
Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto - coolswan
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/study-suggests-link-between-dread-pirate-roberts-and-satoshi-nakamoto/?_r=0
======
spenvo
This currently isn't "news," as the paper hasn't been published yet, and none
of the disclosed findings are too damning or conclusive.

That being said, it's important for two reasons:

1.) the paper gets published tomorrow, which will lead to a round of negative
press, regardless of the claims' merit.

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).

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.

Several of the oldest wallets have been dormant for years, which means that
this is not hypothetical -- that wealth has not circulated.

 _edit made to be clear about "bad actors"_:

"Bad actors" meaning: unpredictable and possibly having malicious intent.

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.

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.

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.

~~~
dobbsbob
There's no way in hell Satoshi is anywhere connected to "DPR". Look at the
OPSEC between the two. Satoshi carefully concealed his identity even in the
early crypto mailing list days of Bitcoin. Ross Ulbricht failed at this
completely throughout his underground career. Satoshi was a pretty good
developer, Ulbricht posted to Stackexchange the most basic of php questions.

Satoshi seemed to be very aware of the power of gov agencies both in UK and US
and the risks he was taking creating Bitcoin, a good example was his response
to people back in 2010 who were calling for Wikileaks to accept Bitcoin
donations. Ulbricht on the other hand foolishly underestimated them and
would've cheered Wikileaks adoption. I don't recall Satoshi ever granting
interviews and was hesitant to even reply to PMs on bitcointalk. He also
didn't discuss politics, though you could infer from his hatred of central
banking what his politics were he never spelled them out like Ulbricht did on
a regular basis.

Not the same people

~~~
auctiontheory
_Satoshi carefully concealed his identity_

Or her.

~~~
nanidin
Is this level of pedantry really necessary? According to Wikipedia, the name
is generally given to males.

~~~
eitland
Against the rules I guess, but thank you.

I don't care if Satoshi is he/she/it (well the "it" case could be interesting)
but having to add " or she " to every sentence sounds tiring.

~~~
raverbashing
Or "they" which has a good probability (at least, much better than 'it')

------
Aqueous
I doubt that the link here amounts to DPR knowing SN personally, or even
worse, DPR being SN.

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:

\- DPR is arrogant.

\- DPR makes stupid mistakes.

\- SN is fairly humble.

\- SN is smarter than DPR.

\- SN doesn't make mistakes.

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.

~~~
feral
> \- SN is fairly humble.

You are talking about some one or group who took great care (including in all
their dealings with other early bitcoin users) to maintain their anonymity -
which is really hard to do, in the face of the sort of scrutiny that SN has
had.

Its at least plausible that, along with the name, other aspects of the SN
persona were explicitly constructed.

There's all this myth around who SN is. A lot of people seem to believe SN is
a benevolent crypto researcher working in their bedroom, for the benefit of
humanity, with no profit motive in sight. I mean, sure, I hope that's the case
too, but we should remember that we don't actually _know_ very much at all.

~~~
Aqueous
It is possible that aspects of the SN persona were highly constructed but what
is a simpler explanation - that everything about SN was fake or just his
identity? It would have taken an enormous cognitive effort to be able to
consistently demonstrate the same personality traits in post after post unless
it came naturally. It seems like he was more concerned about technical
discussion than hiding information about himself beyond his identity.

But of course you are right - until we know who SN is, we can only speculate.

~~~
feral
When I hear an argument about a simpler explanation, I tend to assume there's
an appeal to Occam's razor; but I'm not sure that's useful here:

What's the chances that they took so much care to obscure their identity in
every other way, but decided to use their genuine personality? Doesn't that
seem improbable, too?

I accept the argument about it being hard to maintain two personas - but what
is enormous cognitive effort for you and me might be basic operational
security for someone else.

Bitcoin is very interesting, but I'd like if there was more caution about SN,
given it has has _potentially_ endowed them with vast resources.

------
maayank
Note that Adi Shamir is the S in RSA (i.e. he's a co-inventor and it's named
partly after him)

~~~
atmosx
That's the only reason I believe there might be some sort of story behind
this, although SN figures as way more interesting and complex figure DPR.

------
pallandt
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.':

\- the bitcoin wallet, although said to be associated with SN, has changed
ownership since its creation in 2009

\- 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

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:
[https://gist.github.com/jgarzik/3901921](https://gist.github.com/jgarzik/3901921)
It appears to have some flaws.

I don't know how accurate this statistic is, but the last Gist comment
mentions that 22% of bitcoins are held in reused addresses.

