Latest Satoshi Nakamoto Candidate Buying Bitcoin No Matter What (bloomberg.com) 53
Adam Back's name has surfaced again in the crypto community's favorite guessing game: Who is the anonymous creator of Bitcoin who went by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. From a report: In mid-May, YouTube channel Barely Sociable, with nearly 400,000 subscribers, released a 40-minute video claiming that 49-year-old Back is Satoshi. The video has since raked up nearly 300,000 views. Back does check off a lot of the boxes: He is a British cryptographer with a PhD in computer science, who, back in the 1990s, invented Hashcash, a system of verification that Bitcoin uses. He is also the first person Satoshi contacted online in 2008, asking about Hashcash.
So is he Satoshi? "No, I am not," Back said in a June 1 phone interview from Malta. But he also pointed out it's better for the creator of the world's largest cryptocurrency to remain a mystery. "It's generally viewed at this point as better that the founder of Bitcoin is not known, because a lot of people have a hierarchical mindset," Back said. "If you read about a technology, you try to figure out who is the CEO of a company, and people want to ask questions. Because Bitcoin is more like a digital gold, you wouldn't want gold to have a founder. For Bitcoin to keep a commodity-like perception, I think it's a very good thing that Satoshi stays out of the public."
So is he Satoshi? "No, I am not," Back said in a June 1 phone interview from Malta. But he also pointed out it's better for the creator of the world's largest cryptocurrency to remain a mystery. "It's generally viewed at this point as better that the founder of Bitcoin is not known, because a lot of people have a hierarchical mindset," Back said. "If you read about a technology, you try to figure out who is the CEO of a company, and people want to ask questions. Because Bitcoin is more like a digital gold, you wouldn't want gold to have a founder. For Bitcoin to keep a commodity-like perception, I think it's a very good thing that Satoshi stays out of the public."
Pump and dump (Score:2)
Yeah, no kidding (Score:1)
Sign it (Score:2)
All anyone has to do for proof is use the Satoshi key to sign something.
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Only fools wanting free press for something will ever want to pass off as being Satoshi.
The real Satoshi will never divulge his identity for fear of being killed.
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It's hard to imagine sitting on that much potential wealth and never touching it. Yeah you can't cash out that many bitcoins without tanking the value but say you need a new car or new roof and want to sell off $10k worth.
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Make an anonymous account, exchange Bitcoin for Monero, go to another exchange, sell Monero?
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I'm no bitcoin expert, but from what I understand, NONE of those bitcoins can be spent (or moved) without everyone knowing about it. However, it isn't exactly clear which bitcoin are his, although there was some movement of some of the earliest mined bitcoins just two weeks ago. There's a good chance they were Satoshi's, since there were so few bitcoin miners at that very early stage.
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But if you can't associate a person to the wallet that moved those Bitcoins, and they were exchanged for Monero, from what I understand (about Monero) you can't follow a blockchain trail anymore.
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As far as I can tell the best candidate to be Satoshi Nakamoto is . . . Satoshi Nakamoto.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
a 64-year-old Japanese-American former defense contractor living with his mother in a modest Temple City, California suburban home. According to the article, 'He is someone with a penchant for collecting model trains and a career shrouded in secrecy, having done classified work for major corporations and the U.S. military.' and 'Nakamoto's family describe him as extremely intelligent, mo
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https://yro.slashdot.org/comme... [slashdot.org]
Reminds me of the anti-iPod comments.
Re: Sign it (Score:2)
Hal Finney lived in the same town, and is confirmed to the first person to receive BTC from Satoshi.
Finney created PGP and is known to have taken part in discussions about digital currency precursors to Bitcoin. He is also known to have worked on Bitcoin related projects before his death.
It seems much more likely it's Finney.
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People keep harassing him, his English isn't that great. At first he though people were asking about his classified work. He was not a programmer. He was some sort of mechanical engineer.
There are thousands of people in Japan with the same name.
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The real Satoshi will never divulge his identity for fear of being killed.
Yup. Satoshi Nakamoto's dead if he knows what's good for him.
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All anyone has to do for proof is use the Satoshi key to sign something.
Indeed, but that's beside the point. This guy is trying to deny he's Satoshi and thinks its best if Satoshi is never discovered. Someone else is claiming he's Satoshi.
How do you prove the negative?
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How do you prove the negative?
Well, to start with, you don't transparently use it to promote yourself. That kind-of sends a both-sides-of-mouth vibe.
Malta a tax haven. (Score:2)
Back also added that Streets back!
Oh yeah!
On a serious note, he sounds like he is a good candidate...
