He’s not one person but a front for a US law enforcement task force dedicated to tracking down cyber criminals and anyone who would need anonymity online. It started, alongside TOR, as a way for drug dealers, weapons dealers, and pedophiles to do business. Neither cryptocurrency nor TOR are actually anonymous. They’re part of a pretty impressive honeypot ecosystem.
What I’m interested in is the pivot when crypto tried to go legit. Some spook or suit decided that it would be used for other reasons also. Now it has some semblance of legitimacy.
Before anyone asks: social media is another part of the same ecosystem. Nurtured and protected by the government and law enforcement, despite any number of practices that would bankrupt most companies and sent people to jail.
It also locks us all down to just the computers that are in our possession and the big tech silos, because now nobody can offer any computer resources free to the public without crypto miners immediately getting dropped on them. Even GitHub Actions got used this way, for example. Now every-goddamn-thing is sign up, log in, Know Your Customer, show us your ID, move your head like the arrows on screen, enter the digits from your authenticator app, check your email for the unique code.
> I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography.
> So does Bitcoin. A Bitcoin user has two keys: a public key, from which an address is derived that acts as a digital safe deposit box; and a private key, which is the secret combination used to unlock that box and spend the coins it contains.
> How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptographic technique that Satoshi had repurposed.
I read up to here, but I wasn't convinced that this is the revelation that the author claims. To my knowledge, asymmetric cryptography is widely used. I have no opinions on the rest of the article, though.
I don't blame you for this initial reaction, which would have been mine too had I not known who the author was. I don't mean that I automatically trust anything published by the reporter who busted Theranos (and won two Pulitzers for other major investigations). But I do mean that if John Carreyrou and his editors decided to publish something this long, that means they (and they're lawyers) are willing to die on this hill, no matter how meandering the first paragraphs of his 1st-person narrative.
Since the story doesn't end with: "And then Adam Back bowed his head and said, 'You have found me, Satoshi'", I'm guessing they preferred to go for the softer "how we did this story" first-person narrative. There is no explicit smoking gun, like an official document or eyewitness who asserts Satoshi's identity. But the circumstantial and technical evidence is quite thorough, to the point where the most likeliest conclusions are:
1. Adam Back is Satoshi
2. Satoshi is someone who is either a close friend or frenemy of Back, and deliberately chose to leave a obfuscated trail that correlates with Back's persona and personal timeline.
You can't sell books or articles from saying something that's been said before, but Nick Szabo remains the best Satoshi candidate by a mile.
He had developed the system closest to Bitcoin, he was actively seeking collaborators to turn his system into a practical offering briefly before Bitcoin was released, and he was the only cipherpunk who conspicuously said very little when the system he'd been trying to realize for a decade suddenly appeared. Satoshi credited all his inspirations except for the most obvious one, Szabo's. No one in the cipherpunks mailing list thought any of this was odd, probably because it was obvious to them who Satoshi was.
In contrast to a certain convicted Australian fraudster who got caught trying to backdate his statements, Szabo got caught trying to front-date them. His politics are a match to Satoshi (tbf. true of all the cipherpunks), his coding style matches Satoshi, his writing style matches Satoshi if you disable the British English spellchecker. For good measure his initials match Satoshi.
I view articles like these as a good test of which investigative journalists are hacks indifferent to the truth - except for that Wired guy, who I think knows better but thinks it's righteous to lie a little to protect Satoshi's anonymity.
Exactly my thoughts down to the indictment of the thought process of a top investigative journalist. The amount of tunnel vision here, that dismisses Szabo based on a tweet of wanting to understand developments in core 10 years later? In all this writing, there's not a hint of investigation into every damning link to Szabo, including the IP leak which was simply dismissed as "dead end".
Carreyrou is flying across the world to finally get a weak slip in speech he thinks finally implicates Back, meanwhile Szabo already slipped up in speech years ago for anyone to find.
