(1) It's not Peter Todd. Anyone who knows Peter Todd and/or was around in the early days, can clearly tell Satoshi and Peter are not the same person.
(2) No good comes from speculation over the identity of Satoshi. When someone living is named, their life becomes absolute hell and the security risk imposed on them is very real. When someone dead is proposed, that hellish experience is passed to their family and heirs.
It's incredibly dangerous of these "journalists". Putting targets on people's back as well as possibly being slander.
Any bitcoin oldheads know it's not Peter Todd based on tons of behavioral, timestamped, and logistical evidence. The actual leading candidate is Len Sassaman if you look objectively at the evidence.
> No good comes from speculation over the identity of Satoshi. When someone living is named, their life becomes absolute hell and the security risk imposed on them is very real. When someone dead is proposed, that hellish experience is passed to their family and heirs.
Indeed.
Cullen should know better: his previous project was a documentary on the QAnon conspiracies, which have managed to get people hurt due to crazies looking for these conspiracies. Cullen's evidence is hopelessly coincidence based... exactly the kind of shoddy evidence that fuels conspiracies like QAnon.
Personally I suspect he made the accusation against me simply to create media interest. In particular, by making an accusation against someone who wasn't a leading contender, myself. I haven't seen the film yet myself. But friends of mine have, and said that other than the Satoshi nonsense it was a reasonable documentary about Bitcoin. Problem is, it's hard to build interest in that.
Anyway, hopefully this just blows over. But we'll see. I already took some precautions re: security just in case...
> No good comes from speculation over the identity of Satoshi.
As Bitcoin gains market value the issue of Satoshi’s coins is becoming more and more serious.
It’s not wildly understood yet but Bitcoin will go fully dark in the future, how to do this, especially with help of L2 systems, is well known in the deep technical circles.
I think all libertarian capitalists believe money should be private. However Satoshi will eventually be the wealthiest human to ever exist and if that wealth is 100% dark it raises some tricky issues.
> No good comes from speculation over the identity of Satoshi. When someone living is named, their life becomes absolute hell and the security risk imposed on them is very real. When someone dead is proposed, that hellish experience is passed to their family and heirs.
Not a good reason. The person who developed bitcoin is responsible for billions (maybe trillions) of dollars of fraud and crime. They are responsible for a ludicrous amount of waste and carbon output. They should be held to account by the public.
It stands out to the producers because: 1) Peter makes it just after joining the form, so he is unlikely to have detailed knowledge of bitcoin. 2) He seems to be finishing Satoshi's thought, as though he returned to an earlier post forgetting which account he was signed into. 3) The post happens just before Satoshi disappears and Peter leaves for a few years.
The doc also features many scenes with Peter and Adam Back where their eyes kind of shift around and they laugh awkwardly when asked about certain things. Since the doc it seems that Peter has taken to twitter to say he was mislead about the purpose of the interviews.
I've always kind of thought that Satoshi was probably one person who built it all in isolation, and I never played much attention to theories that Satoshi was actually multiple people. After watching the doc it does seem like Adam and Peter know a good deal more than they are letting on, even if it wasn't them specifically, it seems likely that they have some idea who it was.
> Peter makes it just after joining the form, so he is unlikely to have detailed knowledge of bitcoin.
The fact that the inputs, outputs, and fee of a transaction must add up isn't exactly "detailed knowledge" :) I don't think it took me all that long to figure that out when I first tried understanding how Bitcoin worked.
And frankly, the core of Bitcoin really isn't all that complex! You can have a very good understanding of all the parts after just a few days carefully studying it. Which is exactly what I did: I sat down with the Bitcoin Core codebase and figured out what all the code did. Especially at the time, it really wasn't that big of a codebase.
> After watching the doc it does seem like Adam and Peter know a good deal more than they are letting on, even if it wasn't them specifically, it seems likely that they have some idea who it was.
I can't speak for Adam. But I have no idea who Satoshi is. If anything, I think it could be literally hundreds or even thousands of potential people. Bitcoin is something so simple that you didn't need to be a super-genius to come up with it. You just needed to understand some relatively high-level, basic, cryptography and have a brilliant flash of inspiration. Satoshi was a very competent C++ programmer (it's a myth that his code was bad). But there's lots and lots of very competent C++ programmers out there.
