Satoshi having the foresight and discipline to take careful measures that would enable him to keep his identity secret, and succeeding to do so up to this point is almost more impressive achievement of his technical skills than bitcoin.
Even back in 2009, it was difficult (impossible?) to operate online without leaving tons of digital footprint, and we can guess that for sure state-backed actors tried to identify him and probably failed. Unless of course he was a state-backed actor(s).
He's probably dead. My two top picks for who Satoshi might be are Len Sassaman (died 2011) and Hal Finney (died 2014)
There's little point in unmasking somebody who's already dead - their ability to influence future events is gone. So even if state intelligence surveys knew who it was, there'd be no benefit to unmasking it.
Looking again, he _mentions_ what he told his children, but it's written on Bitcoin Talk.
> "My bitcoins are stored in our safe deposit box, and my son and daughter are tech savvy. I think they're safe enough. I'm comfortable with my legacy." [0]
It doesn't invalidate that he created Bitcoin, but what he wrote over the years sounds much more like a devoted hobbyist who was far from extremely wealthy, for example taking a public bus to UC Santa Barbara to do his research [1]. Once afflicted with ALS, he became an avid ALS fundraiser. For someone in 2014 with 1,000,000+ BTC @ ~$500 per, and trying to be anonymous, I doubt whoever Satoshi is would have taken the path that Hal did.
I know a few people with net worths in the 100s of millions (largely early Google employees, or founders of tech companies), and that sounds exactly like them. Honestly that's exactly what a well-adjusted rich person sounds like - they are "comfortable", "safe enough", and make every effort to downplay their wealth. (In the Finneys' case, they have particular reason to be circumspect because they were swatted and extorted for Bitcoin.). Most wealthy people are very quiet about their wealth; the Trumps and Musks are exceptions that disproportionately impact peoples' perception of what a wealthy person seems like simply because they show up in the news all the time.
One probably has to be perfect - not just good with opsec - to maintain anonymity from the government. The FBI has multiple side-channels, such as agents physically tracking if you're home at your "super-secure" 7-VPN computer when your Internet persona is active online
You can be good and yet the heavy hand of the law still gets you. They got Escobar and "El Chapo" Guzmán too. And his operation was smaller than either of those fine gentlemen's.
He created truecrypt for his, well buisness. But are there any other indications, he also did anything towards cryptocoins? This is the first time I heard of this theory and so far I really doubt it. Satoshi seems to have been one tinkering alone and in peace with his concepts. Le Roux seems to have been more involved in action, too busy to create bitcoin.
in the real real far future you don't need his head, but maybe a single hair or a bone? Assuming every DNA cell keeps all memories or perhaps like a chicken running with a cutoff head maybe if his hands to be reconstructed, given enough time over a keyboard he would finally "twich" a password? Just thinking out loud...
Why do you assume state-backed actors failed to identify him?
I would guess he is probably known with a high degree of certainty to at least one nation's intelligence but that publicizing that knowledge and the documentation of it is not in anyone's interest.
I don’t think bitcoin is some sort of intelligence thing, Occam’s razor, it is probably just a dude. I mean, what was his big feat of secrecy? Writing a paper needn’t necessarily leave a big footprint.
But! Bitcoins are too clunky to threaten the federal reserve really. And, a system that is widely understood by laymen to be anonymous, but is actually pseudonymous and inherently traceable, seems like Christmas for intelligence and police organizations.
The funny thing is, crypto is actually good for the dollar.
USDT/USDC are far easier to acquire than actual USD in third world countries. There’s a separate economy built up in Africa, Phillippines, etc. that operates entirely on USDT.
You can see this in the price of USDT vs USD in these countries - USDT commands a premium.
Crypto via coins like USDT means that Nigerians increasingly want to work for USDT, not Naira. Bad for Naira, good for the USD
Tether has to be backed by USD-denominated reserves for that to work. If it's actually backed by something else (or nothing) then all that value is going somewhere other than the dollar
Silver (#8 asset in the world) is also "clunky" but it is close to being surpassed in market cap by Bitcoin (#10 asset in the world).
A large part of that value is derived from a market cap based upon the stability created by the dormant coins, like gold sitting dormant in fort knox used to stabilize the USD value.
It really does seem like an intelligent design passes Occam's razor more than "oops i conveniently formatted that harddrive then disappeared"
Hypothetically, getting those who hate "the feds" to record their transactions on a public ledger would be criminal intelligence coup even bigger than when FBI's "Encrypted Phone" platform became popular with criminals[1]. In this hypothetical, the FBI would hack/subvert/operate their own mixer service and eliminate uncooperative services, so that all money-flows are transparent to investigators.
Not all cryptocurrencies use public ledgers. Bitcoin was the first, but it was always intended to add privacy tech - see MimbleWimble.
Zero knowledge proofs and other strong privacy protections are available on more modern projects. Some ledgers are entirely dark, granting a decent anonymity set.
How many of those cryptocurrency were created by Satoshi Nakamoto, the subject of the thread's speculation? I was speculating on the why a 3LA would have created Bitcoin, specifically.
Others like Monero also have mysterious origins. I don’t think Satoshi was behind the design even in part, but it’s one theory.
I’m pointing out that even if Bitcoin was the creation, the introduction of this concept and class of data structure is much more important and will have more lasting impact.
Surely any government agency would have considered the feasibility of new alternatives with similar designs.
It’s no threat at all for the foreseeable future.
Make no mistake though, over the next decades, the core idea is an existential threat.
If a currency like Monero with further developed scaling and privacy features is able to gain a foothold in developing nations, and enough off-ramps are set up via decentralized exchanges like Bisq and through direct acceptance for goods and services, then it is difficult to see the spread stopping between nations with reasonably free Internet, especially as factions within each government will likely have some direct interest.
The US dollar will be least threatened, the longest.
Privacy features in a currency are a double-edged sword. It means that the money is very difficult or impossible to recover in the event of theft, fraud, or even user errors. It isn't a risk most people want to be exposed to.
Physical cash is typically used in face-to-face transactions, which somewhat reduces the risks. The scenarios in which a digital version of physical cash might make sense are few and far between. To suggest that such a currency could one day threaten the US dollar dominance is absurd, in my opinion.
I completely agree with you. And you're assuming that a crypto network even exists that could support that kind of transaction volume, so the reality is even more absurd.
Monero for instance is optionally transparent using view keys, which allow read access to incoming but not outgoing transactions.
As cryptocurrency already requires the safeguarding of a private key or a custodial partner doing so, and generally do not accept rollbacks on the base level, there isn’t that much added drawback to making strong privacy default.
Spitballing here… it could have been a test to see how easy they could get a digital currency into common use. The idea of a digital currency offers the Fed a lot of advantages… no money laundering, traceability, etc. it could actually advance them if well executed, not threaten them.
Does the fed employ a lot of cryptographers? I feel like people expect the U.S. gov to be omnipotent when the last 20 years have been just fumble after another
While not omnipotent, the NSA does hire a huge amount of mathematicians and has a budget in the tens of billions. Most of what they do is also behind (extremely) closed doors.
The Bretton-Woods paradigm was already in collapse at the advent of bitcoin due to the corresponding growth of the US trade deficit as the US stopped producing/exporting and began massive consumption from the east.
The USA is in a debt spiral spending $659B on interest on debt annually (13% of tax revenue) while running larger and larger deficits. This cannot really be escaped, and it's impact on inflation is becoming unavoidable.
Bitcoin? No. But if you're asking whether digital currencies (which share a lot of the same underlying characteristics) might transform the global monetary landscape, well, they already have: 11 countries have issued CBDCs, and another 130 are actively exploring them as a more convenient alternative to USD for international transaction settlements. Several of those are in advanced pilot stages. No one with serious ties to the US financial system finds this to be a laughing matter, I assure you. The dollar is by far the currency of choice in trade invoicing (more than 50% of total trade) and foreign exchange transaction volume (almost 90% of the total) globally (Moronoti, 2022). This also means that US settlement authorities and financial institutions are involved in finalising most global transactions. If two countries have CBDCs, then they in principle would have the ability to settle transactions between themselves with near-instant finality, potentially bypassing the current dollar-based system.
I think we can safely expect at least one major CBDC-based cross-border payment system to launch by the end of the year. Soramitsu is the most promising candidate IMHO. A prevailing theory is that foreign corporations that operate domestically within a country will need to create accounts with a domestic central bank for CBDC payments to work efficiently. If this becomes a reality, the status of the dollar's "exorbitant privilege" will be up for immediate dispute. Its geopolitical hegemony over global finance won't be swept away overnight, but it will suffer a major blow. Only time will tell how serious.
You don't say why a CBDC would be a more convenient alternative to USD for international transaction settlements. A CBDC is simply a digital version of an existing currency. It isn't nothing new, since bank deposits already allow digital transactions with any currency.
You're missing the point. The reason the dollar is the global currency of choice is because it offers the infrastructure for any two parties to settle a transaction. The existence of CDBCs for wholesale purposes has the potential to fundamentally change that. Central banks could directly settle transactions between themselves in local currencies via dedicated corridors that bypass the dollar settlement system. That would mean more diversification of currency pairs, with increased liquidity for currency pairs that do not include USD.
> It isn't nothing new,
It is though. The infrastructure to support cross-border payments with CBDCs is bleeding edge stuff. The term floated around in obscurity for a while, but it's only been in use since 2019 or so. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_CBDCs_by_country
The USD doesn't have a technological monopoly on cross-border payments. Before the introduction of the euro, European nations were trading with each other using their local currencies just fine.
Moreover, CBDCs are ill-suited for internation trade, or for any kind of trade, because they're cash-like. They're intended as a substitute for physical cash.