> No one in the cipherpunks mailing list thought any of this was odd, probably because it was obvious to them who Satoshi was.
If dozens of people affiliated on a mailing list knew that Sbazo was Satoshi is a decade ago, would’t his identity be treated as an open secret by now?
If Satoshi is still alive (I believe it's a single guy), then it's incredible the amount of self-control he has to not reveal his identity after all these years. Not needing the wealth or the fame and ego-stroking that comes with being behind such a revolutionary technology is enviable.
Not many people are like that.
If he is still alive and just moved on to other things as he said, I can't applaud that kind of personality enough.
One factor is that it's known that he controls the wallet with many billions of dollars in it. That would make him a target for kidnapping/extortion/etc. He could have easily kept mining under a different address though and become very wealthy aside from the main wallet.
I don't think this reveals Satoshi's identity, nor that any prior piece of reporting may have done so. But I do think there's a high probability that Satoshi lurks or has lurked on HN, and perhaps reads these posts with an initial sense of apprehension followed by a chuckle at the inevitable misidentification.
I'm surprised that this is the best NYT investigative journalism could do. It's well written and comprehensive, but it also contains no new information.
And I truly mean it, all the proofs listed here are so well known that you're likely to learn just as much by watching one of the hundreds of "Adam is Satoshi!!1" YouTube videos.
Given the title (a quest!) I would have expected some personal findings to be added to the shared narrative, not just rehash of the first 2 pages of a Google search.
I tend to think this, too. Or rather a small group of cryptographers working for a nation-state. It's the only way to make sense of the fact that Satoshi is enormously wealthy. I don't think any individual could sit on this kind of wealth and not cash out visibly.
I like it. In particular the descriptions of how he reacted when confronted. The public key anecdote is a red herring - there is far more convincing evidence in the article.
Given Back and Finney's close-ish relationship, that same fact could have permeated to Back, and would be a further reason for him to use the name. That said, it's all pure speculation so :shrug:?.
Is it a coincidence? Or is it really bad opsec from someone who was otherwise pretty good at it? Or was it really good opsec and someone wanted to plant little clues that it was finney?
Yeah this one seems absolutely insane, how many Satoshi Nakamotos are there in the world? It's very plausible to see the name on a mailbox (or meet the person) and think "that'd be a cool handle." And it's so wildly improbable that someone else would make up exactly the name of a neighbor of one of a small clique of obscure internet cypherpunks. It's not like the name was "John Smith" or anything.
But I don't know how to square that with the "Finney was running a marathon while satoshi sent emails" claim.
I found this article about as compelling as all the other attempts at identifying him. Half of the cypherpunks (I was pretty active) had the same set of interests in public key cryptography, libertarianism, anonymity, criticism of copyright, and predecessor systems like Chaum's ecash; we talked about those in virtually every meeting.
The most compelling evidence is Adam Back's body language, as subjectively observed by a reporter who is clearly in love with his own story. The stylometry also struck me as a form of p-hacking—keep re-rolling the methodology until you get the answer you want.
It's entirely possible Adam is Satoshi, but in my opinion this article moves us no closer to knowing whether that's true or not. He's been on everybody's top 5 list for years, and this article provides no actual evidence that hasn't been seen before.
What struck me in particular was the fact the reporter noticed that Back had theorized how to evade stylometry. Obviously, if one of the people in question had specifically come up with ways to evade methods, you’d want to re-roll those methods to account for that.
That, alongside a number of other tidbits (Back’s activity and inactivity patterns lining up with Satoshi’s appearance and disappearance, his refusal to provide email metadata, his financial incentive to hide his identity as Satoshi under US securities law) makes the case a lot more meaningful than just “likely p-hacking.”
One other factoid that the reporter did not mention: if you read through all of the cited papers in Satoshi's original BTC paper, only one of them is similar in layout, language formality levels, citation setup, and length: Adam Back's Hashcash
Personally, if someone accuses me of lying, but I am actually telling the truth, I immediately start acting like a liar. It's really embarrassing and hard to explain. I can't believe such a seasoned reporter is leaning so hard on "his face went red."