The obvious answer is Satoshi Nakamoto is functionally dead.
His wallet would be worth around $70 billion dollars today and he hasn't touched it in over a decade.
Either he is A) dead, B) lost the wallet and wishes he were dead, or C) has achieved such spiritual enlightenment that has no interest in the personal or societal impact that $70 billion dollars could have.
He is not coming back folks, and even if we figure out who he was, that $70 billion is gone.
The $70 billion is not gone. He would need to sell his Bitcoin to others to amass $70 billion. Whatever impact $70B dollars could have is already happening: the difference is that it’s not his impact.
Much like Elon Musk couldn't liquidate his stocks and wind up a billionaire, my bitcoin is nowhere nearly worth $70B. I won't tell you my estimate, but I will say that it's quite modest by comparison.
Do you think the world really has $70B in cash to blow on bitcoin right now? Big players mine the stuff, they don't buy it.
To my reading, the bitcointalk reply only makes sense as a snarky comment (ie Todd isn't Satoshi). and the fact it was 1.5 hours after the Satoshi post also suggests it wasn't the same person making a quick correction.
Who is more likely to build ontop of some obscure code base called "Hash Cash"? Some random people that trolled the same forums or the original creator of it?
Imo this "secret" is known by many people as I have seen so many censorship and misdirection campaigns throughout the years if people mention Adam being the one.
Him being Satoshi also makes bitcoin core seem more legitimate. He can guide his creation without being formally known as satoshi.
It is obvious. Especially if you have ever been a solo dev for an extended period of time (like adam was)
There is a ton more evidence but seems like no one really wants to dig into Adam.
Adam literally stopped updating hash cash and a year later Bitcoin is released... check his website on archive.org.
Its ok. I like that there is still conversation as to who it is. It gives protection to him since there likely wont be anything concrete (if hopefully he was slick enough)
Clearly not him. He initially dismissed Bitcoin and jumped on the bandwagon when it started making headlines due to its fast rising price. Plus, Adam Back seeks fame, he would happily claim to be Satoshi if it was really him. He was even criticized early on for seeming to take too much credit for Bitcoin[0].
My guess is that it's someone who was not particularly well-known prior to Bitcoin.
If an HBO show suggested that I was the Bitcoin creator, I would be wealthy... from owning HBO, after my team of lawyers (who accepted the suit on contingency) was done with them.
Then there's Google editorializing a headline at the top of search hits:
> Top stories
> Bitcoin creator's identity revealed in new HBO documentary
Yet none of the headlines they show makes that claim:
> POLITICO.eu - Bitcoin creator is Peter Todd, HBO film says
> Bloomberg - HBO Documentary Suggests Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Is Peter Todd
> The New York Times - A New Bitcoin Documentary Reopens the Search for Satoshi Nakamoto
> The Crypto Times - Peter Todd Denies He is Satoshi Nakamoto as claimed by HBO...
> The New Yorker - Has Bitcoin's Elusive Creator Finally Been Unmasked?
In general (not just in this case), there should also soon be some huge lawsuits for robo-slander, robo-libel, robo-defamation, robo-reckless-endangerment, etc.
Government is getting a lot more tech-savvy, and "everything's legal, if you claim an AI/algorithm/computer/dog did it" isn't flying anymore.
>CNN sat down with Hoback, prior to Todd’s denial, to discuss why the director is so confident in his theory, whether he’s worried about being sued, and that big dramatic confrontation at the end of the film.
I'm honestly surprised that all of the alleged satoshis haven't been kid napped by armed gangs trying to get the billions locked up in the first mined blocks.
Would be a pretty amusing black comedy. They kidnap the potential Satoshi, who is actually Satoshi but they’re not sure. [hijinx added here]. Then in the process of torturing him, they accidentally kill him before he reveals the password. And then it’s confirmed he’s who they wanted.
At least one of the Satoshi fakes moves around with a big security detail. For them it's presumably just a cost of their faking business and paid for by the people they're defrauding.
But for someone involuntarily accused that's another matter. A security detail is eye wateringly expensive -- particularly one comprehensive enough to stop kidnappers in general.
Because he wrote everyone he wasn't important and asked everyone to focus on the main objective which was his creation. Seriously: IDK I am all puzzled. Looks like a start of a religion (^^).