The speculative currency crises in Europe during the 90s helped drive the adoption of the Euro in the first place. It's a bit outside my ken, but I do wonder if Italians of a certain age would agree that the older system worked "just fine."
I think reasonable minds can disagree about whether CBDCs are any more or less suitable than the alternatives (which seem worse to me in some respects, and certainly are worse in others) but either way, the world's central banks are singing a similar tune in unison right now. Like it or not, the macroeconomic tailwinds favor a more decentralized approach to cross-border settlements and we'll soon have infrastructure to enable this at massive scale.
Again, that's simply not true. You can't point to a single instance where CBDC infrastructure has enabled or improved wholesale international payments that were impossible or otherwise costly to do before.
Give it until the end of the year. These systems are new. Legal and logistical frameworks are being created around them. Southeast Asia will have a streamlined import/export relationship with Japan by the end of the year. Where it goes is from there is anyone's guess, but there's a lot of momentum for this to be the first of several major events over the next 2-3 years.
I've always figured some intelligence agency figured out how to reverse SHA-256 by calculating hash collisions on a global scale while wresting some capital and power from the international banks in one move.
Still a dumb idea even if it managed to hold. One CPU one vote is it's not even as "fair" as $1 one vote, because it isn't a bare CPU that does the hashing, but the necessary power, space, cooling and network connectivity as well. The result would have been no different than if GPUs never came into the equation: people in a position to buy an extravagant share of mining resources, no matter what form factor they came in or how they approach the problem of calculating hashes, would always have had a massive and self-amplifying advantage getting started in the network, being awarded more coin bases and controlling more of the leverage over liquidity than anyone else. in the process creating the basis for a shadow banking system even more inscrutable and free from accountability than any central government or bank could hope to be.
The meme of crypto people claiming to be fighting against the central banking or currency is cynical to put it mildly.
I think you massively understate this advantage. Those with existing resources have advantages in nearly every endeavor possible.
This can only be mitigated, not prevented, and not likely in the first example of a currency outside nation state control, which was unthinkable previously. It’s a possible option for evading asset seizure or hyperinflation from a despotic government to not insignificant numbers of people already. One step at a time.
Ethereum 2.0’s proof of stake eliminates the ability of the biggest actors to stockpile and control supply of hardware, while also providing stronger security and massively reducing energy use from mining.
On its face, directly staking coins over accurate security validations makes the problem even more obvious, but the result is that the rich accelerate their ownership slower.
You may be well served by speaking with some of the very well intentioned people working on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero. From my experiences the majority of them do believe they are bettering the world, as do most who work in open source anywhere, and they continue to strive much more for that reason than any indirect personal enrichment.
The inevitable rise of GPUs and more specialized hardware was being discussed by Satoshi and others on bitcointalk around early 2010. Just my memory as a source, or you can see some discussion of emails between Laszlo Hanecz who bought the 19K BTC pizza and was GPU mining and Satoshi.
Those in China essentially have a get out out of jail free card for hacking. Just like we do for Chinese targets.
Any rich Chinese could've banked on cryptocurrency. Also, the poor in China and Russia are very poor. While the rich and middle incomes could easily afford energy prizes.
I don't know about China but Russia is a maffia state in disguise where a criminal rich club runs it with Putin. The middle class (those living in St. Petersburg and Moscow) need to be kept happy enough as a kind of unwritten deal between Putin and those people.
> Those in China essentially have a get out out of jail free card for hacking. Just like we do for Chinese targets.
What does this have to do with inventing Bitcoin? And what does it have to do with living 'anonymously over the internet'? Btw, you can try hacking into Chinese targets and getting caught, and seeing whether you face any legal repercussions.
But, what does any of what you say have to do with inventing Bitcoin?
Especially as you say, if you are rich in China or Russia, more likely than not you are on more than friendly terms with the ruling clique. So what do you need cryptocurrency for?
> Especially as you say, if you are rich in China or Russia, more likely than not you are on more than friendly terms with the ruling clique. So what do you need cryptocurrency for?
That is the conundrum isn't it. It is being marketed as some kind of liberal utopia but right now it can be used to work around the (quite massive) trade blocks. It really works both ways, but there's one group who love it either way (albeit also the more anonymous successor): criminals. What is the most criminal country in world (not relative to size)? Russia. It isn't even a country it is the Russian maffia in disguise as a country. If you you look at who benefits, it is also a deeply isolated country such as North Korea. And Bitcoin / PoW is a great method to get rid of your excess nuclear energy which is a fit for China. All have a motive.
> Btw, you can try hacking into Chinese targets and getting caught, and seeing whether you face any legal repercussions.
If I were very good at this and would enjoy it I'd work for some Western secret service. Very decent paycheck, morally on the better side of the spectrum, and well imagine having fun at work.
> The middle class (those living in St. Petersburg and Moscow) need to be kept happy enough as a kind of unwritten deal between Putin and those people.
That used to be the case, but not anymore. What are they going to do, exactly - protest on the streets? Since 2011, all that gets you is a beating and a fine (and now worse). Leave? That's economically infeasible for many who have already invested into property and can't easily unload it for reasonable money; people who thought the trade-off worthwhile have already largely left after 2022.
Until they're drafted. Then they flee, become unhappy. Putin ain't drafting there (yet). He is practicing classic divide & conquer like NKVD did during Great Terror and Holodomor.
Vader (father in Dutch) put it well in Cloud City, talking to Lando: I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
Once they are drafted, it's too late to flee. And the person being drafted does, of course, become unhappy, but again, so what? They don't have any ways to express their displeasure that affect people in power there.
It used to be that "mothers' committees" held more sway, but those have also been mostly subdued now. Thing is, once you get to a certain point, civil protest just doesn't account for much, and people there simply aren't organized enough for meaningful violent resistance - and besides, most of them live too good a life to risk their neck engaging in such.
The control in place, esp in China, allows for the ability to very well track Bitcoin. Also, what do you think Russian criminals use to stay under radar, also given sanctions? Monero seems a great candidate. Unlike its predecessor it provides anonymity.
IMO you have way too much faith in state agencies' ability to keep secrets. It's information the world would like to know, so it's a hard secret to keep. On top of that anyone with access to the keys of big wallets would be very tempted to just use them. This doesn't seem like a situation that can be kept secret by a mid-sized conspiracy. If this was a state project, how many people would have to know about it and still keep quiet, despite all the advantages of not keeping it quiet, or the risk of leaks?
It'd be tough to get three people to keep this quiet. The dozens that would have to be involved at an intelligence agency, if this is really a project that was started in one of them? The specifics would have leaked by now.
> It'd be tough to get three people to keep this quiet
Incompetence fallacy and impossibility complex. Just because something seems difficult or impossible doesn't mean it is. Especially when it's the most logical explanation. People often like to think the government is just a bunch of incompetent bureaucrats. Yet the U.S. government is the most powerful entity on earth. There's not a single reason to believe that any large number of government employees could keep a secret on the level of Satoshi's true identity.
Honestly somebody should put a bounty to be paid of course in BTC for definitively identifying Satoshi. With enough incentive I’m sure can be figured out. Recent AI improvements should be able to be used to scan all his/their writings and code.
All three good candidates for Satoshi are beyond said cryptanalysis: Sassaman and Finney are dead, Paul Le Roux is in a federal prison and it is not known to the public where, even without Bitcoins, quite a few people want him dead so the feds are not going to make it easy to get access to him.
That's silly. The fact that you don't know who somebody is says nothing about what some "state-backed actor" knows. If anything, I'm fairly confident that some people in NSA/CIA know who he is for a decade at least, and "probably" have it written in some documents that will long outlive you. Of course, this is as proofless statement as you saying that they "probably failed" to figure it out, but what you are saying basically amounts to "it is so unlikely for this to happen, so it's such a miracle it probably happened!" A more reasonable thing to say would be "it is so unlikely for this to happen, so it probably didn't happen".
yep, they absolutely use propaganda’s to achieve a scarecrow effect. Remember all the info they fed journalists about bin Laden hiding in networks of underground caves? Then it turns out he is hiding at a family members house with all his relatives?
You seem to be falling into this common trap of confusing "finding a human's body hiding offline in mountains of Pakistan" and "figuring out the name of a guy thinking he is shitposting anonymously on the internet" (and that if we assume that the "shitposting guy" was just that, and not some remarkable researcher with some very specific skill-set, and also not affiliated with any 3-letter agency in the first place — which is hell of an assumption as well).
(Also, doesn't matter, but just for the record, I don't recognize your assumption as "fair". It's not like a I deny it, it's just way too many assumptions for a discussion involving more unknowns than any real factual information at all.)
Well, the Manhattan project is a good example of something that remained secret from the public for far longer than any formula would predict, given the gigantic amount of people involved (though of course other state actors knew about it long before).
I guess it depends on your definition of "remained secret from the public". For example, Kodak figured it out pretty quickly after the first tests because the radiation particles in the atmosphere were carried from the Southwest US to their factories in Rochester, NY, and affected their film production.
If that calculation was completely wrong, how would anyone know? We never get a perfect snapshot of the world to compare with.
What that stat really says is any conspiracy involving 10+ people, if the details manages to stay secret for 20 years, will likely never come to light.
You all know Satoshi Nakamoto translates exactly to Central Intelligence... Sell all your things and invest in bitcoin. its annonymous, tho (social security number required to buy a piece of bitcoin)...
If you dig a lot you will find a footprint. There is evidence that there was a small core team and that satoshi may not be a single person, if it is, he is most likely to be Wei Dai. The other likely alternative is of course the hypothetical state-backed actor.