I actually think the most compelling evidence is the fact that he was one of the first people to get rich from it, which also explains why he never had to touch his vault of coins.
If you were around those circles, a lot of the "signals" in the article just look like the shared baseline culture rather than anything uniquely identifying
The refusal to provide email metadata is the most damning evidence. Adam Back clearly has the emails; he is the one who provided them in the first place during the previous court case. Everyone knows he has the emails. If Adam Back and Satoshi are two different people, the metadata should be exculpatory, and easy to share. There's literally no reason whatsoever to hide the metadata unless he is the one.
In a court of law, self-disclosure of inculpatory information cannot be compelled, so this analysis does not pass muster in a court of law. The court of public opinion, however, is quite different.
The thing is, most of the people heavily involved in early Bitcoin are fairly characterized as cryptoanarchists, a group strongly devoted to the principle of privacy and liberty effected through technological means.
The refusal to provide personal communications metadata by such a person is evidence of nothing but their steadfast commitment to the philosophy that presented them with the opportunity to be part of those email conversations in the first place.
What would it show? If he logged in to Santoshi's email account and sent an email to his personal account, the metadata would be in order, and we would learn little from it.
The author didn't make a serious effort to obtain the email metadata. The email w/ metadata has previously been part of litigation, -- if it indicated that Adam was Satoshi it would have come up.
Adam has no reason to further fuck up Satoshi's privacy by sharing private information. But I can get how people who see no issue invading Adam's and Satoshi's privacy would have no concept as to why someone wouldn't publish it.
Or he wants you to believe he is Satoshi, without being a complete moron, like Craig Wright. Back stands to benefit from this, because he still has money on Bitcoin ventures (Blockstream). If people believe that he is Satoshi, he would still find investors backing him.
The emails would not have been published in public except my opponent had an established track-record of abusing non-public communication that had been provided in response to subponea in order to further his con-- he did so with both emails produced by Gavin and emails produced by Martii.
On that basis, I encouraged Adam to agree to publish the message content-- which itself was not very interesting and matched what Adam had indirectly said for years as this would undermine our opponent's ability to abuse knowledge of that content for further fraud. The same argument didn't apply for the metadata: it has less to no abuse potential that we could come up with, publishing the email content also makes it clear to everyone that Wright had access to the material ... but there was always a risk that it exposed something less obvious about Satoshi or Adam that should be kept confidential.
Regardless of whether Carreyrou is right, Mr. Back's life has now changed massively. The article points out that the market value of Satoshi's wallet is north of $100bn. Time to invest in some personal security.
Why would anyone use bitcoin if the world's factory ie China wants gold as payments?
Even pro Bitcoin people like Balaji and Lyn Alden haven't answered this structural question. There exists market for what counts as money. If that market (led by China) says we don't accept Bitcoin, then these are just some random numbers.
The most important bit to me is that doing something like this would be entirely in-line with his personality.
Also, I think he truly believed there was a good chance he’d eventually be brought back. The most likely case in my mind is that he died with the private keys in his head, and that we’ll never get confirmation.
So I just searched the article for Finney to see why it claimed it wasn't him. It claims Satoshi was active after Finney had died?
What's that about? I used to be of the opinion that it was probably hal, but haven't paid too much attention. What's the counter evidence here? And why do we disregard that?
I am also not sure about Finney, but Hal saw his death coming so it is plausible he handed the reins to one more person he deeply trusted, and asked him to tie some knots but not to keep the show going.
I haven't read the full article yet but I'm guessing they didn't give credit, as the New York Times tends to do. Not definitive but it's a very convincing case.
This article is convincing, but ultimately still no true evidence, it's all circumstantial.