1. Satoshi emailed me at the same time Hal was taking part in a marathon. Yes, technically emails can be delayed, but ... why? There was no urgency in those discussions.
2. Hal preferred to write C and was still writing C up until the moment he sadly passed away. Satoshi wrote in modern(ish) C++. Note that the same problem applies for Len Sassaman and basically everyone who has been fingered as a possible Satoshi. The combination of C++, Win32 and cryptography is not very common in the cypherpunk space.
3. Hal was a professional cryptographer who worked on an encrypted messaging product (PGP). Satoshi had some fairly basic misunderstandings about cryptography, like believing that you can't use elliptic curve keys to encrypt messages, and referenced having to do research to understand the cryptography he needed. Why would Hal pretend to be a newbie at cryptography, up to and including not having features Satoshi said he wanted?
4. Hal did try to create digital cash already, but tried to build it on trusted computing hardware. He had a long term interest in that approach, as did I, and his last project before his death was one I suggested related to this tech. In fact there are emails between me and Hal in list archives pre-Bitcoin where we swap notes on Intel LaGrande. If Hal had been Satoshi it seems likely that Satoshi would have at least commented on the ways TC could be used at some point, but Satoshi never showed any awareness the tech exists.
6. If you're trying to be anonymous, why would you immediately and pointlessly reveal your identity by messaging yourself?
This paper makes a pretty good case that the late Len Sassaman was Satoshi. Its a pretty thorough examination regardless if you think it was Len or not and doesn't come to a definitive conclusion.
My money is on Hal, too. He was in the dorm room next to mine. I've never met an actual genius before or since. Bitcoin is just the thing he would invent.
He was interviewed when he could no longer speak. He was asked if he was Satoshi. He just smiled.
It veers quickly into conspiracy theory territory but I have long thought a nation state is a likely candidate for creator. You can kinda pick from several, all equally free from and evidence, and come up with narratives around why they might have done such a thing.
adastra22|1 year ago
(1) It's not Peter Todd. Anyone who knows Peter Todd and/or was around in the early days, can clearly tell Satoshi and Peter are not the same person.
(2) No good comes from speculation over the identity of Satoshi. When someone living is named, their life becomes absolute hell and the security risk imposed on them is very real. When someone dead is proposed, that hellish experience is passed to their family and heirs.
(3) It's not Peter Todd.
staplers|1 year ago
Any bitcoin oldheads know it's not Peter Todd based on tons of behavioral, timestamped, and logistical evidence. The actual leading candidate is Len Sassaman if you look objectively at the evidence.
Mistletoe|1 year ago
I just can't imagine the real Satoshi saying something this stupid.
petertodd|1 year ago
Indeed.
Cullen should know better: his previous project was a documentary on the QAnon conspiracies, which have managed to get people hurt due to crazies looking for these conspiracies. Cullen's evidence is hopelessly coincidence based... exactly the kind of shoddy evidence that fuels conspiracies like QAnon.
Personally I suspect he made the accusation against me simply to create media interest. In particular, by making an accusation against someone who wasn't a leading contender, myself. I haven't seen the film yet myself. But friends of mine have, and said that other than the Satoshi nonsense it was a reasonable documentary about Bitcoin. Problem is, it's hard to build interest in that.
Anyway, hopefully this just blows over. But we'll see. I already took some precautions re: security just in case...
scarab92|1 year ago
Stop looking to them for credible analysis.
alchemist1e9|1 year ago
As Bitcoin gains market value the issue of Satoshi’s coins is becoming more and more serious.
It’s not wildly understood yet but Bitcoin will go fully dark in the future, how to do this, especially with help of L2 systems, is well known in the deep technical circles.
I think all libertarian capitalists believe money should be private. However Satoshi will eventually be the wealthiest human to ever exist and if that wealth is 100% dark it raises some tricky issues.
mvdtnz|1 year ago
Not a good reason. The person who developed bitcoin is responsible for billions (maybe trillions) of dollars of fraud and crime. They are responsible for a ludicrous amount of waste and carbon output. They should be held to account by the public.
jawiggins|1 year ago
The key piece of evidence seems to be this comment from Peter Todd: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2181.msg28739#msg287...
