Given his history as a prolific liar, I find his post to be utter bullshit. Note how he's still lying about things he was caught at: "When the rumours began, my qualifications and character were attacked. When those allegations were proven false". NO - it was established (with confirmation from the schools in question) that he lied about having a PhD from Charles Stuart U. and he definitely does not possess 8 masters degrees. Not to mention other lies about having super computers and partnership with SGI to build more with fake reference letter (all clarified by company as false), etc.
Now, because he knows he can't successfully claim Satoshi's identity and in light of possible charges based on ongoing police investigation (fraudulent use of tax credits), he wants to dramatically disappear. I hope the authorities have his passport(s). His thirst for fame is unreal.
Why would anyone want to acquire 8 masters degrees? Usually one is enough. Some people get two which makes sense for them. By three you've surely proven that you can learn and replicate stuff and don't need to go to any more exams to prove that. You're better off getting other qualifications.
Perhaps the Satoshi show is his way to convince Australian tax authorities of diminished capacity to lessen the penalties for his fraudulent acts? A sociopath grasping at any lever that could work in his favor.
Okay seriously, is anyone contacting the authorities to see if this man is still alive? I do not know who to contact or what his location is. His "blog" post sounds like a suicide note - I've had the misfortune of reading others, and there are telltale signs - and it doesn't appear that anyone is taking steps to see if he's okay.
Maybe he is a liar, maybe he's Satoshi, who gives a shit at this point when the jaded comments make it sound like we've been invaded by 4chan.
This post reminds me of a tactic abusive people use to prevent their victims from leaving them. When confronted with their bad behavior, they apologize profusely and pretend to feel remorse for their actions to the point that people worry about them. Once people feel adequately sorry for them and are distracted from their bad behavior, they go right back to doing what they were doing.
But the giveaway that shows it's all fake is that they never really get to the root of the bad behavior and do anything to fix it. In this case, Wright still hasn't admitted that he isn't Satoshi and doesn't have the key to the genesis block.
I've seen this behavior far too many times from my ex--I'm not going to give in to it here. Sure, someone should go check that he's not going to kill himself. But that should not for a second distract from the fact that he's a liar and a fraud, and this is likely just his latest ploy.
Sadly, this type of behavior is also the hallmark of a master manipulator. Given his track record of deceit upon deceit (lied about PhD as confirmed by university, lied about supercomputer as confirmed by SGI, got caught backdating PGP key, multiple acquaintances in Australia on record about his sketchy business practices, etc. etc), I'd guess that the emotion here is significantly less than genuine.
That said, I agree that if I knew the man, or had any idea where he is then I'd feel compelled to check in on him. But it sounds like people have checked in on him and he's OK [1].
But I'm guessing it's just more showmanship and more attempts to distract from the fact that he has no proof he's who he's claiming to be.
I saw the post within a minute of two of it going up and also read it as a suicide note. I reached out to everyone I knew and heard back indirectly through someone else that he's ok.
He's also updated his homepage in the last few minutes.
Despite knowing just how much of a manipulator Craig is I think it's worth erring on the side of caution here.
Yes, certainly we should sympathize with this person who is behaving in a confusing way.
Even if he made a calculated decision to manipulate the news media here, the blame must be shared by the journalists who promoted the story, and to an extent, the portion of the audience that was simply looking for an easy answer and a satisfying resolution.
At the end of the day, the whole lot of us should be responsible for being skeptical enough to prevent a destructive person from turning their personal issues into a global crisis.
Many people stepped up to debunk this story quite readily. It was the mainstream media that was really exacerbating the situation.
I understand this, but there's also the dimension where his actions, whether true or not, are also damaging other people (Gavin's reputation is on the line).
We'd all be more worried for him if he wasn't so blatantly causing harm to other people's reputation.
Obviously he could suffer from severe mental illness, which combines elements of harming others and self harm, but as a society I think we should worry more about the person being harmed (ex. Gavin).
"But, as the events of this week unfolded and I prepared to publish the proof of access to the earliest keys, I broke. I do not have the courage. I cannot."
My (non-provable) theory is that Satoshi is not a person but a team, now defunct, that was tasked with developing a crypto-currency. They are probably more scientists/mathematicians/economists than they are software developers, which would explain the very sound but not exactly elegant initial code.
It would also explain the silence - the project is over, the team is probably bound to secrecy because this stuff is classified.