> There is evidence that there was a small core team and that satoshi may not be a single person
"Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead." - Benjamin Franklin
It seems highly improbable that a team of any size would have been successful at keeping this a secret for this long, let alone not wrestle for control of vast BTC wealth.
I have a pet theory that the smart people at the NSA are aware that politicians with 4 year terms aren't effective at long term financial planning. The current debt situation coupled with the last ~30 years of mostly loose monetary policy has set the US up for serious problems if it doesn't come up with another world-changer like the ICE, electric light, or internet. Hence, Bitcoin is a hedge industry could embrace against a failing dollar.
I know the US isn't solely or originally responsible for those, but boy it sure ran the ball a long distance.
As far as the US government is concerned, this primary effect of Bitcoin and other crypto is a weakening of their ability to enforce sanctions and prevent money laundering.
If Bitcoin was a government program, it probably wasn't the US government. I'd guess North Korea, Iran, Russia, etc. One of the countries heavily bothered by US-led sanctions, or at least one that doesn't already have an important ~global currency to disrupt.
It seems to have grown mostly in the English-speaking world to start with, but that doesn't seem like a fatal flaw of my theory.
Tor was created to allow contacting people securely from within restrictive regimes, wasn't it? Doesn't seem like the same thing to me. The US has a history of free speech advocacy, not of encouraging others to be able to spend money freely.
It's also a big government though, it is quite possible that some part would have driven something like Bitcoin for its own reasons. It just doesn't strike me as very likely compared to the alternatives.
Most likely, in my estimation, is still probably it being started by non-government to be clear.
I'm pretty sure the US can already do both, and that neither of those would be easier with a US backed cryptocoin.
Literal American cash dollars (which tend to work everywhere, even anti-American regimes) under the table would be more secure. But then assets in other countries are probably just paid through shell companies in those countries with local currency or something.
On the other hand, if they were Wei Dei, they wouldn't exactly say "Ah yes of course, I wrote this paper but don't use that name, use Satoshi" but they would of course say "Oh I didn't know, I'll put a reference to it in my paper".
I won't agree... I think it was much easier in 2009 to operate online completely anonymous. The video surveillance was not prevalent – just pick some crowded places with free wifi randomly, don't use a cell phone, wear some sunglasses and a surgical mask, use a clean generic browser agent, use a usb-stick linux distro which will not be able to save anything on the hard drive and have some hacked proxies in another parts of the world ready to entangle your traffic routes - state actors back then would be scratching their heads forever trying to solve such a case.
with skimmed cards bought in disguise for cash from a local hotel receptionist, of course...
satoshi understood well that the centralised state-backed global payment systems are the strongest rivals to the true independence of a human being, so invention of bitcoin was an obvious move
Well, one of the theories I fancy is that we know that Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto worked on a classified defence project, now it is almost impossible that he was the creator of btc, however there is a chance that a group of security service hackers who interacted with him while he worked there were inspired by this eccentric persona and thus decided to adopt his name as a joke when they were thinking of made-up moniker.
Honest inquiry here - What I don't understand is how people think the identification of Satoshi is "bound to happen". What did the person do wrong, exactly?
Based on how I understand it, if the person did nothing wrong by inventing Bitcoin, no investigation will occur and no judge will sign off on a search warrant to get the ID data. No private investigator will be able to obtain the data either, as ISPs wouldn't just dish out private info like that without a warrant.
Did the inventor of Bitcoin do something wrong to allow for a judge to violate their privacy in a court case? That's the only way I see the info getting out, but is there a crime to allow that situation to arise?
What other (legal or illegal) path is there to identify a person who posted something online?
The space has moved past this risk for a lot of reasons, to start. And it’s hard to understand I think in light of modern (relative to pre-2018/19) widespread mainstream adoption.
But, a long term protection for BTC when it was smaller and tbh anyone’s guess how it would turn out (still is IMO), was: who are you going to haul into senate hearings, court, cryptography export control violations, whatever over BTC?
This happened ample times in the recent past before BTC with digital money attempts and cryptography projects. It’s happening now with mixers on btc and ethereum. It was a real risk to BTC in its own way.
With BTC then and now, there was no real leader though. There were important core devs and industry leads, but no one held true sway like, say, Vitalik did with eth early days.
So it wasn’t so much a firm “did something wrong” risk for BTC’s founder, but more of a concern that the US govt had taken very heavyhanded measures against many similar projects to BTC. As there was no one to target in BTC’s case, this protection played a large role in its early push into staying power.
Also going to color this with CIA had the lead dev at the time visit them to discuss it in 2011. So there was certainly some real sustained attention to it from the start.
Sounds like this person was really smart to begin with. High-level societal awareness caused them to choose the private route, and focus on releasing something for the greater good.
I wouldn't be surprised if this person never even took a single bitcoin for themselves, other than the ones used for code testing purposes. That would create another avenue for people to come after them if it became public that they hoarded some of the Bitcoin for themselves.
This. Maybe, Satoshi saw where it was going, knew it had wings, didn’t want to be the elephant’s plaything in some senate hearing, and bowed out. Sometimes people make things because it’s the right thing to do. Other times people make things because they are experimenting and seeing what sticks. This was a case of both. The right idea, at the right time, without hubris, and without someone to blame or throw in court if the experiment fails.
Satoshi could have chosen a 0 BTC subsidy in the blocks he mined. Or he could have burned all the BTC he mined. But he chose to do neither, leaving himself as the biggest BTC owner ever.
Other coins have been designed in a way where the founders can only obtain coins by mining them in very small quantities or buying them on the open market (mostly by fixing the block subsidy forever).
When in 2011 ? You seem to mean that it was unknown by then, but it wasn't : 2011 was pretty much the year when it blew up into the public consciousness, spreading from the likes of Slashdot and Ars Technica into more generalist publications (also causing its first - or was that 2nd? - bubble popping) :
(I love how I picked it randomly, and the first two subtitles are "Bitcoin and its mysterious inventor." and "It’s not clear if bitcoin is legal, but there is no company in control and no one to arrest.")
I know what you’re getting at but I disagree with the analysis and I’ll try to frame what I mean, which is somewhat the opposite.
I mean the ‘11 visit is indicative of serious attention paid to by serious people very early on relative to the rest of crypto’s history. As in, the founder was right to be cautious.
“Early on” in this case means that outside of tech pubs and curiosity pieces due to the compelling founder mystery, the space was treated as a joke by and large. Like watch Banking on Bitcoin, and imagine trying to convince critics of it at that time that ETFs, crypto aide to Ukraine, 3x nation state adoptions, custody teams at big banks, and so on were all coming. I would just completely disagree if you argued this wasn’t the theme then. So yes, 2011 and intel agency interest is quite early on.
For example, it’s taken 15 years to get tangible regulatory clarity which arguably just starting finally with the ETF.
this is like winning lotto ticket but not cashing it . anyone in theory could have read the article or related ones and bought some, but you would needed to hold
I hear your point and it's a valid one. Consider the recent case of Tornado Cash and the Open Source Is Not A Crime movement. Two individuals were arrested for developing open-source code on GitHub. Just last week, GoFundMe shut down the Tornado Cash legal defense crowdfunding. This suggests that the state is more interested in protecting itself from individuals rather than defending their rights. This could potentially set a precedent where inventors or developers of decentralized technologies could be targeted, even if they've done nothing inherently wrong. If interested you can learn more here: https://wewantjusticedao.org/
Oh this is bullshit and you know it. Another example of "we didn't call it a security so it's not a security"
They weren't arrested for the code. They were arrested for actively participating and profiting off money laundering with North Korea being a customer.
Zero-knowledge proofs are different from public ledgers. That's where the issue comes in to play. The Treasury Department has already given guidance that cryptocurrency mixers fall under Know Your Customer laws and the Bank Secrecy Act, and are required to know who exactly is using their services and how.
It's not "Criminalizing Open Source". You live in a society with laws. Obfuscating classic financial products with tech jargon worked for the first half of the decade.
Y'all are just mad it doesn't work anymore and claim "You just don't understand the technology. You haven't issued guidance on specifics of crypto currency. You can't use hundred year old laws"
Yes, you can use 100 year old laws. At the end of the day, the financial shenanigans of most crypto, exchanges, and tokens are fundamentally the same things that have already been regulated. You just have new words.
Tornado Cash is a protocol which can be used by both good and bad actors. Saying TC was responsible for bad actors laundering their crypto through the protocol is like saying auto makers are responsible for car crashes or Bob Kahn is responsible for all the illegal activities on the internet.
The technology behind Tornado Cash could also be used for instituting something like truly fully anonymous group surveys (such as those employee surveys big companies always ask you to take that they claim are "anonymous")
It doesn't have to be used for money laundering, and even if using it to move funds anonymously, that doesn't mean you're money laundering. There are good reasons to not want individuals and state actors whose jurisdiction you're not under to track your financial movements, even if you are reporting your income accurately with your own government.
> even if using it to move funds anonymously, that doesn't mean you're money laundering
The whole point of tornado cash is to "pool" funds to obfuscate who owns what. If your funds get "pooled" with funds from a criminal enterprise, then you become an accessory to that crime. Good luck using your hypothetical to convince a court otherwise.
"I didn't ask where the (other) money came from" is no defense.
“ In August 2022, the U.S. Department of the Treasury blacklisted the service, making it illegal for US citizens, residents and companies to use.” [0]
Regardless of how you feel about it, you can’t deny that they were doing something illegal under US law, and a consequence of that is that the Feds can come down on you, even if the law seems ad hoc and unfair.
> ISPs wouldn't just dish out private info like that without a warrant.
ISPs routinely sell such information for money en masse. Police departments are a major buyer, but also ad agencies and others. Plus, bribing a low level employee for access to such records, or directly infiltrating the ISP to get access yourself, is child's play to any determined group.
