

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin? - RockyMcNuts
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto-the-creator-of-bitcoin

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keiferski
_Satoshi could be sitting on a stash of roughly one million bitcoins, worth
~$120 million at today’s exchange rate._

I just love the idea of someone creating a crypto-currency in order to amass a
fortune. That's higher-level entrepreneurship, for sure.

~~~
hyperbovine
It's at least as clever as all the other questionable shit the finance guys do
to make money nowadays (HFT, CDO, etc.) I would not be surprised at all if
"Satoshi" is somebody on Wall Street. (Although (s)he seems to know a lot more
about crypto than your average quant.)

~~~
jychang
To be fair to the quants, you need a serious knowledge of CS for some of the
algos.

That probably speaks against the probability that Satoshi is a wall street
guy, though, if his coding is amateur.

~~~
emmelaich
I don't think finance software is typically very polished. Deadlines are the
enemy of quality code and finance has some of the hardest deadlines.

------
mrb
Sometimes I can't help but think that Dread Pirate Roberts is Satoshi. He
would have created Bitcoin for the ultimate goal of enabling The Silk Road:

\- Notice how Satoshi disappeared from the community in late 2010, saying he
is "moving to other projects", and The Silk Road opened in February 2011, a
surprisingly early Bitcoin adopter.

\- DPR, like Satoshi, has a financial background and relates to Austrian
economics:
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/04/29/collect...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/04/29/collected-
quotations-of-the-dread-pirate-roberts-founder-of-the-drug-site-silk-road-and-
radical-libertarian/)

\- Both DPR and Satoshi are known to prefer british spelling and expressions.

\- Both DPR and Satoshi have technical/cryptographic skillsets: they use TOR,
PGP, etc.

\- One reason for Satoshi wanting to remain anonymous would be to hide his
involvement with The Silk Road, as too much media attention on his life might
uncover he is involved in an unknown/secret project.

~~~
Aqueous
What, are you high? :)

In all seriousness, it's an intriguing idea, and you point out some
interesting parallels, but the idea of the Silk Road seems really small for
someone like Satoshi Nakamoto, given that BitCoin is a work of unusual genius
that potentially has world-changing power, and the Silk Road is about
trafficking narcotics. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I want to think the
creator of BitCoin has larger, more expansive goals in mind than getting
people high or even undermining the war on drugs.

Thinking that the creator of Silk Road is also the creator of BitCoin is like
answering the question, "Why hasn't the miner of the first million BitCoins
spent any of his currency?" by suggesting that Satoshi accidentally erased his
wallet.

Which would be hilarious. 'Fuck me,' I would imagine him saying.

~~~
mrb
Read
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/04/29/collect...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/04/29/collected-
quotations-of-the-dread-pirate-roberts-founder-of-the-drug-site-silk-road-and-
radical-libertarian/) to understand the world-changing ambition that DPR has.
The Silk Road is a _lot_ more than trafficking narcotics for DPR. To the point
that reading his thoughts in this Forbes article is what made me think he
could be Satoshi.

~~~
Aqueous
His passion is admirable, but his vision for himself and his site seems a
little grandiose. He might have world-changing ambition but Silk Road is not a
world-changing idea. BitCoin attacks the status quo at its center - our entire
system of finance, which forms the nucleus of a credit-driven economy, depends
on having a currency that is issued and regulated from a central authority.
BitCoin is a blow to state power at its core. Silk Road is just a store, or
bazaar, that takes BitCoin.

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scott_karana
> he would alternate between British and American spellings and
> colloquialisms, which could mean that he was trying to mask his nationality
> or that Satoshi is actually more than one person

Or he's Canadian :)

~~~
MacsHeadroom
This. I sometimes alternate spellings in the same sentence accidentally.

~~~
moepstar
Or really any other language - i'm German and sometime i alternate too, though
i most of the time use the British spelling.

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dsuth
Perhaps the reasons he gave are genuine - he didn't want to get stuck in the
'maintainter' role a la Linus Torvalds. He created a practical implementation
of his white paper, with resounding success, and that is the end of his
interest in it.

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not_that_noob
What's interesting to me is why Satoshi chooses to be anonymous. Most people
would want to take credit and get their turn under the spotlight.

Perhaps he can't take it because of repercussions in his physical life -
perhaps he works for a central bank!

Or perhaps he's super humble and prefers to let the work speak for itself.

~~~
dude_abides
Some possible reasons are:

\- He's just too humble to want the fame. Gavin Andresen could then be a
likely candidate.

\- Scared, maybe by what happened to Julian Assange. However, unlike
WikiLeaks, it's hard to imagine what law Bitcoin breaks.

\- He wanted to make money off it and move on. That would suggest Jed McCaleb,
who founded and then sold MtGox.

Other reasons?

