or even, involved in
something that is now in the public attention, a U.S. news organization can
make the case that information about you is of public interest.

Except there isn't evidence that this guy is Satoshi. So there isn't evidence
that he is a public figure.

Also, choosing not to reveal someone's identity is not censorship.

------
exo762
This article should result in huge court settlements payed by NYTimes to Mr.
Szabo. They are literally putting his life and life of his family in danger.

I hope will sue their asses.

~~~
Amezarak
> They are literally putting his life and life of his family in danger.

The world is filled with millionaires and billionaires who are publicly known
and yet perfectly safe, even though the vast majority of them don't have
security guards or anything like that.

Why do you think things would be different for the creator of Bitcoin? The
reality is that very few criminals are of the take-hostages-and-murder type in
the first place and murdering or stealing from a semi-famous rich person is a
surefire way to get caught, especially when Bitcoins are traceable in a way
that cash is not. You might as well break in and steal a Picasso painting from
some other millionaire.

There are lots of people who want to remain private and unknown; the best
(though not guaranteed) way is to not do anything worthy of the public notice.
If you do, you should expect some scrutiny. So while I sympathize with Szabo,
I don't feel very sorry for him. He pursued his dream of working on
cryptocurrency (whether or not he is Satoshi) and this is a perfectly
reasonable and predictable consequence of that dream.

~~~
zaphar
Those millionaires and billionaires by and large do not have large piles of
untraceable money sitting around. Killing them wouldn't enrich the killer
appreciably. Satoshi, whoever he is, does have a large pile of what may be
untraceable money though. There is a world of difference between him and the
others.

~~~
Amezarak
> Those millionaires and billionaires by and large do not have large piles of
> untraceable money sitting around.

Neither does Szabo. What Bitcoins he has are traceable and they are not just
sitting around. The usual imagination is that someone would threat/torture and
kill him and his family to get his keys, but that's extremely high profile and
risky and works just as well for normally wealthy people. (Send your wife to
take out one million dollars cash from the bank or I'll kill your children!)

> Satoshi, whoever he is, does have a large pile of what may be untraceable
> money though.

How would it be untraceable? Bitcoin, unlike cash, is very traceable.

Szabo's situation is not at all different from anybody else who is wealthy.

