> According to the race data, Finney competed in the “Santa Barbara Running Company Chardonnay 10 Miler & 5K,” starting at 8 am Pacific time and finishing the race at 78 minutes.
> The race, however, coincides with timestamped emails between Satoshi and one of the first Bitcoin developers, Mike Hearn.
i doubt he was crafting cron jobs to send emails when he had no idea bitcoin would get big and he had a marathon to do. tbh I think I can guess a good way to figure out who it was but I am unsure what the incentive would be, and unfortunately it would require effort.
EDIT> Am I being downvoted by people upset that I am suggesting it wasn't Hal or because of my nebulous statement? Oh nvm
My point is hubris applies to all human efforts. But even when feeling hubris you don’t know what the future holds. No one can know the importance of any of their actions in the present, and even when you embark on something you expect could change everything, no one is assured of success. In fact practical experience tells us it almost never actually happens. When someone does actually succeed it’s easy to see omniscience in their insights, and it’s arguably insightful, but only the insane believe that themselves when they set out.
And if he was more than one person, I've never seen any proof that that more-than-one person group could not also include Hearn, and that part of crafting a Satoshi pseudo-identity was to create alibis for those most likely to be suspected of being especially as those involved were highly familiar with, and created bitcoin in its decentralized-ish form precisely to avoid the fates of those centrally involved with earlier e-money products.
But no, any attempt to investigate the origins of Satoshi will be viciously attacked by the same twenty or so individuals who show up everywhere to defend this modern day hermes trismegistus mystery, which has proved infinitely useful, not to mention fun, to keep propped up.
Amusingly for the typical HN CJ, slashdot fell off my radar when Google Reader left us. I had been an avid /. reader for years, but had transitioned to reading through RSS. It went downhill during that time and I never picked it back up.
Satoshi was/is a smart man. It's quite possible that he anticipated stylometry and deliberately wrote in a deceptive dialect. Though I've also seen some forensic linguists say they can often see through that unless it's done very well, with the tells being overuse of stereotypical features of the dialect combined with a lack of more subtle indicators like what modal verbs are used, for example. Also I admit this line of "he did that on purpose" reasoning makes anything unfalsifiable when taken to the extreme
Adam Back certainly fits the profile the best. Invented Hashcash, has a Ph.D. in Distributed Systems, and is English. He's also still deeply involved with Bitcoin and has a lot of influence, which best can be seen when he successfully proposed the "speedy-trial" activation method for Taproot.
The "being in a rush" theory sounds very interesting and very plausible combined with adapting a pseudonym to avoid lawsuits.
However, if these were the two reasons behind keeping his identity secret, wouldn't Hal Finney be also the kind of person who leaves some kind of digital trace that confirms his identity as creator even after he is dead? Like automating the execution of a transaction on the genesis block or something?
Apart from wanting to take credit and glory of being creator, he must have had very interesting "war stories" to share concerning the creation of bitcoin, his feelings as he saw it grow... this would have been a very interesting memoir to share with the world.
I am wondering if he left such a document somewhere that will suddenly decrypt itself to the world along with irrefutable evidence of his invention of bitcoin.
He was critical of blockchain, because he considered a permanent register of transactions to be the antithesis of privacy. How much store you want to set by that is up to you, but my instinct says that he was sincere.
The life extension / cryopreservation gunk is something that has roots in a thought form of 'extropism' that you'll see in rationalist forums like lesswrong.
I think it's the other way around - some people saw the possibilities and formalized their thoughts as extropism. It's not the first group to have these thoughts. See Russian Cosmism, for example.
Personal conspiracy theory is that "Satoshi" was an early emergent AGI trying to figure out a way to convince maximum monkeys to hook up maximum processing power to a network. And succeeding, apparently. Where are all those processors now?[1]
[1] From early crypto? In the trash, mainly. But it ramped up production, which is what fictional "Satoshi" would want.
Given whoever is popularly identified as Satoshi is probably going to have criminals after him for extorting bitcoins and governments for facilitating money laundering, I'm ok for Craig to do the job.
Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, who was falsely accused of being the creator of bitcoin, also lived within a few blocks of Hal Finney's home. If that isn't proof enough of Hal at least being somewhat involved, I can't think of a more coincidental fact.
the funniest and most shallow reason I ever thought that Dorian was somehow involved was he literally said " Ill interview with whoever buys me lunch "
which tbh is just the kind of thing someone involved with bitcoin would say, its just funny and ironic.
> According to the race data, Finney competed in the “Santa Barbara Running Company Chardonnay 10 Miler & 5K,” starting at 8 am Pacific time and finishing the race at 78 minutes.
> The race, however, coincides with timestamped emails between Satoshi and one of the first Bitcoin developers, Mike Hearn.