It is extraordinarily naive, especially in a post-Snowden world, to think that any and all information available to a private company is not also available to, at least, spy agencies of the parent state.
> Did the inventor of Bitcoin do something wrong to allow for a judge to violate their privacy in a court case? That's the only way I see the info getting out, but is there a crime to allow that situation to arise?
This feels like wrong framework/approach. Fundamentaly question here: “is it worth it for somebody?” Economists path to an answer: If for somebody[3], profit[1] of identifying satoshi outweighs the cost[2], it will be done.
[1] profit in very abstract sense. E.g. elimination of (perceived?) threat, aquisition of credible threat to other enemies, political points, money, making an example for others, showing off skills.
[2] “cost” is also used in very abstract sense. E.g. Favor from a known(or compromised) judge, man hours dedicated by FBI/MI6, money, negative press budget after “bending” some rules, risk of getting caught by supriors/underlinglins/press/constituents.
[3] “somebody” - to no surprise - can be anybody/anything. E.g. A corporation, a government, maybe single branch or department, maybe sole individual able to use his government position for personal gain, an employee of ISP, a blockchain historian, most likely Satoshi’s ex.
Important to note: both individuals and governments do break the law when they think it is necessary.
I find at least two credible incentives to find satoshi:
- bitcoin can be used to lounder money, circumvent financial sanctions, so governments want to stop that and make example of it.
- Satoshi, has 1 000 000 bitcoins. That’s a lot of money. a) banal roberies are done for far less. b) CIA or similar might want to know who wields this much resource, friend or foe (especially if its value would grow even more)
How Satoshi can be uncovered I have no idea, but the story of Silkroad owner shows, that minor slipups can be revealed after number of years.
It only takes one person at an ISP to steal and leak the data. I mean, an IRS employee leaked the president's tax returns and is currently in federal prison for it. I imagine the stakes are much lower for just stealing some IP address assignment data from an ISP archive(if such an archive exists).
> as ISPs wouldn't just dish out private info like that without a warrant
ISPs regularly sell private data to the highest bidder. Similarly with payroll providers and whatnot (a non-trivial fraction of my paystubs -- not just salary, but withholding, exempt tax status, ... -- are available to anyone with a few dollars; historically, it _seems_ like the only buyers have been employers trying to see if their salary offers aligned with my expectations).
They sell "anonymized" data, not just "aggregated". The only missing link is tying that back to a real person (i.e., they haven't solved differential privacy; they've just given the illusion that they're not selling personal data). Tying it back to a real person is easy though because the non-anonymized fields (age, gender, salary, zip-code, ...) are uniquely identifying for most individuals and are available for sale tied back to a real human from other sources which you can fuzzily join the ISP data into.
It's similar to how bitcoin transactions (before mixers and whatnot) were de-anonymized. You have the secret information (an identity), the public information (transaction history), and you're able to fuzzily join that public information to other public sources containing the secret information to also have secret information tied with the original "anonymous" source.
Just to re-emphasize, because I think it's really poorly understood: most "anonymized" data is a few additional data points away from being re-identified.
Data re-identification was already happening in 2006 (just one example below). And now there's exponentially more data available to use for this purpose.
>We apply our de-anonymization methodology to the Netflix Prize dataset, which contains anonymous movie ratings of 500,000 subscribers of Netflix, the world’s largest online movie rental service. We demonstrate that an adversary who knows only a little bit about an individual subscriber can easily identify this subscriber’s record in the dataset. Using the Internet Movie Database as the source of background knowledge, we successfully identified the Netflix records of known users, uncovering their apparent political preferences and other potentially sensitive information.
Yes you can, companies have deals with ISPs for individual real-time mobile and home browsing data. If you pay enough it has real names, otherwise it has person id and household id along with other data that makes it easy to associate with the real person or household.
American ISPs injected tracking codes into their user’s HTTP traffic so they could get paid by advertisers. I would not speak in absolutes about that, especially because anonymizing data is a hard problem which even we’ll-intended people have made mistakes with.
The USG seems pretty intent on implementing KYC across the entirety of the financial system, so it wouldn't really surprise me if they aimed to identify wallets holding large (say, $100 million USD or more) amounts of Bitcoin.
Would this not be self reported by wallet owners? Because if each transaction uses a unique wallet address, funds are very difficult to connect to an owner. Until they’re connected to a sale to fiat at least?
Dark sarcasm take: there's a large volume of early bitcoin that may or may not be lost forever. The risk of addresses that have gone dark a long time ago lighting up again must have a big influence of any bitcoin evaluation that is at least in part based on reason. Fossilized coins could hugely change the supply/demand dynamic. The documented death of a person believed to be Satoshi would significantly shift that risk assessment. Nobody would know wether the person took meaningful keys to their grave or not, but the risk equation would contain one scenario less than before in the category of old coin flood.
Idolization of Satoshi is strong. For that reason alone, if I were him/her, I would disappear. The work is self-evident and the idea a dime a dozen. The execution of it and the fact that it was accepted is what we should be idolizing. Which is exactly what happened. BTC became a thing and was no longer an idea. I reject anyone claiming to be Satoshi because Satoshi would never claim to be Satoshi. ;)
That's why I hope the truth comes out. If say, Satoshi is Len, then Satoshi is no longer a god. He's a regular dude, that suffered like many people and tragically took his own life. There's a lot to unwrap there.
Maybe, we are better off NOT knowing. Having closure could mean the end of BTC. It could mean the end of a lot of things. It could also be beginnings, no doubt. However, like Schrödinger’s cat, it’s best if it’s kept in a state of quantum entanglement.
I think people who follow / read up on the thing have a pretty good idea who it is but as you say he didn't really do anything wrong. Reasons for anonymity include not having criminals try to extort you and maybe some government having a go over money laundering or people suing for this of that so I think people with a good idea stay quiet to respect Satoshi's desires.
I've got a theory he may come out and donate to a charitable foundation when he's old and near the end.
My understanding is conspiracy people want to know if it was an alphabet agency that developed bitcoin to push a new world order of cashless currency. Or a new way to move money around anonymously and make it easier for governments and their agencies to stay anonymous.
> There are donors I can tap if we come up with something that needs
> funding, but they want to be anonymous, which makes it hard to actually
> do anything with it.
Satoshi regularly took two spaces after a period. He uses vocabulary tied to British
There is a famous British cryptographer called Adam Back, who is also the inventor of the proof of work method laid out on the paper “hashcash”. He also leaves two spaces after a period (or used too)
I don’t think it really matters who created it. If you read the political story of bitcoin things look a lot clearer.
“The Blocksize War: The Battle Over Who Controls Bitcoin's Protocol Rules” is a good entry point
> Satoshi regularly took two spaces after a period.
So did I, for a long time, because I was taught that way in typing class. And so were millions of other people. It's how it was usually done on typewriters. It supposedly made the text easier to read.
It has fallen out of fashion now. I eventually switched to one space once I realized things were going that direction. I'm not sure if I had switched by 2009.
So I think this just tells you that Satoshi is probably old enough to have been taught the old rule.
I will say, I did enjoy reading abriosi's assumption, though. As I get older I get more aware of the things I just "took for granted" that everyone knows (because nearly everyone in my generation does know it) are really just generation-specific.
Like when I learned most kids can't read cursive anymore. Or that, for a long time, my use of "emoji noses", :-), really dated me (and I still think it looks better with a nose than without!) So I admit I had a similar chuckle with the idea that putting two spaces after a period was a unique characteristic! Even well into the PC era, 2 spaces was the norm before proportional fonts became widespread. And I still had a heck of a time moving to a single space because it just looked so weird to me.
Adam Back is far too jealous of Satoshi inventing Bitcoin. He put, “Bitcoin is HashCash extended with inflation control” in his Twitter profile for years after he got into Bitcoin after initially dismissing it when contacted by Satoshi. Back definitely isn’t Satoshi.
Yeah, there are many, many reasons why Back is not and cannot be Satoshi. These emails also provide more evidence that Satoshi was what would later be called a “Big Blocker” in favor of on-chain scaling and minimal tx fees set by nodes independently (though likely converging). Back is famously a Small Blocker who employed all the major Small Blocker devs with Blockstream, which ended up effectively controlling Bitcoin Core. Thankfully, we still have Bitcoin Cash following Satoshi’s intended path for scaling.
Even if this is correct (which it probably is) it doesn't matter because bch is worthless because it doesn't have the name bitcoin. Whoever controls bitcoin core controls the meaning of the word "bitcoin" so if the bch people never find a way to wrest back control from the blockstream people then this whole thing is just irrelevant. History is written by the victors, etc
That perspective is valid, but it’s not mine. BCH is bigger than Bitcoin circa Satoshi’s days already. I’m honestly not too concerned about it. The Bitcoin that I became interested in still exists. It just isn’t called BTC/“Bitcoin” anymore.
There are, but SV and ABC (now called eCash/XEC) also made departures from Bitcoin that I feel are pretty significant:
BSV: completely removed any concept of a tx spam cap and encouraged use of its blockchain for random data storage. Neither of these are things Satoshi supported. Its spiritual leader is also a charlatan.
XEC: changed both the mining algorithm and added in a "dev tax" on block rewards. The dev tax in particular is something I don't imagine Satoshi would have supported, or he would have added it himself from the start.
Bitcoin SV is the Craig Wright-backed crypto that is pretty different from Bitcoin, and is only "following Satoshi's intended path" if you actually believe that hack is Satoshi
I learned on a PC, and we were taught that way initially also. I still think it makes sentences easier to read, so still do it. Though usually on mobile it's .nn because that's where my thumb always wants to land.