The only time Satoshi spoke out (edit: and we don't even know that it was authentic, see discussion below) was to help the poor bloke who was mistaken to be Satoshi and his life was being ruined, and that was probably a collective decision by the former team members, it was the right thing to do.
This is a different case - Satoshi speaking out wouldn't help in this case, Craig sounds like someone in need of help from a professional psychiatrist or psychologist, http://www.drcraigwright.net/ almost sounds like a suicide note. I feel sorry and worried for the bloke.
I wouldn't be surprised if we never know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, and his coins remain forever out of reach. I bet they collectively decided to throw away the keys, so to speak.
If being considered Satoshi ruined some other guy's life too, isn't Wright's claim that he is Satoshi but he just chickened out of irrefutably proving it semi-plausible?
Dude's a liar. After everything else he has done this is the simplest step which requires no extra burden on him. He has already claimed to be SN, the only reason not to follow through is because he cannot and could never have. Therefore he is just another pretender to the throne.
Why is there even an argument? It is not rocket science to produce a signed message with a key, the reference software can do this trivially. Until that is provided I don't see why anyone should entertain the possibility. Anything else is just theatrics.
To those of you who have never known a conman or someone with borderline personality disorder, this behavior might seem odd. To me, it's like looking at a picture of a dog and going "oh that's a dog!"
The best indicator for me was, instead of providing something right away, saying you will provide it "soon," and then waiting for the inevitable excuse when it doesn't happen.
It's hard for me to believe that he's backing out of his promise to provide stronger evidence because the pressure is too much, because the pressure of being known as a fraud is a lot worse than being known as an inventor.
Some of the website is still in archive.org, but will probably disappear soon. Any snapshots before May have already disappeared. Might help for folks to download the old posts before they disappear from the web entirely.
Frustratingly, it appears the main screenshots from the Sartre post (showing his original 'proof') have already been removed from archive.org.
The only blamable thing in this story is that the so called mainstream media are not technically knowledgeable enough to "scientifically" check their news sources. Good thing, all the nerds around have exposed the scheme in such a short time, I like this era !!
>In December 2013, a blogger named Skye Grey linked Nick Szabo to the bitcoin's whitepaper using a stylometric analysis.
All that, and the NS/NS: Nakamoto Satoshi / Nick Szabo. :)
I assign a low probability to the proposition that Nakamoto is other than Szabo.
Suppose Nakamoto isn't Szabo. Why the various similarities? They could be deliberate: Nakamoto isn't Szabo but another researcher who not only runs with the same ideas, but mimics the elements of writing, duplicates the timezone of activity and so on. Even chooses the letters N and S for his pseudonym to tantalize people with the hypothesis that he is Szabo. The problem under this hypothesized scenario is that Szabo would almost certainly have cried foul: "Hey, world, this Bitcoin Nakamoto dude is ripping off my research without crediting me at all!" Secondly, why would someone who wants to create a digital currency system based on Szabo's ideas go to the trouble of creating all these irrelevant similarities.
On the other hand, there is the why: why wouldn't someone who obviously knows a lot about security an privacy issues not put more effort into building plausible deniability? Maybe Szabo simply doesn't care about having anything near air-tight claim that he isn't Nakamoto, and so just let himself be sloppy. Perhaps he actually wants there to be all that circumstantial evidence, and is biding his time until the right moment to admit that he is Nakamoto, at which time with just some small piece of proof, it will be iron-clad to everyone.
It is interesting to note that the only Satoshi-existence scenario whose probability improves with each passing day, is the scenario in which Satoshi / the "Satoshis" is/are dead (unless you think Bitcoin was the first great invention of hyper-advanced AI, of course).
Figuring out whether anyone actually knows who Satoshi is/was becomes more interesting than waiting for the person(s) to show up, because it will never happen in a death scenario. One thing we have gained from this bizarre circus is a sign that neither Gavin nor Jon know who Satoshi might be; who's left? Who might know?
This whole "controversy" is incredibly boring. The real Satoshi would be able to prove it easily. Prove it, or STFU and we can move on from the who is Satoshi mystery?
Thought experiment: Suppose Satoshi, whoever it is, is still alive somewhere in the wild. But he doesn't have his original keys (hard-drive failure with no backup, apartment fire with no offsite backup, etc etc).
He could still have access to his PGP private key, which would be a strong data point. It could be possible that someone stole this key though, so this alone wouldn't completely prove his identity.