~~~
dobbsbob
Not all the early mined coins were controlled by Satoshi, Hal Finney and
other's on the crypto mailing list have many, many coins. Maybe Hal bought
some weed

According to Bitcoin developers Satoshi hasn't moved any of the coins they
know he is/was in control of. Amateur sleuths trying to unmask Satoshi have
gone through every piece of public writing and paper he's done, picked out
unique phrases and words and tried to match them up to existing mailing list
posts, forum posts and white papers with no success. Satoshi slipped in and
out of British slang as well, either on purpose for distraction from his real
identity or they were 2 people using the same account. He also referenced the
Times when mining the first block as proof he had not premined a bunch of
coins to run a ponzi/scam further indicating he may of been from the UK.

Either way he certainly is content with avoiding the spotlight while Ulbricht
loved the fame that came with being DPR.

------
gwern
It could be Finney buying drugs for his unfortunate condition:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rbd8q/study_sugges...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rbd8q/study_suggests_link_between_dread_pirate_roberts/cdlhjlj?context=3)

------
dx4100
Such utter nonsense. It's a news story about news that might be. Provide
conclusive evidence and strong correlations, please.

------
mrb
I have already suspected the original DPR (who supposedly handed Silk Road to
Ross Ulbrich) was Satoshi Nakamoto:
[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=bJqRUuX_...](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)

------
mschuster91
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!

~~~
GeneralMayhem
What better cover?

~~~
michaelt
A form of cover that doesn't get you busted by the feds and thrown in jail?

Let's say I'm an expert killer who has assassinated dozens of people without
being caught. Do I camouflage myself by doing a shitty job and getting sent to
jail? Of course not, I keep doing an expert job because I'd rather not be in
jail.

------
dsrguru
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.

[http://www.fastcompany.com/1785445/bitcoin-crypto-
currency-m...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1785445/bitcoin-crypto-currency-
mystery-reopened)

~~~
gwern
Here's a quick litmus test when someone proposes a Satoshi candidate X: "how
did $X pay for DigiRock hosting of bitcoin.org in August 2008 when DigiRock
accepts only yen and has no English language support?"

~~~
jfoster
I think that's a misleading litmus test.

Only yen could be worked around through a prepaid card, stolen card number,
gratis account, and probably other methods I'm not aware of.

Lack of English support doesn't necessarily make the person Japanese.
Westerners can learn Japanese or use translation tools.

~~~
gwern
Well, of course you can excuse it away (at the cost of adding complicating
details and raising the question of why, if they used one of your suggestions,
they later switched to the 21x more expensive Anonymousspeech hosting).

The point of the test is to quickly asses whether the person trying to dox
Satoshi has done even their basic homework and realized that it's an issue for
their theory? If they haven't even looked at the Bitcoin.org WHOIS history,
that says something important about the depth of their research into the
question.

~~~
sentenza
However, the null hypothesis here should be clearly:

The NSA is SN.

Crypto knowledge? Check.

Ability to hide identity? Check.

Cultural expertise? Check.

Everything else that could possibly be needed? Check!

~~~
gwern
No, that's not the null hypothesis. The NSA does not dabble in digital
currency, nor does it release vast complex systems with huge bugs in them

------
FreedomDealer
Silkroad was also a free mixing service.

~~~
mike_esspe
This seems to be the answer - some early adopter, maybe even Satoshi, used
Silk Road as a coin mixer.

------
RexRollman
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?

~~~
natch
He's anonymous to us, but probably not to the government. They can do
stylometric analysis of his writing and zero in on him.

------
atularora
Here is the paper - [https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/839348-silk-road-
pap...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/839348-silk-road-paper.html)

via [http://www.pcworld.com/article/2066780/did-satoshi-
nakamoto-...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2066780/did-satoshi-nakamoto-
transfer-1000-bitcoins-to-the-silk-road.html)

------
dil8
A few transactions went from one wallet to another and this is considered a
link... give me a break

EDIT I am referring to the article not the yet to be published material

~~~
jfoster
When would transactions not constitute a link?

------
rajacombinator
Sounds like the early groundwork for a false flag campaign and subsequent
crackdown...

------
kolev
The biggest joke I've heard recently. Those guys want to manipulate the market
and buy cheap Bitcoins, I bet.

------
gojomo
Perhaps Satoshi needed something from some other Silk Road seller... and this
was a desposit-to-escrow?

------
shmerl
Looks like too many "can't prove" there.