Growing up we had DB Cooper and Deepthroat - interesting and compelling stories but those guys are famous only for being anonymous. They didn’t really do anything special.
"Banksy" is now a group of artists, but the original is believed to be Robin Gunningham. He is named as a co-defendant in a lawsuit against Pest Control (the company that sells and validates Banksy art).
His identity has been known for quite some time. His first name is Robin, and he used the alias Robin Banks for a while, which eventually became Banksy.
But also Banksy is something of a collective effort, with people like 3D from Massive Attack apparently occasionally collaborating.
Are all of the digital fingerprints created by Satoshi (emails and posted code) completely untraceable, with no archives of domains, IP addresses, access logs, etc., still in existence that might identify where he was logging in from?
Last I read the domain registration for Bitcoin.org (I think) is the main exposure point.
But, what you raised is why I don’t buy they haven’t been ID’d. Digital fingerprints across multiple forums, and platforms, the logs to find a way in are there somewhere.
I think you’d have to factor in Satoshi’s opsec measures though vs taking them at their word at being bad at Linux, consider SN displayed very capable opsec in other forums.
Len had significant time and topic correlations to many/basically all iirc of the feeder research and projects that clearly fed into BTC. SN also went offline around the time Len passed. Those two factors plus the related details sealed it for me.
Edit - like if I was known to research under Szabo and Finney (iirc) right around the same time BTC launched, was known to advocate to peers to launch controversial open source under pseudonyms, and so on, I’d probably wrap my public persona under “BTC sucks” and my SN persona under “idk linux well,” and so on. Seems an obvious step to take.
I don't think you can fake being blind to unix style when writing c++. The c++ style that grew out of the windows world is kind of unique.
(Although I personally am both a longtime enthusiast of unix-like OSes and a former MS employee, so I am familiar with both ... But I find that to be kind of rare.)
>I think you’d have to factor in Satoshi’s opsec measures though
Lying about trivial and mundane stuff is a wildly hard thing to maintain over any period of time and, for long-term opsec, more likely to cause issues than not.
Being "linux capable" or not is mundane and vague enough (as well as applicable to enough people) that there isn't really any gain in lying about it but it adds risk in the case that you slip up in your maintaining of that lie 10 years down the road.
There are much more effective ways to resist being identified, which are also easier to maintain long-term.
Well, a lot of other effective things were done as well as you say.
For me, comes down to that I disagree that the creator of one of the most consequential tech break through that hits at the core of national sovereignty and control didn’t think of a lot of angles to this. Early Cypherpunks, of which SN was certainly one, were a pretty insane/intense crew in these areas.
And to your point about the difficulty of maintaining trivial deceptions long term, well Len passed pretty soon after the initial years.
I'm not saying it wasn't thought about. If anything, I'm saying the opposite.
When you think about it long enough, you realize that many of the 'little lies' carry more risk than they are worth. Lying about being "linux capable" falls into that category.
>And to your point about the difficulty of maintaining trivial deceptions long term, well Len passed pretty soon after the initial years.
I was speaking more generally about opsec and lies which aren't worth the trouble and increased risk.
Specific to your comment: If Len knew they would die soon after, there is less incentive to lie about little things like linux capability. If they didn't know they would die soon after, they would care about the long-term opsec.
All interesting points. I think I disagree with the last part due to my original post - nobody knew how this would turn out, but those involved knew projects like this consistently attracted serious State attention.
B/t protect the protocol by trying every possible angle against this sort of “adversary” (which, here in 2024, seems to have worked), versus cutting corners, the comprehensive nature of SN’s opsec seems to imply it’d show up in a lot of small ways like lying about Linux. Analysis of the codebase also had similar findings about attention to detail (“thought of everything” sort of difficulty regarding appsec).
Overall, there’s a good write up on Len as SN worth digging into if the topic is interesting. I also think the ‘11 New Yorker piece got close to the truth.
>versus cutting corners, the comprehensive nature of SN’s opsec seems to imply it’d show up in a lot of small ways like lying about Linux.
I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself poorly, or if we're maybe just speaking past each other, or I'm not understanding you.
You're saying that not lying about linux capability would be "cutting corners".
I'm saying that not lying (in this specific situation) would be the better opsec, and that anyone serious about opsec against government-level adversaries would not bother lying about such a mundane detail because it is all risk with no benefit to opsec. This concept was taught to me at a previous job where the adversaries were of the same magnitude as governments, and I'm confident that anyone seriously into the opsec/prviacy "scene" would concur.
Satoshi was, obviously, careful about opsec. Therefor I do not think they would lie about such a trivial and vague detail such as saying someone else is more linux capable than they are, because it would be a risk to lie about it compared to not lying.
Not really. He's already in his fifties and faces 20 years in US prison, and then he will probably be deported to the Philippines to spend the rest of his life in prison. I imagine if he had access to billions he would he would be paying mercenaries to bust him out.
I’ve read the various write ups, and iirc the New Yorker piece and who/the group they pointed and a write up on Len seemed to make the most sense. Fun area, been a while since I dug into it.
Very few projects are created truly anonymously. I believe the Bitcoin creator had a real motive to stay anonymous, and a practical use case that was driving him to make Bitcoin eg transferring large amounts of illegitimate wealth internationally and outside of the banking system.
there’s pretty clear documentation on the motivations for why it was made, but I suppose it could be duplicitous and hard to ever verify one way or the other unless SN wallets became active again.
I know it sounds utterly morbid, but has anyone proposed the conspiracy that Len was "suicided" after his identity was identified by a very shady -- possibly state-backed -- actors . This guy was a walking bag of cash at that point and people have been killed for far less.
yup, agree, also looking how Len writes, he is definitely not Satoshi. You can see on his twitter(Len) - https://twitter.com/lensassaman that he is quite punctual, ie. sentences end with periods, quotation is accurate. What gives it away is every sentence he writes on twitter is one space after the period, Satoshi is 2 spaces every single time. Also seeing the same thing for Hal Finney(https://twitter.com/halfin), so my deduction is neither of them is Satoshi.
PINE (the mail client) had a ^J keyboard shortcut to justify the lines. It's been a long time since I used it, but I seem to recall that it would insert double space after period when you hit that key. It might even have been possible to set it up to auto justify on save/send. I suspect that's why a lot of old (plain text) email had the double space after period and perhaps still does in OSS circles.
I think the default vim justification worked that way too. Around this time I went through a phase of bloody-mindedly using Mail/mailx and vi on OpenBSD while still sending mail through my ISP's SMTP and using fetchmail to grab it through POP3. I would not at all be surprised if cypherpunk types were doing the same thing, even if their main desktop or laptop was Windows and they used single space after period for non-email communication.
Edit to add: I just looked up fmt(1) manpage[0] and it specifically mentions using it to format mails, and that the default is two space after period.
I don't really have a theory, just sharing my experience growing up being taught to use two spaces, then in the early 2000s consciously adjusting my writing style back to one space, then having my plaintext emails still end up with two spaces anyway.
It's interesting that a document written in a WYSIWYG word processor would have two spaces because I think what originally got me to switch to one was word processor auto corrects removing the extra space, or at least putting blue squigglies in during the grammar check.
I guess my feeling is that although this might be an indicator of authorship, it's not necessarily a smoking gun one way or the other.
There’s a great write up on Len that digs into this style of analysis and others, and that’s what sold me. Worth reading if it the topic interests you, it’s linked elsewhere here I think! Lots of fun spacing, timezone to forum posts analysis, who worked and researched with who…
Well, repeating whitespace. Single whitespace still has significance. If you have two display: inline-block <div> elements, it will make a difference if you add a space (or three million spaces) in between.
Len was a Macbook user, but he would not have done Bitcoin on his personal laptop. It's much more likely he used available PCs in a computer lab on the campus he studied/worked at, which were likely Windows machines.
It's also been shown Satoshi (and Len's) activities aligned and they overlapped with a school/academic year.
Fun fact, he was experimenting with email based image uploads on flickr. That was around the time Satoshi suggested they build an image hosting site that accepts Bitcoin.
It's not a leap to assume Len's brain made the following cypherpunk leaps:
remailer (anonymous email) -> image upload by email -> pay via semi-anonymous crypto currency
Len's own bio says, "I have a very strong interest in the real-world applicability of my work."
Satoshi stepped away from Bitcoin in 2010 and handed over the project to the maintainers.
Len started posting about Bitcoin in 2010 (post Satoshi handing the project over).
It seems to me, if Len was Satoshi, he grew distant from the project. Maybe it wasn't the cypherpunk utopia he envisioned. Maybe the wikileaks and silkroad issues weren't what he wanted to enable. Perhaps he wanted to distance himself further from the project.
My understanding is around the time SN left correlated to around the time Len’s mental health escalated. That noted, RIP/don’t mean to crassly speculate about what sounded like a talented and difficult life.
Timezone-wise it'd make the most sense if he was somewhere in the US, since he almost never posted between 05:00 and 11:00 GMT. That'd be between 00:00 and 06:00 New York time.
It's a mechanism by which the CIA(or others!) could pay operatives covertly.
I'm pretty sure i read this like a decade ago, but to me it makes sense. Especially given that numbers stations apparently blared out orders into the late 1900s.
When HTML is rendered, multiple normal white space characters collapse into one, e.g. if you write "<p>Hello it's me</p>" it will be displayed in a browser as "Hello it's me". The source code tells the whole truth.
Yeah, I've always been surprised[1] when people come out claiming to be Satoshi but ignore this very blatant writing style in their own texts. I haven't really interacted that much with them online and both the double spaces and the British spellings struck out to me and a few others years ago.