After reading this, Back does seem like a pretty likely candidate, but maybe you could run the same kind of investigation on every other candidate and find similar matches. The filters they used for the text analysis did seem pretty arbitrary to match up with Back's language
I have always thought Satoshi must be dead (as a couple of past suspects are).
How could someone not want one hundred BILLION dollars? There is no person alive who could resist that. I'm sorry, there's just not.
To be fair, if Back was Satoshi, he would need to hide it so his company can go public, or whatever. Because that way he might make -- who knows! -- hundreds of millions of dollars?
Even if moving the coins crashed the Bitcoin price by 90%, Satoshi would still be a billionaire. Generational wealth.
Let's say you designed the bitcoin specifically as a currency that can only go up in value. And then it did get up tremendously in value.
If you already have a lot of money (and Adam has) then why would you cash out early? Your money is already in asset specifically designed (by you) to beat markets and be bubble resistant
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadWhat I’m interested in is the pivot when crypto tried to go legit. Some spook or suit decided that it would be used for other reasons also. Now it has some semblance of legitimacy.
Before anyone asks: social media is another part of the same ecosystem. Nurtured and protected by the government and law enforcement, despite any number of practices that would bankrupt most companies and sent people to jail.
> So does Bitcoin. A Bitcoin user has two keys: a public key, from which an address is derived that acts as a digital safe deposit box; and a private key, which is the secret combination used to unlock that box and spend the coins it contains.
> How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptographic technique that Satoshi had repurposed.
I read up to here, but I wasn't convinced that this is the revelation that the author claims. To my knowledge, asymmetric cryptography is widely used. I have no opinions on the rest of the article, though.
Since the story doesn't end with: "And then Adam Back bowed his head and said, 'You have found me, Satoshi'", I'm guessing they preferred to go for the softer "how we did this story" first-person narrative. There is no explicit smoking gun, like an official document or eyewitness who asserts Satoshi's identity. But the circumstantial and technical evidence is quite thorough, to the point where the most likeliest conclusions are:
1. Adam Back is Satoshi
2. Satoshi is someone who is either a close friend or frenemy of Back, and deliberately chose to leave a obfuscated trail that correlates with Back's persona and personal timeline.
Just a bunch of weird stuff in this article.
He had developed the system closest to Bitcoin, he was actively seeking collaborators to turn his system into a practical offering briefly before Bitcoin was released, and he was the only cipherpunk who conspicuously said very little when the system he'd been trying to realize for a decade suddenly appeared. Satoshi credited all his inspirations except for the most obvious one, Szabo's. No one in the cipherpunks mailing list thought any of this was odd, probably because it was obvious to them who Satoshi was.
In contrast to a certain convicted Australian fraudster who got caught trying to backdate his statements, Szabo got caught trying to front-date them. His politics are a match to Satoshi (tbf. true of all the cipherpunks), his coding style matches Satoshi, his writing style matches Satoshi if you disable the British English spellchecker. For good measure his initials match Satoshi.
I view articles like these as a good test of which investigative journalists are hacks indifferent to the truth - except for that Wired guy, who I think knows better but thinks it's righteous to lie a little to protect Satoshi's anonymity.
Incredible gell-mann reminder for reporting...
If dozens of people affiliated on a mailing list knew that Sbazo was Satoshi is a decade ago, would’t his identity be treated as an open secret by now?
Not many people are like that.
If he is still alive and just moved on to other things as he said, I can't applaud that kind of personality enough.
And I truly mean it, all the proofs listed here are so well known that you're likely to learn just as much by watching one of the hundreds of "Adam is Satoshi!!1" YouTube videos.
Given the title (a quest!) I would have expected some personal findings to be added to the shared narrative, not just rehash of the first 2 pages of a Google search.
I know coincidences happen but that’s one hell of a coincidence
But I don't know how to square that with the "Finney was running a marathon while satoshi sent emails" claim.
Indeed. Would anyone on the short list have known of this neighbor?