~~~
hkmurakami
_\- Scared, maybe by what happened to Julian Assange. However, unlike
WikiLeaks, it's hard to imagine what law Bitcoin breaks._

A determined government could probably concoct something if it became
determined to do so.

------
16s
This is not uncommon in crypto, Truecrypt devs are anonymous as well: "The
developers of TrueCrypt have been only anonymously referred to on the site as
“The TrueCrypt Foundation” since 2010,[44] though there are potentially good
reasons related to privacy why they might have chosen to remain thus."
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truecrypt>

------
betterunix
Anyone who is looking at mathematicians, cryptographers, or security experts
is almost certainly looking in the wrong place. Everything about Bitcoin
suggests the work of a cryptography amateur/enthusiast, not an expert. Perhaps
a talented amateur, maybe a very smart amateur, but you are not going to find
the creator of Bitcoin in a research lab (at least not circa 2008; maybe the
reason he vanished off the face of the Earth was the beginning of a grad
school career, which ate into his time).

Really though, it makes no difference who the creator of Bitcoin is, nor why
he created it. All the matters is whether it lives up to its promises. It is
secure against attacks? Do the economics make sense? Those are the questions
that should be answered.

~~~
apawloski
You're begging the question pretty hard here. Why are they looking in the
wrong place?

~~~
betterunix
I already gave the answer: Bitcoin has all the hallmarks of amateur
cryptography, not the work of an expert, researcher, or professional.

~~~
mhartl
What are some of the hallmarks you see?

~~~
betterunix
No security definition, no threat model, a security analysis that only covers
one specific attack strategy the author himself came up with, the "51% attack"
being considered acceptable (despite being a polynomial time attack), no
reference to the decades of related work in secure multiparty computation or
digital cash, the blurred boundary between the protocol design and its
implementation, etc. I discussed this in great detail a few days ago:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5735993>

~~~
mhartl
Great, thanks for the reply. I'll take a look at your other comment as well.

------
dublinben
I thought the latest consensus was that Satoshi was a group of people working
together. It's much more likely than for it to be a single person.

<https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto>

~~~
icpmacdo
I would think that it would be a lot less likely for a group of people to all
stay silent on that matter though.

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DanBlake
Seems like it would be trivial for the various admins of mailing lists,
forums, newsgroups, etc.. to just see what IP "satoshin@gmx.com" posted under.

I am sure a select people know who/whom 'satoshi' is

I believe the reason for not wanting to be found out is 2 fold-

1: The answer could have a substantial effect on bitcoin prices, since such a
large portion is held by one entity. If that entity is something other than a
charismatic, reclusive japanese guy, could be weird. How would we feel if
zynga == satoshi (obviously not likely)

2: Lottery syndrome. Not wanting to risk being kidnapped or begged for money
from friends. If what is said is true, this guy is worth a serious amount of
money now.

~~~
jiggy2011
I'm guessing he would have bounced these through various proxies, tor
nodes,whathaveyou.

~~~
DanBlake
Totally possible- But theres always that chance he didnt, or that he also
stayed logged into whatever vpn on another account at the same time, etc..

~~~
kanzure
> But theres always that chance he didnt

Check the logs yourself. He was extremely careful about using tor.

<http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/>

More: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733582>

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tn13
No one has run a search for "Satoshi Nakamoto" on all japanese goverment
databases ? We might might get a subset that has some skill with math.

~~~
corysama
It's my understanding that "Satoshi Nakamoto" is pretty similar to a Japanese
"John Smith".

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wavesum
I think the important question is: Why would we need to know, and why would we
care. His/her work is done. Let Satoshi be.

~~~
krapp
Because it's a mystery involving a pseudonymous entity who might have
engineered himself a fortune, which he can't cash in on without revealing his
identity? Is the community being drawn into a long game at the benefit of a
government or corporation? Is Satoshi someone we would otherwise know, or an
otherwise unknown cypherpunk who wanted to undermine traditional economics,
and whose idea just took off? Why keep his identity a secret? What's his
agenda? What happens when we know?

I mean come on... this is practically a William Gibson novel already.

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sdfjkl
Does it matter? Clearly they prefer to stay anonymous, so how about respecting
that?

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theklub
Ok, so what is stopping someone from copying the bitcoin model?

~~~
stordoff
There are many alternative crypto-coins (most notable are Litecoin and
Namecoin). The main reasons that they don't get as much attention as Bitcoin
are, IMO, the fact that Bitcoin was first, and the network effects of the
number of people already using Bitcoin.

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fsiefken
Satoshi is European, not Asian... <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdrSP0V-KLg>

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nwzpaperman
Edmond Dantes

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dreen
I am Satoshi!

~~~
dreen
Have you guys been born yesterday?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8h_v_our_Q>