I learned to do it because old-school unix vi would identify your sentences better for sentence-based moves if you had 2 spaces after the period. I'm actually trying to unlearn it now because you don't need it for any kind of vim/neovim and I read on some ultrapedantic typesetting website that it's wrong for some reason I don't quite remember now.
In any case it's definitely not specifically American (neither am I) and all the other "forensics" that people are trying based on vocab etc are somewhat of a stretch also. eg non-Americans use "gotten" non British people use "British" English (eg people from Ireland or from former British colonies for the most part) non-Americans use "ize" sometimes for spellings (I could never be bothered to learn the few exceptions needed to spell "ize/ise" words correctly in the British style and worked enough for American companies who wanted US spelling as a house style for my personal spelling to be even remotely consistent and certainly not indicative of where I am from.
As a British person, despite having been taught that the '-ise' suffix is 'proper' English, I have made some effort to unlearn this habit, as it was never really based on any etymological roots anyway. Here's what Wiktionary has to say about it[1]:
Many English verbs end in the suffix /aɪz/. Historically, this has been spelled -ize on words originating from Greek (for example baptize, Hellenize), while -ise has been used, especially in -vise, -tise, -cise and -prise, on words that came from French or Latin roots (for example surprise, supervise). In the 19th century, it became common in the United Kingdom (due to French influence)... to use -ise also on words that had historically been spelled -ize (hence baptise, Hellenise). However, the... Oxford English Dictionary continue to use the spelling -ize on Greek words, and -ize has always been the spelling used in the United States and Canada on such words.
The whole debate becomes rather moot when it is considered that Ancient Greek didn't use the Latin script, so both '-ize' or '-ise' would have looked distinctly foreign to a Greek author two thousand years ago. Horace so succinctly noted that "Captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought civilisation to barbarous Latium", but he might have been a little less glowing if the orthography of Greek loanwords was as heated a debate in Rome as it is in contemporary Britain!
Emacs uses the presence of double spaces after periods as a marker that that particular sequence of text is the end of a sentence. It doesn't insert them by default, but rather interprets their insertion in a particular way.
See: sentence-end-double-space, a variable, and sentence-end, a function, both defined in ‘paragraphs.el’.
Other editors made this same interpretation of existing, common practice.
I didn’t think double spaces after a full stop is an American thing. We were taught that in the 70s back when typewriters were still a thing. And I can’t break the habit today.
I was taught typing on electric typewriters in junior high, and yes 2 spaces after a period.
Which is strange, because my first typing experience was on Apple IIe's in grade school. I don't recall any typing instruction back then, so probably my double space habit comes from the electric typewriter instruction.
Dr.[space]Pepper is a soft drink.[space][space]This is a new sentence. Actually, "Dr Pepper" doesn't use a period so the point is void, but there's definitely some potential semantic (and display) differences between the periods in (eg) N.A.S.A. and the periods at end of a sentence. Not quite as straightforward as you might think.
The books go into it, and LaTeX has \. for periods that are not sentence-stops (there's even more, as word-breaking and line-breaking come into play, as you don't want to end a line with Dr. when it's part of a name, etc.
The usage of British English as an identifying factor seems ridiculous to me. Faking such a thing is extraordinarily low-hanging fruit even for a bumbler. Letting slip some regional red herring is quite literally the easiest misdirection I can think of)
He's also fairly inconsistent. He occasionally uses -ize endings, e.g. "realize". He also uses some language that is more prevalent in North American English, e.g. "sucks", "gotten", "chump change" and others.
Someone attempting to use British English to obscure their identity would know to use words like "maths" and "flat", as he did; not as many people however are aware that British English doesn't (typically) feature the word "gotten", which he used on multiple occasions. To me, this lends to the theory the BrE was a misdirection.
(As an aside, he's inconsistent in some other things, like "e-mail" versus "email", "TOR" versus "Tor", and "double click" versus "doubleclick".)
> In the letter, he gave the names of three KGB agents secretly working for the FBI: Boris Yuzhin, Valery Martynov, and Sergei Motorin ... Hanssen was recalled yet again to Washington, D.C., in 1987. He was tasked with studying all known and rumored penetrations of the FBI to find the man who had betrayed Martynov and Motorin; this meant, in effect, that he was charged with searching for himself.
Is there a website listing people that Satoshi definitely could not be? That it seems would be more useful to our evergreen "Who is Satoshi" discussions.
I love reading this stuff. 2010 is when i found out about bitcoin and wanting to learn about it was what took me from someone who played around on linux to someone who could write software and then ended up finishing a CS degree after.
Reading this reminds me of what I originally loved so much about the tech scene at the time. I haven’t been able to find that spark for a long time now unfortunately. Maybe im just looking in the wrong place but i feel it is hard to find another community like the early bitcoin one.
> To think about what a really huge transaction load would look like,
I look at the existing credit card network. I found some more
estimates about how many transactions are online purchases. It's
about 15 million tx per day for the entire e-commerce load of the
Internet worldwide. At 1KB per transaction, that would be 15GB of
bandwidth for each block generating node per day, or about two DVD
movies worth. Seems do-able even with today's technology.
So Satoshi would have increased the block size by now.
There's already far more text written by him (as well as code), and there have been run comparisons of it against all the seriously proposed candidates.
A good writer can probably change his/her demeanor and style in writing when changing personas. I'm sure it's hard work, but I'm also sure that practice makes it possible -- at least for some gifted people. It's also possible that Satoshi isn't a single human being, but an organization that can dedicate a lot of effort to this sort of thing.
Anything is possible, but not everything is equally possible. I consider it most likely that bitcoin was developed by the 3-4 people who still worked on digital cash schemes after Chaum's scheme failed in 1998. Of those, Nick Szabo (with British spellcheck) is the strongest candidate for being the one who held the Satoshi keys.
As a Canadian who was raised on British English, I seamlessly switch between British and American English when interacting with clients from the US, England, and Canada. This flexibility in language is quite natural to me. Furthermore, for someone who meticulously conceals their identity, adapting in such a manner would likely be effortless and unremarkable.
"gotten" would be less unusual for a Scottish person, although it is usually used in the context of "ill-gotten [gains]" it does crop up now and again outwith that.
The article in the comment you responded to contains the following information:
"Since COSIC was based in Leuven, Len was living in Belgium during Bitcoin’s development. This is salient given that a number of facts suggest that Satoshi was based in Europe...
Satoshi’s writing exhibits spelling and word choices idiosyncratic of British English such as “bloody difficult”, “flat”, “maths”, grey”, as well as the dd/mm/yyyy date format. However, Satoshi also refers to Euros rather than pounds.
These clues leave us with a paradox: they suggest Satoshi was European, yet someone with the requisite skillset and exposure to Bitcoin’s primary influences would likely have been American. Much of the Cypherpunk community coalesced conferences and meetups, part of why a disproportionate number hailed from America and especially SF. The jobs where one could have gained cutting-edge professional infosec and crypto experience were similarly concentrated in the US.
Strangely enough, Len used the very same British English as Satoshi even though he was American."
yes, the article referenced above referenced several tweet's from Len using Britishisms like "bloody". He was an American, living in Europe. Satoshi also referenced Euros (rather than pounds).
I'm British and I use the word. "They've gotten good". Coders in particular have to learn American and a lot of us just use American on the internet unless we're talking in an English (or UK - English, Welsh, Scottish, North Irish) corner of the interwebs.
Or even Cornish! I was pleasantly surprised to find Cornish written across the side of the buses whilst visiting Plymouth. It's not much more than a linguistic and cultural curiosity, unfortunately, with even the excitement of the Cornish Revival being wholly insufficient to reach a critical mass of contemporary speakers. However, if there's just a faint possibility we'll be able to preserve the tradition I'm all for it.
It does exist (in that British people are aware of the US usage and "ill gotten gains") but sounds like a clueless person talking, or a child, so unless deeply exposes to American English nobody would use it themselves. I'm beginning to, but only after 30 years in the colonies.
Hm. Listen some more! We use it in the US Midwest routinely. Had gotten dehydrated. Have gotten bit by that issue. We've gotten the flu around here pretty frequently this winter.
Interesting Satoshi's spelling of the word "favour" instead of "favor" in "I've been putting it off in favour".
The use of "favour" instead of "favor" is a clear marker of British English or other Commonwealth varieties such as Australian or Canadian English. This spelling is not used in US English.
Australian too, fwiw. One general way to distinguish UK from Aussie online is we (Aus) use metric for everything, (kg, KMs, cms) and UK don't (stone (?), miles, feet)
At a glance the emails felt very Australian to me before I checked these comments, but I didn't do a thorough read.
That seems unlikely. The original code base was fairly small and very much reads like one person was responsible for writing it. Also, the more people who know a secret the less likely it is to be kept.
This is true, but having multiple people involved makes it every difficult to pinpoint one true source. Plus, when I say multiple people I mean 2-3 or 3-4. Not like a big operation. And if these small number are so paranoid about privacy and identity that they invented Bitcoin, I would expect them to be able to keep a secret.
I just find it hard to believe there isn't a single soul walking on this planet right now that has any idea who Satoshi Nakamoto is/was.
Genuine question, if you are satoshi and not insanely media shy, what would be a real concern for not divulging your identity in 2024?
You are rich enough to manage any security, tax or legal hits that you need to manage.
Furthermore due to BTC being completely mainstreamed, the credit you will get for inventing btc would be epic.
The least of it would be noble prize in economics. You will literally be a living cult leader like no other in history. Think of all those BTC fanatics finally meeting their leader. See the way Elon fanatics follow Musk and multiply that by 100.
I believe Satoshi was a cypherpunk and a remailer dev. Cypherpunks had a history of doing things anonymously on the mailing list and even trying to out one another (a sort of game).