The most compelling evidence is Adam Back's body language, as subjectively observed by a reporter who is clearly in love with his own story. The stylometry also struck me as a form of p-hacking—keep re-rolling the methodology until you get the answer you want.
It's entirely possible Adam is Satoshi, but in my opinion this article moves us no closer to knowing whether that's true or not. He's been on everybody's top 5 list for years, and this article provides no actual evidence that hasn't been seen before.
That, alongside a number of other tidbits (Back’s activity and inactivity patterns lining up with Satoshi’s appearance and disappearance, his refusal to provide email metadata, his financial incentive to hide his identity as Satoshi under US securities law) makes the case a lot more meaningful than just “likely p-hacking.”
Personally, if someone accuses me of lying, but I am actually telling the truth, I immediately start acting like a liar. It's really embarrassing and hard to explain. I can't believe such a seasoned reporter is leaning so hard on "his face went red."
In a court of law, self-disclosure of inculpatory information cannot be compelled, so this analysis does not pass muster in a court of law. The court of public opinion, however, is quite different.
privacy?
The refusal to provide personal communications metadata by such a person is evidence of nothing but their steadfast commitment to the philosophy that presented them with the opportunity to be part of those email conversations in the first place.
Adam has no reason to further fuck up Satoshi's privacy by sharing private information. But I can get how people who see no issue invading Adam's and Satoshi's privacy would have no concept as to why someone wouldn't publish it.
The emails would not have been published in public except my opponent had an established track-record of abusing non-public communication that had been provided in response to subponea in order to further his con-- he did so with both emails produced by Gavin and emails produced by Martii.
On that basis, I encouraged Adam to agree to publish the message content-- which itself was not very interesting and matched what Adam had indirectly said for years as this would undermine our opponent's ability to abuse knowledge of that content for further fraud. The same argument didn't apply for the metadata: it has less to no abuse potential that we could come up with, publishing the email content also makes it clear to everyone that Wright had access to the material ... but there was always a risk that it exposed something less obvious about Satoshi or Adam that should be kept confidential.
Why would anyone use bitcoin if the world's factory ie China wants gold as payments?
Even pro Bitcoin people like Balaji and Lyn Alden haven't answered this structural question. There exists market for what counts as money. If that market (led by China) says we don't accept Bitcoin, then these are just some random numbers.
Every couple years one of these articles shows up focusing on one of the core Satoshi suspects, at least do a Wei Dai one next time.
The most important bit to me is that doing something like this would be entirely in-line with his personality.
Also, I think he truly believed there was a good chance he’d eventually be brought back. The most likely case in my mind is that he died with the private keys in his head, and that we’ll never get confirmation.
What's that about? I used to be of the opinion that it was probably hal, but haven't paid too much attention. What's the counter evidence here? And why do we disregard that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g
I haven't read the full article yet but I'm guessing they didn't give credit, as the New York Times tends to do. Not definitive but it's a very convincing case.
After reading this, Back does seem like a pretty likely candidate, but maybe you could run the same kind of investigation on every other candidate and find similar matches. The filters they used for the text analysis did seem pretty arbitrary to match up with Back's language
But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_Electric%3A_The_Bitcoin_... is a bit more compelling. Satoshi is Adam Back and Peter Todd.
Turns out HashCash (system Bitcoin borrowed), was originally built to fight email spam in 1977 - https://vectree.io/c/hashcash-the-proof-of-work-system-cited...
Spend this effort investigating corruption.
How could someone not want one hundred BILLION dollars? There is no person alive who could resist that. I'm sorry, there's just not.
To be fair, if Back was Satoshi, he would need to hide it so his company can go public, or whatever. Because that way he might make -- who knows! -- hundreds of millions of dollars?
Even if moving the coins crashed the Bitcoin price by 90%, Satoshi would still be a billionaire. Generational wealth.
If you already have a lot of money (and Adam has) then why would you cash out early? Your money is already in asset specifically designed (by you) to beat markets and be bubble resistant