Playing the long con
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He actually didn't want anything to do with it in the early days. Like many here on /. he thought it could never work. His comments about it being digital gold also do not line up with the original whitepaper well at all. Bitcoin was meant to be digital CASH.
He's busy these days doing all he can to get people interested in his centralized side-chain called Liquid instead of real Bitcoin per se.
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I saw him! (Score:3, Funny)
Satoshi key is lost (Score:2)
The original is lost or destroyed and no one wants to be publicly embarrassed for losing such an unbelievable amount of wealth.
Re:Satoshi key is lost (Score:4, Funny)
At least that's the story I've told the IRS.
- S. Nakamoto
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The original is lost or destroyed and no one wants to be publicly embarrassed for losing such an unbelievable amount of wealth.
I wonder what type of computing power it would take to recreate the original key. It would seem that you could put a bunch of bitcoin miner rigs on that task and get quite the windfall if you managed to crack it.
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I wonder what type of computing power it would take to recreate the original key.
If you could convert the heat energy of the planet Jupiter into computer calculations, you would not be noticeably closer.
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The original is lost
Unless you were in possession of that key in the first place, how would you know. I guess we just figured out who Satoshi really is!
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How is that different from buying company shares?
Re:Institutional Investors (Score:5, Informative)
How is that different from buying company shares?
In general companies create (or hope to eventually produce) a profit, some of which is then distributed to shareholders.
That's why most companies' stock values, in general even if not always and with definite exceptions, are broadly dependent
on their earnings, and tend to increase in value as the earnings increase.
BTC produces no earnings at all. (P/E = 0).
General Mills makes cereal (Score:4, Insightful)
> How is that different from buying company shares?
General Mills makes cereal, something useful to peoole. Buying into General Mills means you are come an owner of cereal factory. They sell the cereal at a profit, paying out 49 cents per share every three months. The stock goes up when the company expands, building a new factory to make more cereal and make more money.
Bitcoin makes nothing. Buying Bitcoin is buying nothing. There is no profit, no dividends. The price goes goes up and down and random.
In short, the difference between buying into a company and buying into Bitcoin is that with a company you're buying useful productive things like factories, ships, and labs. With Bitcoin you're buying nothing.
Clear enough?
Everything is gambling (Score:1)
There are no investors in BitCoin, only gamblers
It's fine if you want to use that term - but not if you want to say Bitcoin is any different than other investments.
To invest in something means to purchase something of value
Value is always relative. Buying anything means it has at least value to you - including Bitcoin. But really stocks are no different, you are buying something and then hoping someone else will still find it valuable later.
In BC the purchase is of the hope that some bigger sucker will c
Re: Institutional Investors (Score:2)
And how, prey tell, does one determine the value of something?
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> And how, prey tell, does one determine the value of something?
Go ask your prey.
E
Why risky BTC? (Score:2)
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What is amazing is that Dogecoin is now worth a quarter of a cent [coingecko.com], which is hundreds of times more than what Bitcoin was worth at the beginning.
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hfinney (Score:1)
Hal Finney was a great match for Satoshi. And he's dead.
Not "latest" candidate by a long shot (Score:2)
Bitcoin folklorists have identified Adam Back with the Nakamoto character for at least 7 or 8 years, but he's only one of several people connected to it through similarly circumstantial associations.
If Nakamoto is still around, Bitcoin is in serious danger of being unambiguously exposed as a de facto centralized currency, due to his disproportionate degree of influence over future design decisions and his enormous personal holdings of coin, which are generally assumed "frozen" and thus a constraint on all u
Re: digital shit actually (Score:2)
It's value is determined the same way a car is valued, or a condo, or an ounce of gold, or a stock share: it's what people are willing to pay for it.
Quotation (Score:2)
"It's generally viewed at this point as better that the founder of Bitcoin is not known, because a lot of people have still not figured out that it's a huge scam."
FTFY
His response sounds suspiciously like... (Score:2)
His response sounds suspiciously like what Satoshi Nakamoto would say!
In all seriousness though, go watch the Barely Sociable YouTube video (preferably with the first two videos with the context, it's much better in its entirety). https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
On top of the evidence that Barely Sociable dug up, Adam Back's more recent comments really are entirely consistent with what Satoshi Nakamoto would say. Between being entirely consistent with Satoshi's philosophy and being damage control for the m
Why can't crypto coins have intrinsic value? (Score:2)
Seems like if you could 'spend' the coins on the network itself to run compute operations, and miners could perform compute operations for other people to earn coins instead of mindlessly computing hashes, you would really be onto something. Then the coins would have intrinsic value.
I saw Satoshi (Score:1)
I saw Satoshi drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's. His hair was perfect.