Furthermore, as a remailer dev Satoshi was all too familiar with what happened with the penent remailer[1]. He knew such services will become a legal target by the powers that be. This is why Satoshi even said we "kicked the hornets nest" when Wikileaks/Silkroad began accepting Bitcoin.
Most people don't want to be cult leaders. Unless they are an attention hungry person (which we can safely rule out at this point) they have nothing to gain from making their identity known. And I assume the tax authorities might be somewhat interested in their bitcoin stash...
Not wanting the lifestyle that would certainly come with it like harassment, being recognized constantly in public, drawn into lawsuits, controversy, the market hanging on his every word, swatting, etc.
> You will literally be a living cult leader like no other in history. Think of all those BTC fanatics finally meeting their leader. See the way Elon fanatics follow Musk and multiply that by 100.
Didn't you just answer your own question? What sane person wants that?
I would imagine security is one argument. There are plenty of people and groups out there who have lost large amounts of BTC and who would like to believe that satoshi has the power to restore them or otherwise manipulate the currency.
It is almost strange to read that they are handling the project as something very big and important. At that time it was absolutely not obvious that it would become big and mainstream.
There was a lot of resentment towards bailouts at the time and making an alternative system
Many people would have been passionate about their quests towards a solution. Many people still make redundant things without knowing the hurdles involved and are just as passionate. I have a client thinking they are going to “bank the unbanked” with a mobile app not using crypto at all, in 2024
One reason why Satoshi would have been extremely passionate is because they had solved one of the unsolved problems of computer science up until 2008 which was the Double Spend Problem, and 2009 was his first production implementation of it called Bitcoin
so you have a person that was seeing everything that the field of computer science had touched over the last half century, and knowing a solution for a unsolved aspect that prevented it from touching other industries and seeing how expansive that would be
The Double Spend Problem was not unsolved in 2008.
The likes of Wei Dai, David Chaum, and Stephan Brands had working anonymous "digital cash" cryptosystems solving the double spending problem within a federated banking model in the late 80s and early 90s
yes and bitcoin builds on top of that, I believe the white paper may cite that effort, it cites W Dai’s b-money paper from 1998
The bitcoin white paper specifies that this is a solution without a trusted intermediary
the first line of the abstract entails not using a financial institution
I agree that ‘unsolved’ was inaccurate, I try to also say bitcoin 2008 is one implementation and essentially all distributed ledgers are following this branch of solution
If you want the TLDR; the meat is the "Candidates" section about Len Sassaman and the original Bitcoin paper's references (in particular, how Len was the only person with the right skill set, in the right place, at the right time to even get a copy of the referenced work).... among a mountain of other circumstantial evidence.
Oh, I'm excited to read this! Once or twice a year I take a trip down the rabbit hole on Satoshi, and my personal conclusion after the last couple of trips has been Len Sassaman.
The one thing that bugs me is that the original bitcoin paper, while amazing, doesn't seem like it was written by a PhD candidate. It cites just eight related works, and the W. Dai citation was famously added only after someone else suggested it, because Satoshi reportedly didn't know about it. A typical paper by a PhD candidate will cite dozens of related works, and Len Sassman would certainly have knowledge of dozens of related works off the top of his head.
Academics are overly verbose with citations, because they are afraid of offending a colleague or reviewer by omitting their work. One of the worst things you can possibly do is forget to cite the work of your anonymous reviewers... and there is no way to guess who that might be ahead of time, so you cite everyone.
An anonymous whitepaper has no such constraints, so you can just cite what is actually necessary to explain your point, and nothing more.
lol sorry to bug you but couldn't reply to your post from PFA thread 71 days ago. ordered a vintage woolrich crewneck that was supposed to be 100% wool but instead was the 85-15 wool-nylon blend. seems like what you were talking about, with nylon as scaffolding rather than hydrophobic outer shell. safe to assume PFA-free?
Yeah, I like this bit: "The bibliography of the whitepaper discloses a stunning paucity of knowledge about historic precursors... at the time of writing the Bitcoin whitepaper; this may either indicate a lack of interest in compliance with good academic practices, a disrespect or personal aversion against certain pioneers, or a sheer unfamiliarity with the state of the art..."
Edited to add: I didn't realize until now that Sassaman only finished his master's degree in 2008. Based on some of the work that I see from master's students (albeit none as brilliant and passionate as Sassaman) with thin lists of references, this makes Sassaman a more likely candidate in my mind.
"I've been at full-time work lately, and will be until the end of June,
so I haven't had that much time to work with Bitcoin or my exchange
service. I have a working beta of my service though, and a few weeks
ago made my first transaction: sold 10,000 btc for 20 euros via EU
bank transfer. Maybe I can make it public soon."
I'm sure it's a dead end but you'd think this would be an interesting avenue of investigation. Wouldn't think transaction be pretty obvious in the blockchain? Did the owner of those 10,000 btc ever spend them? If so, it'd be interesting to see if any of the wallets in the spend chain are something public, like someone asking for donations or something.
> Absolutely not my experience from those days, VPSs were rock-solid for me.
Likewise, my personal toy VPS actually dates back to 2009 and the only unplanned downtime it's ever had were when Linode was one of the targets of one of those big DDoS waves a few years back. Even then it was online and working fine internally, just limited in its ability to reach the outside world.
The VPS itself has been rock solid and in 15 years the only times it's not been at least trying to serve whatever I have on it have been when I've rebooted it for updates.
I found those specs really curious as I worked in webhosting (even rax which is in the thread) and we didn't have anything near that low for a vps, but reading further I guess they're using some random fly-by-night webhost that doesn't even have a cPanel or Plesk license or anything for the user to self-service, they base all of their pricing on linode and you have to call/ticket in to manage your site.
I don't know the background of satoshi, etc (of course) but that's a $10 vps and they're complaining about running out of memory, etc in the thread.. Why so cheap? Dedicated xeon servers back then were 80-250 and vps filled every other price range.
And if they just need to compile a python widget on linux with a desktop WM... we had the technology to do that locally in 2009..
It was an amateur open source project hosting a simple site for project collaboration, in an era before the FAANG bubble in engineer salaries. I think $10/month for a hobby thing is about right.
Also recognize that this was still in the "OMG how did computers get so fast" era. Our intuition about the time was still colored by the 486's on which we'd all installed Linux for the first time (or the Sparcstations we used at school, same deal). Even today a 100+ MHz device still "feels fast" to me, and recognize that I write audio firmware on 400-800 MHz DSP cores.
I mean, I just said I was in this business back then. I was probably 22 and making a whole $40k in my first "real" engineering job at Hostway, then Hostgator, then Rackspace, etc. And I owned multiple servers. A $40 VPS was not a big ask in 2009. I absolutely didn't make FAANG salary nor did 99.9% of our VPS customers. We used to stick 1-3k customers on one $350/month dell poweredge.
We had millions of customers with VPS of various pricing and traffic and businesses.
> Also recognize that this was still in the "OMG how did computers get so fast" era.
I'm so confused by this statement. I've been in datacenters since 2005, if we ever had a "omg fast cpus" moment anywhere in that time line it was when AMD Epyc came out around 2016 and we could push massive PCIE bandwidth for vfio/etc. Beyond that we've been sitting on various 2-4ghz xeons for 25 years. I'm confused on the 486 comparison. I had a 486 when I was 8, 31 years ago.
TWO THOUSAND AND NINE
2 0 0 9
"Before the SV balloon in salaries".. dude, we're talking under a $100/month... In 2009. Your comment makes it sound like this was the yesteryear of computers, like 1988 or something, this comment has me so confused.
The entire thread is them talking about putting a tiddlywiki+phpbb on a VPS. This, aside from LAMP/etc stacks were the most common hosting product sold and were usually $5-10/mo plans. I have a feeling they're actually using one of those scammy "free" webhosts you used to be able to get off of somethingawful, etc. that would disappear after 2 months and were probably CSAM vectors.
It's just a very strange level of frugality, which is mentioned in this HN thread elsewhere. It sounds like they were only using donations to move forward, nothing wrong with that, just interesting how low skill/researched their infrastructure stuff is for someone who seemingly can create a thing like bitcoin.
You lost me. You asked why someone would rent a bottom tier hosting solution in 2009, and I told gave you an answer as someone who was paying somewhere around that for hobby projects at right around the same time. I mean, I'm sure you're right in some sense that there were better choices, there always are.
But this wasn't a weird choice at all, unless you want to inform it with a BTC quote from 2018 or whatever.
I was just rhetorically reflecting on how strange it was that those specs is what they were using when they clearly aren't a 12 year old child or Russian warez slinger who can't get a VPS elsewhere and can afford something beyond a free or $10/mo VPS, WHILE they're arguing about how they're running out of memory on the VPS when compiling. And .. I assume that they're technically savvy since they created bitcoin, although I have absolutely no idea what that entailed.
Those specs for a VPS are absolutely pathetic even for 2009 era Xeon computing. I had quad xeons poweredges with 128gb+ ram under my desk as workstations when customers stopped paying their bills in 2009 when I worked at Hostway. VPS were leased with either dedicated cores or shared cores, shared probably around $20-40 then dedi core $60-250+. Datacenters either used Vmware g/esx or Virtuzzo.
I worked at all of the largest webhosts in the USA (not Hetzner etc in Europe) from I think 2005-2015 so I'm pretty familiar with that era of hosting. The guy who owns the webhost they're using can't even spell his competitor Linodes url/name. It's like they went to some random IRC channel and picked whatever free VPS host they could, which is a horrible idea. Whoever owned that VPS could absolutely figure out who these people were and interact with any file on their system he wanted to. I bet if someone tracked down whoever is the in that email talking about his webhost, they could track that email thread back and figure everyone out. But fraud at webhosts was absolutely rampant back then so there is the possibility the entire group faked their identities if they even HAD to identify at a fly-by-night webhost (narrator: they didn't).