If he had the foresight to know he might want to prove his identity at some point in the future, he could have embedded the hash of a message into an early block (using the public keys of coinbase transactions). The message could say something like "Satoshi Nakamoto is <real name>. <salt>". In order to prove his identity, he'd just have to reveal the contents of the message (he'd have the make the salt something he could memorize so that it wouldn't be at risk of being destroyed by a fire). Ideally he'd encode this message hash in multiple early blocks (using a different salt in each message, so that the hash is different each time).
I think anything like the "knowledge of the content of private emails" is flawed. Satoshi's email account was hacked, so most of his "private" emails are no longer private (supposedly he didn't use PGP for most of his private correspondence).
According to that awesome analysis[0], he was backing his stuff up pretty regularly (every five days at first). I would find it very hard to believe that someone with the wherewithal to make backups is not making an off-site copy of those backups. I haven't met many people that make backups but only store a copy locally. History is rife with horror stories. It's a good question though. Specifically there might be things only Satoshi knows among some of the original adopters (but clearly Gavin is not one of those people, if he was fooled by Crazy Craig).
I believe that David Kleiman was the one with the Satoshi keys, they were kept on an encrypted USB. He died unexpectedly in 2013, and his brother took the USB. Nobody knows how to unlock it.
If I were to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he is Satoshi, this note still doesn't make any sense. Removing all doubt that he at least controls the keys is almost trivial.
It's very interesting that he asked the media to send coins to one of Satoshi's Bitcoin addresses, and that he would return them. All of Satoshi's original coins are Pay-to-Public-Key, whereas the BBC's money was sent Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash (P2PKH). This means that Craig would have to present a signature along with a public key that just has the same hash as the Satoshi public key, not a signature for Satoshi's public key itself. I think he is banking on finding another key with the same hash, as a final desperate attempt to forge his identity.
[+] [-] Geekette|10 years ago|reply
Now, because he knows he can't successfully claim Satoshi's identity and in light of possible charges based on ongoing police investigation (fraudulent use of tax credits), he wants to dramatically disappear. I hope the authorities have his passport(s). His thirst for fame is unreal.
[+] [-] danielweber|10 years ago|reply
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-legacy-distorted-lo...
If you toss out the ones about romantic relationships, Craig hits on most of them.
[+] [-] static_noise|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pinewurst|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathrawka|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spdustin|10 years ago|reply
Maybe he is a liar, maybe he's Satoshi, who gives a shit at this point when the jaded comments make it sound like we've been invaded by 4chan.
[+] [-] devishard|10 years ago|reply
But the giveaway that shows it's all fake is that they never really get to the root of the bad behavior and do anything to fix it. In this case, Wright still hasn't admitted that he isn't Satoshi and doesn't have the key to the genesis block.
I've seen this behavior far too many times from my ex--I'm not going to give in to it here. Sure, someone should go check that he's not going to kill himself. But that should not for a second distract from the fact that he's a liar and a fraud, and this is likely just his latest ploy.
[+] [-] jnbiche|10 years ago|reply
That said, I agree that if I knew the man, or had any idea where he is then I'd feel compelled to check in on him. But it sounds like people have checked in on him and he's OK [1].
But I'm guessing it's just more showmanship and more attempts to distract from the fact that he has no proof he's who he's claiming to be.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11636144
[+] [-] nikcub|10 years ago|reply
He's also updated his homepage in the last few minutes.
Despite knowing just how much of a manipulator Craig is I think it's worth erring on the side of caution here.
[+] [-] brador|10 years ago|reply
It would take less than 5 minutes, which leaves the question, why drag it on like this?
[+] [-] nihonde|10 years ago|reply
Even if he made a calculated decision to manipulate the news media here, the blame must be shared by the journalists who promoted the story, and to an extent, the portion of the audience that was simply looking for an easy answer and a satisfying resolution.
At the end of the day, the whole lot of us should be responsible for being skeptical enough to prevent a destructive person from turning their personal issues into a global crisis.
Many people stepped up to debunk this story quite readily. It was the mainstream media that was really exacerbating the situation.
[+] [-] empath75|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lxr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andremendes|10 years ago|reply
I believe someone (healthy) close to him should take some care of him for a while. Regardless of his online identity.
[+] [-] sktrdie|10 years ago|reply
We'd all be more worried for him if he wasn't so blatantly causing harm to other people's reputation.
Obviously he could suffer from severe mental illness, which combines elements of harming others and self harm, but as a society I think we should worry more about the person being harmed (ex. Gavin).