It stands out to the producers because: 1) Peter makes it just after joining the form, so he is unlikely to have detailed knowledge of bitcoin. 2) He seems to be finishing Satoshi's thought, as though he returned to an earlier post forgetting which account he was signed into. 3) The post happens just before Satoshi disappears and Peter leaves for a few years.
The doc also features many scenes with Peter and Adam Back where their eyes kind of shift around and they laugh awkwardly when asked about certain things. Since the doc it seems that Peter has taken to twitter to say he was mislead about the purpose of the interviews.
I've always kind of thought that Satoshi was probably one person who built it all in isolation, and I never played much attention to theories that Satoshi was actually multiple people. After watching the doc it does seem like Adam and Peter know a good deal more than they are letting on, even if it wasn't them specifically, it seems likely that they have some idea who it was.
petertodd|1 year ago
The fact that the inputs, outputs, and fee of a transaction must add up isn't exactly "detailed knowledge" :) I don't think it took me all that long to figure that out when I first tried understanding how Bitcoin worked.
And frankly, the core of Bitcoin really isn't all that complex! You can have a very good understanding of all the parts after just a few days carefully studying it. Which is exactly what I did: I sat down with the Bitcoin Core codebase and figured out what all the code did. Especially at the time, it really wasn't that big of a codebase.
> After watching the doc it does seem like Adam and Peter know a good deal more than they are letting on, even if it wasn't them specifically, it seems likely that they have some idea who it was.
I can't speak for Adam. But I have no idea who Satoshi is. If anything, I think it could be literally hundreds or even thousands of potential people. Bitcoin is something so simple that you didn't need to be a super-genius to come up with it. You just needed to understand some relatively high-level, basic, cryptography and have a brilliant flash of inspiration. Satoshi was a very competent C++ programmer (it's a myth that his code was bad). But there's lots and lots of very competent C++ programmers out there.
ryandvm|1 year ago
His wallet would be worth around $70 billion dollars today and he hasn't touched it in over a decade.
Either he is A) dead, B) lost the wallet and wishes he were dead, or C) has achieved such spiritual enlightenment that has no interest in the personal or societal impact that $70 billion dollars could have.
He is not coming back folks, and even if we figure out who he was, that $70 billion is gone.
fny|1 year ago
astrange|1 year ago
At least it's a good tax write-off. (Well… $3000 a year for life in the US iirc.)
real_satoshi|1 year ago
Do you think the world really has $70B in cash to blow on bitcoin right now? Big players mine the stuff, they don't buy it.
sigmar|1 year ago
To my reading, the bitcointalk reply only makes sense as a snarky comment (ie Todd isn't Satoshi). and the fact it was 1.5 hours after the Satoshi post also suggests it wasn't the same person making a quick correction.
runjake|1 year ago
gnabgib|1 year ago
(49 points, 5 days ago, 48 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732985
(52 points, 4 days ago, 62 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41749352
olalonde|1 year ago
Bengalilol|1 year ago
philsquared_|1 year ago
Who is more likely to build ontop of some obscure code base called "Hash Cash"? Some random people that trolled the same forums or the original creator of it?
Imo this "secret" is known by many people as I have seen so many censorship and misdirection campaigns throughout the years if people mention Adam being the one.
Him being Satoshi also makes bitcoin core seem more legitimate. He can guide his creation without being formally known as satoshi.
It is obvious. Especially if you have ever been a solo dev for an extended period of time (like adam was)
There is a ton more evidence but seems like no one really wants to dig into Adam.
Adam literally stopped updating hash cash and a year later Bitcoin is released... check his website on archive.org.
Its ok. I like that there is still conversation as to who it is. It gives protection to him since there likely wont be anything concrete (if hopefully he was slick enough)
olalonde|1 year ago
My guess is that it's someone who was not particularly well-known prior to Bitcoin.
[0] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=225463.0
ErikAugust|1 year ago
esafak|1 year ago
ethbr1|1 year ago
neilv|1 year ago
Then there's Google editorializing a headline at the top of search hits:
> Top stories
> Bitcoin creator's identity revealed in new HBO documentary
Yet none of the headlines they show makes that claim:
> POLITICO.eu - Bitcoin creator is Peter Todd, HBO film says
> Bloomberg - HBO Documentary Suggests Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Is Peter Todd
> The New York Times - A New Bitcoin Documentary Reopens the Search for Satoshi Nakamoto
> The Crypto Times - Peter Todd Denies He is Satoshi Nakamoto as claimed by HBO...