When we took down Windows + Linux servers for CSAM, warez, fraud, etc we'd often log into them before wiping them and they'd have IRC, ICQ, etc open on the server and we'd be able to take down an entire group by going through their logs/etc that were still on the server.
$7.99 at HOSTGATOR who back then was the biggest (outside of godaddy) budget webhost barely got you a free shared cPanel account on a server with another 2000 customers to lag your site down. It was basically an sftp account with a cpanel login, that's it. The webhost in question here doesn't even give them a login, they have to communicate and have things done by their "customer support" (probably a call center India full of sysadmins, they were huge back then).
A $9.99 VPS in 2009? oof.
Even more to the point of this thread, it shows that the tech/operations/infra skills of that team are .. not very impressive. One guy didn't know linux at all and the "Linux guy" is the one picking a free VPS at a shady webhost that can't even compile his code. So that takes a lot of SRE/types off the "who made bitcoin" list. And this wasn't like, "Linux is super rare" world. It was 2009. I had been using Linux since the 90s when I wasn't even 10. We had hundreds of Linux sysengineers at each of these companies and we had no problem hiring them.
2009 hostgator SHARED (NOT! vps/dedi) pricing, $7.95, although they didn't have VPS back then so can't compare that. A dual xeon dedi is $219/mo, IIRC VPS started around $30-60 whenever that got added.
I think you are overestimating the skills of a couple of math nerds working on a hobby project in their spare time. Even working at a tech company with professionals who are paid to write computer software, a lot of people don't know much about operations. Heck, I had been in the industry for 10 years by that point, including one as a sysadmin, and I wouldn't know where to get webhosting because I was never employed to do that kind of work. Most people in the tech industry (and even more so for people in tech-adjacent academia) only really have deep knowledge in one or two areas of specialization.
That is absolutely ridiculous. This was 2009. We had just started the recession and everyone who lost their jobs was opening up wordpress blogs and everything else. That's why Hostgator sold for $300 million 5 years later and made Oxley a fortune. 2008-2010 was the absolute largest webhosting boom that we've **ever** had. SO many webhosts started post-2008 to pull in that market. The webhosting market is absoultely dead nowadays.
Your grandma probably set up a blog to get some adwords revenue. The entire market was based around WYSYWIG website theme guis and wordpress. Nothing techinical required until you need a vps/dedi.
Once again, I worked in the industry. I am very familiar with the types of mom and pop customers who were buying $9.99 sharing hosting accounts. I spent a LOT of time on the phone supporting people.
Regardless, if they AREN'T skilled in infra/operations, like I said that they aren't - then whats your point? You just corroborated that they're not skilled in infra. So thanks for repeating me? We have a group of programmers who are so unskilled with operations/infrastructure I *know* they aren't SRE/infra types. That was my point. Satoshi or Hatoshi or whoever clearly wasn't an operations person.
If you consider someone technically skilled in linux when they don't know ANY webhosts or are willing to use a free webhost as ... technically skilled then we are absolutely not going to agree. That is absolutely pathetic, insecure, and stupid to do. Do not EVER use a free webhost. You shouldn't need a PHD in Debian to understand the implications of some random person/company who doesn't even charge you remotely normal fees having access to your super secret bitcoin code.
You were a linux sysadmin and didn't know any webhosts/dcs? Did you not work on apache/nginx? If you did you got your .htacess configurations from webhosts. You probably got your ~/.ssh/config from webhosts tutorials. You probably learned postgres/mysql through webhost tutorials. You probably learned systemd/etcd/etc from webhost tutorials. You absolutely learned iptables through a webhost tutorial.
Almost *EVERY* single linux tutorial from the 1990s to the 2015s was some sort of "Set up a LAMP/WAMP stack for a Bookstore company."
This sounds like a blatant lie. or you should've been nowhere near systems. You didn't know Geocities? Angelfire? Tripod? Godaddy? Linode? DigitalOcean? Rackspace? Hostway? The Planet? Liquidweb? 1&1?? Hetzner?? Or any of the tens of thousands of local datacenters we had to rack servers in? You were a linux admin who literally had never had their own server hosted somewhere? Where exactly did you get PRODUCTION experience to become a sysadmin? I learned linux over IRC but I absolutely had tens or hundreds of servers throughout my growth. A HUGE amount of us #linux people had eggdrops/shells even when we were little kids.
If you don't know any webhosts then what exactly were you hosting in the datacenter where you were a linux admin? What, 80-90% of servers in a datacenter are linux servers running a webserver probably. And if you're doing that you're doing exactly what webhosts are doing, except they put a nice little cPanel/Plesk portal in front. I think you're using "linux admin" a bit loosely here or our skills are astronomically far apart.
This is some strange weird whitewashing of an entire era of computing that some seem to know NOTHING about, WHILE arguing with someone who was in the trenches at that time talking about EXACTLY what they did for a living. But no, please have a random hackernews person who wasn't involved in webhosting whatsoever describe to me the industry in 2009.
Anything to play devils advocate. You people are making it sound like this was the wild west and webhosting was so hard and complex back then in the yesteryear of ... 2009.
I don't really understand your hostility here. When I was a sysadmin, I was working on Windows NT and Digital UNIX systems, and we were taking the radical step of moving some of those systems to Debian. There was no hosted website, it was on-prem IT. In subsequent jobs I developed software that ran on various versions of UNIX/Linux, but they were on-prem installs too. By the time I worked in a company that had a SaaS offering, there was a whole team of people dedicated to setting up the operations side. I wrote back end application code, why would I ever need to set up a LAMP stack? At another company I did admittedly set up Apache and do a bit of PHP programming as glue to a Java back end, but once again... on-prem installs for enterprise clients.
I think you are seeing the world through your own lens of being an expert in web hosting. Sure, every software developer who used Linux before knows how to navigate a shell, and most software developers working in SaaS 15 years ago knew how to spin up a local web server. That doesn't mean they knew the names of every company offering web hosting services on the public internet, especially in America (assuming these Bitcoin devs were European), or that they knew about cPanel or Wordpress or whatever other PHP content management system. It's a completely different area of expertise.
Meredith appears to be telling the truth. She didn't say Len wasn't Satoshi, she simply said to the best of her knowledge he wasn't. That doesn't mean he wasn't working on it covertly.
One of Len's best friends (Bram Cohen) knew Len was posting pseudonymously on the cypherpunk mailing list but never knew what handle he was using. Also, when Bram was about to release BitTorrent Len tried to convince him to do it anonymously. It's not hard to believe that Len would have done it secretly; even from his wife.
Furthermore, Meredith can't be 100% trusted. When Satoshi handed the project over to the maintainers and stopped posting to the cypherpunk mailing list in late 2010, Meredith tweeted, "Bitcoin isn't ready for prime time yet, according to its creator. Interested people can help finish it, though!"[1]
Satoshi never said those words publicly or privately-- so it's a curious thing to say.
As for the computer...
It's likely Len used university computer(s) for the development as the commit times and communication line up with an academic schedule. It's likely the university had Windows computers. Plus; it's one way to isolate the environment and reduce the chance of information leakage (could have even been a Windows VM).
The C++ coding style is also very much the way a Windows developer would write C++ code. Not the way a Unix-y C++ developer writing on Windows would write.
I always figured based on the code and the emails that it was an older Japanese developer. I've emailed 100s of them over the years and they do all typically write similar in English, they mix a lot of UK/US-ism, and often their English is really good, like I wouldn't know they weren't a native English-speaker until I just caught on to how they wrote. (Speaking is an entirely different issue, many of them cannot speak English in person very well or make obvious grammatical mistakes they don't make when typing.)
Coding is quite subjective. When I examined the early bitcoin code (the one Satoshi wrote and shared). The C++ code looked pretty sloppy and amateur-ish.
The comments were odd and not standardized (randomly using four //// sometimes, etc). The use of 4-6 random new lines between sections of code was awkward. The way the code was organized, folders named, etc.
The code itself was a mix of hungarian-isms. It felt very academic-y to me... like someone that did most of their coding in university as a teacher or phd candidate (little real-world coding).
There's a podcast (name slips my mind...) where the host asked Bram Cohen if he thought Len was Satoshi and he doesn't outright say yes... To paraphrase, he basically answered, "I can't say for sure. It seemed like he (Len) lacked the C++ knowledge.. but his programming got a lot better since I last seen it... so I don't know. It seems to be the most likely scenario would be Len doing the brain work and someone like Hal doing the coding."
But, isn't that sorta what happened? Satoshi had 169 commits and Hal basically took over and cleaned everything up. Satoshi didn't do that much coding, and the coding he did do was done over 1.5-2 years (as he stated in the cypherpunk mailing list).
The biggest thing that bugs me about the Len Sassaman theory is that the original bitcoin paper, while amazing, doesn't seem like it was written by a PhD candidate. It cites just eight related works, and the W. Dai citation was famously added only after someone else suggested it, because Satoshi reportedly didn't know about it. A typical paper by a PhD candidate will cite dozens of related works, and Len Sassman would certainly have knowledge of dozens of related works off the top of his head. There should be a whole section citing the literature and enumerating the ways in which the proposals and findings in the paper are novel contributions.
Just chitchat during the development of bitcoin. You can understand a lot about how bitcoin design choices came to be from Satoshi own reasonings. The white paper doesn’t spell these out in detail
Even back in 2009, it was difficult (impossible?) to operate online without leaving tons of digital footprint, and we can guess that for sure state-backed actors tried to identify him and probably failed. Unless of course he was a state-backed actor(s).