[+] [-] musha68k|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Grazester|10 years ago|reply
This guys is so full of crap its amusing
[+] [-] gtrubetskoy|10 years ago|reply
It would also explain the silence - the project is over, the team is probably bound to secrecy because this stuff is classified.
The only time Satoshi spoke out (edit: and we don't even know that it was authentic, see discussion below) was to help the poor bloke who was mistaken to be Satoshi and his life was being ruined, and that was probably a collective decision by the former team members, it was the right thing to do.
This is a different case - Satoshi speaking out wouldn't help in this case, Craig sounds like someone in need of help from a professional psychiatrist or psychologist, http://www.drcraigwright.net/ almost sounds like a suicide note. I feel sorry and worried for the bloke.
[+] [-] user24|10 years ago|reply
no, the forum account was hacked to make that claim. It wasn't by Satoshi.
[+] [-] dzmien|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kilroy123|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cookiecaper|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] headgasket|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] celticninja|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spilk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tazjin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tommynicholas|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielweber|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threatofrain|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andremendes|10 years ago|reply
Asides the conversation, the whole source code of this website is: <img src="homepage.jpg">
This man is really not caring.
EDIT: site is updated now, with proper html+css coding.
[+] [-] SyneRyder|10 years ago|reply
Frustratingly, it appears the main screenshots from the Sartre post (showing his original 'proof') have already been removed from archive.org.
[+] [-] spriggan3|10 years ago|reply
You're kidding right ?
EDIT : no he isn't .
[+] [-] dTal|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mabbo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AKifer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|10 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto#Nick_Szabo
>In December 2013, a blogger named Skye Grey linked Nick Szabo to the bitcoin's whitepaper using a stylometric analysis.
All that, and the NS/NS: Nakamoto Satoshi / Nick Szabo. :)
I assign a low probability to the proposition that Nakamoto is other than Szabo.
Suppose Nakamoto isn't Szabo. Why the various similarities? They could be deliberate: Nakamoto isn't Szabo but another researcher who not only runs with the same ideas, but mimics the elements of writing, duplicates the timezone of activity and so on. Even chooses the letters N and S for his pseudonym to tantalize people with the hypothesis that he is Szabo. The problem under this hypothesized scenario is that Szabo would almost certainly have cried foul: "Hey, world, this Bitcoin Nakamoto dude is ripping off my research without crediting me at all!" Secondly, why would someone who wants to create a digital currency system based on Szabo's ideas go to the trouble of creating all these irrelevant similarities.
On the other hand, there is the why: why wouldn't someone who obviously knows a lot about security an privacy issues not put more effort into building plausible deniability? Maybe Szabo simply doesn't care about having anything near air-tight claim that he isn't Nakamoto, and so just let himself be sloppy. Perhaps he actually wants there to be all that circumstantial evidence, and is biding his time until the right moment to admit that he is Nakamoto, at which time with just some small piece of proof, it will be iron-clad to everyone.
[+] [-] numair|10 years ago|reply
Figuring out whether anyone actually knows who Satoshi is/was becomes more interesting than waiting for the person(s) to show up, because it will never happen in a death scenario. One thing we have gained from this bizarre circus is a sign that neither Gavin nor Jon know who Satoshi might be; who's left? Who might know?
[+] [-] dpweb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atomical|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aqueous|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgrahamc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saalweachter|10 years ago|reply
How would Satoshi prove himself then?
[+] [-] jamoes|10 years ago|reply
If he had the foresight to know he might want to prove his identity at some point in the future, he could have embedded the hash of a message into an early block (using the public keys of coinbase transactions). The message could say something like "Satoshi Nakamoto is <real name>. <salt>". In order to prove his identity, he'd just have to reveal the contents of the message (he'd have the make the salt something he could memorize so that it wouldn't be at risk of being destroyed by a fire). Ideally he'd encode this message hash in multiple early blocks (using a different salt in each message, so that the hash is different each time).
I think anything like the "knowledge of the content of private emails" is flawed. Satoshi's email account was hacked, so most of his "private" emails are no longer private (supposedly he didn't use PGP for most of his private correspondence).
[+] [-] fapjacks|10 years ago|reply
[0] http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2014/08/167-satoshis-hashra...
[+] [-] keypusher|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] criddell|10 years ago|reply
If I were to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he is Satoshi, this note still doesn't make any sense. Removing all doubt that he at least controls the keys is almost trivial.
[+] [-] neuropie|10 years ago|reply