> The New Yorker - Has Bitcoin's Elusive Creator Finally Been Unmasked?
In general (not just in this case), there should also soon be some huge lawsuits for robo-slander, robo-libel, robo-defamation, robo-reckless-endangerment, etc.
Government is getting a lot more tech-savvy, and "everything's legal, if you claim an AI/algorithm/computer/dog did it" isn't flying anymore.
yboris|1 year ago
https://lite.cnn.com/2024/10/08/investing/satoshi-nakamoto-i...
startupsfail|1 year ago
CO2 emissions, fraud, attacking democracy is on the negative side. What’s on the positive? Why is it still legal?
It feels like Crypto at the systemic level is an open vulnerability not an asset. It’d be nice to have this vulnerability to get fixed.
r721|1 year ago
>CNN sat down with Hoback, prior to Todd’s denial, to discuss why the director is so confident in his theory, whether he’s worried about being sued, and that big dramatic confrontation at the end of the film.
astrange|1 year ago
paulgb|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
broknbottle|1 year ago
https://scoobydoo.fandom.com/wiki/Red_Herring
jeanlucas|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
amai|1 year ago
The Son: Peter Todd
The Holy Ghost: Greg Maxwell"
https://x.com/CullenHoback/status/1843884010013102314
midmagico|1 year ago
dools|1 year ago
IncreasePosts|1 year ago
fragmede|1 year ago
https://www.wired.com/story/crypto-home-invasion-crime-ring/
nomilk|1 year ago
jeremiahbuckley|1 year ago
nullc|1 year ago
But for someone involuntarily accused that's another matter. A security detail is eye wateringly expensive -- particularly one comprehensive enough to stop kidnappers in general.
duxup|1 year ago
They don’t seem to occur in a speculative fashion where “maybe this person can pay…”.
Anyone who knows, knows the coins haven’t been touched in a suspiciously long time, and moving Bitcoin is not always anonymous…
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
adastra22|1 year ago
xOSBERTx|1 year ago
Leave it at that.
commafun|1 year ago
Bengalilol|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
whimsicalism|1 year ago
mike_hearn|1 year ago
1. Satoshi emailed me at the same time Hal was taking part in a marathon. Yes, technically emails can be delayed, but ... why? There was no urgency in those discussions.
2. Hal preferred to write C and was still writing C up until the moment he sadly passed away. Satoshi wrote in modern(ish) C++. Note that the same problem applies for Len Sassaman and basically everyone who has been fingered as a possible Satoshi. The combination of C++, Win32 and cryptography is not very common in the cypherpunk space.
3. Hal was a professional cryptographer who worked on an encrypted messaging product (PGP). Satoshi had some fairly basic misunderstandings about cryptography, like believing that you can't use elliptic curve keys to encrypt messages, and referenced having to do research to understand the cryptography he needed. Why would Hal pretend to be a newbie at cryptography, up to and including not having features Satoshi said he wanted?
4. Hal did try to create digital cash already, but tried to build it on trusted computing hardware. He had a long term interest in that approach, as did I, and his last project before his death was one I suggested related to this tech. In fact there are emails between me and Hal in list archives pre-Bitcoin where we swap notes on Intel LaGrande. If Hal had been Satoshi it seems likely that Satoshi would have at least commented on the ways TC could be used at some point, but Satoshi never showed any awareness the tech exists.
6. If you're trying to be anonymous, why would you immediately and pointlessly reveal your identity by messaging yourself?
7. He denied that he was Satoshi.
pa7ch|1 year ago
This paper makes a pretty good case that the late Len Sassaman was Satoshi. Its a pretty thorough examination regardless if you think it was Len or not and doesn't come to a definitive conclusion.
WalterBright|1 year ago
He was interviewed when he could no longer speak. He was asked if he was Satoshi. He just smiled.
It's just the kind of joke Hal would play.
reducesuffering|1 year ago
trog|1 year ago
commafun|1 year ago
marliesheitmann|1 year ago
[deleted]
seanbruce|1 year ago
[deleted]