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I think there's a pretty good chance Adam Back is Satoshi, but I don't think this is a great article. Perhaps he's rendering a careful scientific process in a w
by acjohnson55 5mo ago
I think there's a pretty good chance Adam Back is Satoshi, but I don't think this is a great article. Perhaps he's rendering a careful scientific process in a way that makes for a readable narrative, but as written, it sounds like a lot of gut feel and confirmation bias.
The biggest new contribution to the Satoshi question seems to be ad hoc stylometry. To have faith in his methodology, he should be testing it on identitying other people. If he were to show me that a repeatable methodology that doesn't require hand tuning can identify other people with low error rate, and it said Back=Satoshi, that would be much more convincing.
Like so much tech writing done by non engineers, there are many places where mundane things are made to sound remarkable (e.g. Black's thesis used C++, the "heated debate").
- mike_hearn 5mo agoIt seems very unlikely to me. I've had personal correspondence with Satoshi, and met Adam Back in person, and I can't see it. Actually I don't see how anyone involved with Blockstream could be identified as Satoshi. They never believed in what Satoshi was doing and built their whole company around the claim that Satoshi had screwed up the core of the system's design, despite that nothing about the design or its assumptions had changed. They spent years raising investor capital (why would you do that if you were rich?) specifically to build a system designed to replace Bitcoin for end users. The last time I met Adam he was trying to convince me to not continue working on Satoshi's original design, and none of his arguments were technical. Satoshi had a totally different approach.
- Thorrez 5mo ago>why would you do that if you were rich? Satoshi can't spend any of his bitcoins without tanking bitcoin's price. So Satoshi needs to find some other way to support himself. Creating bitcoin related companies is one way.
- olalonde 5mo agoHe could tank the price to $1000 and still be a billionaire. There's a much more plausible reason for why Satoshi's coins haven't moved.
- ap99 5mo agoWho would realistically not want to cash out? 1. Someone so purely interested in the tech and not money they'd give up the wealth 2. Governments, specifically the ones that don't consider a few billion to be a lot 3. Someone who's dead
- imron 5mo ago4. Someone who wants to keep all their fingers, and not meet some kind of horrifying death.
- Thorrez 5mo agoWhat's the much more plausible reason?
- FinnKuhn 5mo agoThat the person is dead would be a pretty convincing one. Or they just lost access.
- olalonde 5mo agoYep. Dead, lost access or in prison. I'm leaning towards dead.
- Thorrez 5mo agoWhy is being dead a convincing idea? How old do you think he is/was, and why would it be likely that he would die? When do you think he died? The idea that he died doesn't explain how he came out of hiding twice. Losing access by intentionally deleting the keys? That agrees with my point that he knows it would cause problems to spend them, and decided not to spend them. Losing access by accidentally deleting the keys? Would Satoshi really be that careless?
- mike_hearn 5mo agoNobody knows which coins Satoshi owns, it's just a guess for the very early coins and that guess gets progressively less accurate as time goes by. And this was a long time ago. There was no particular reason to think back then that Satoshi spending his coins would tank the price. Everyone back then was spending Bitcoins because that was the only way to build the economy. The idea that if his coins move everyone would panic is a post-2015 idea when Blockstream killed Bitcoin as a genuine means of exchange and it became all about sitting on them as a speculative "investment". But if he did want to spend he could just start from his last coins backwards.
- Thorrez 5mo agoThis [1][2][3] seems to have a methodology for identifying Satoshi's coins, mined from 2009 to May 2010. But yes, for coins mined after May 2010, he likely can spend without scrutiny. >The idea that if his coins move everyone would panic is a post-2015 idea Here are 2 people in 2013 expressing that idea: [4][5]. [1] https://bitslog.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/ https://bitslog.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-... [2] https://bitslog.com/2013/04/17/more-on-block-mining-history-1st-half-of-2010/ https://bitslog.com/2013/04/17/more-on-block-mining-history-... [3] https://bitslog.com/2013/04/24/satoshi-s-fortune-a-more-accurate-figure/ https://bitslog.com/2013/04/24/satoshi-s-fortune-a-more-accu... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5569077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5569077 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5569346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5569346
- mike_hearn 5mo agoThere's ambiguity here. When people talk about crashing the market they mean if he attempted to sell every last coin he owns for dollars all at once. Of course that would be a signal of lost confidence. What I mean is the more likely scenario of spending coins to achieve some specific goal or project.
- ap99 5mo agoI have no idea about any of this stuff - but if I were trying to hide my identity I would go out of my way to misalign my real self with my hidden identity. e.g. Pick a name that puts people on a false trail.
- cloche 5mo agoWhat are your thoughts about Satoshi's last message offering support for Blockstream? Edit: I see you addressed this elsewhere. Thanks for contributing!