New Research Suggests Satoshi Nakamoto Lived In London While Working On Bitcoin. (chainbulletin.com) 99
An anonymous reader shares a report: Satoshi didn't leave much behind when he decided to leave the scene for good back in April, 2011. But, he did leave enough for us to conduct a thorough research into his whereabouts when he was working on Bitcoin. To conduct this research, we gathered data from the following:
Satoshi's Bitcointalk account (539 available posts)
His 34 emails on the cryptography and Bitcoin mailing lists
His 169 commits on SourceForge
The metadata from Bitcoin whitepaper versions from 2008 (PDF) and 2009 (PDF)
The Genesis block
Various Wayback Machine archives
The data-driven part of the research focuses on timestamps from Satoshi's Bitcointalk posts, SourceForge commits, and emails, which represent a total of 742 activity instances from 206 days (not consecutive). The timestamp data starts from October 31, 2008, when he first announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, and ends on December 13, 2010, when he sent his last email that is known to be UTC timestamped. Using that data we compiled scatter charts in different suspect time zones to see when he was active and when he was not. We then used other data we gathered to further confirm the most likely location he called home. Common suspect locations are the UK (GMT), US Eastern (EST), US Pacific (PST), Japan (JST), and Australia (AEST). The last two were easy to debunk, but the first three prospects needed further examination.
Satoshi's Bitcointalk account (539 available posts)
His 34 emails on the cryptography and Bitcoin mailing lists
His 169 commits on SourceForge
The metadata from Bitcoin whitepaper versions from 2008 (PDF) and 2009 (PDF)
The Genesis block
Various Wayback Machine archives
The data-driven part of the research focuses on timestamps from Satoshi's Bitcointalk posts, SourceForge commits, and emails, which represent a total of 742 activity instances from 206 days (not consecutive). The timestamp data starts from October 31, 2008, when he first announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, and ends on December 13, 2010, when he sent his last email that is known to be UTC timestamped. Using that data we compiled scatter charts in different suspect time zones to see when he was active and when he was not. We then used other data we gathered to further confirm the most likely location he called home. Common suspect locations are the UK (GMT), US Eastern (EST), US Pacific (PST), Japan (JST), and Australia (AEST). The last two were easy to debunk, but the first three prospects needed further examination.
His identity (Score:2)
Is probably one of the best mysteries of the 21st century. There are other theories it was several people using the alias.
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It was actually one man who went by the name: Dread Pirate Roberts
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I hear he retired to Patagonia and is living like a king.
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Who can blame him. Patagonia looks incredible.
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In this instance, disregard
Re: His identity (Score:1)
Re: His identity (Score:1)
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Re:His identity (Score:4, Insightful)
The multiple people would make sense, but not having cashed out AT ALL after all these years makes it a bit unlikely IMHO. I mean I can believe just one person being strong-principled enough to not cash out a bit even when their stake was multiple billions. Of course why did they keep that amount for themselves in the first place, which for me makes it likely they passed away at some point. However, if it's a team it is hard to believe they wouldn't have some access to the stash and nobody has cracked all these years.
I am not interested in bitcoin for various reasons, but I do find the Satoshi Nakamoto identity mystery quite intriguing.
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So say you had hidden assets worth a billion dollars and a few years to work on the problem. You would come up with a cashing out plan.
My guess is the keys are lost, either though accident, or though death. It is possible that Satoshi is living a comfortable life on other income and simply doesn't want the changes that would come with having billions of dollars.
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It's not trivial, but it's certainly *possible* to launder bitcoins, given enough resources, and especially given enough patience. Online gambling sites, mixers, and chain-hopping could all facilitate the process, and if you make the transactions in random withdraws and random deposits to various wallets, it's nearly impossible to trace. This isn't rocket science, so given the amount of time that's passed without any activity, the original wallet is probably lost or the owner is dead.
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It's not trivial, but it's certainly *possible* to launder bitcoins, given enough resources, and especially given enough patience. Online gambling sites, mixers, and chain-hopping could all facilitate the process, and if you make the transactions in random withdraws and random deposits to various wallets, it's nearly impossible to trace.
It's certainly possible. But possible for random wallet ID and possible for their wallets from 2009 are two very different levels of possible!
Think about it, it's already assumed Satoshi had more than a single wallet, and there are so many eyes watching ALL of those early wallet IDs for transactions.
This is why so many stories pop up that "Satoshi just transferred bitcoin!" followed up by showing the transfer was not the early nonce numbers suspected to be Satoshi, although certainly from back in the 2009
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Another consideration - the likelihood of "three letter agencies" or even "no letter agencies" (if you knew they existed, they would have already killed you) know who Satoshi is. The public does not know who he (they) are, but that does not mean that nobody does.
What the consequence of that is is anybody's guess, but for sure it means that 'Satoshi' is not a free agent, able to do with the genesis blocks as 'he' wishes.
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Occam's razor would suggest that they are either dead or have lost the wallet holding the coins.
Re: His identity (Score:2)
Or in prison. There is actually a particular criminal with background in cryptography who is a candidate Satoshi.
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He could have made a lot of money on blocks a little later and we would have no way to know it. Maybe he prefers some millions and privacy over many millions and no privacy.
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Also one of the 21st century's least important or interesting mysteries.
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It's probably just one person IMO. The best way to find them might be to fingerprint their spelling and grammar with other online postings, maybe perform some filtering, and then manually investigate the top n closest correlations.
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On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
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I'm Satoshi Nakamoto!
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Him and DB Cooper.
The answer is obvious (Score:3)
who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
If the person(s) want to be private, I fail to see what right anyone has to knowing their identities.
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I'm fine saying if you want privacy, don't become a politician, a movie star or a tech founder worth over 1 billion USD
Re:who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
While the person has the right to remain private, there is huge value to the bitcoin network to know who are the owners of significant wallets since they have an outsized impact on the network activity as a whole. One person in such a position could cause massive damage to the economies around bitcoin simply by liquidating their holding. Satoshi's is the largest wallet by far. It could be truly lost, or Satoshi could simply be very patient.
One plausible conspiracy theory is that Satoshi is CIA, and they are holding onto this "nuclear option" ability to disrupt global cryptocurrency economic activity.
Satoshi could be dead, or too embarrassed about losing the wallet, or be patient. The risk that Satoshi poses to the entire network means that the search won't end until Satoshi is conclusively identified, and the status of the wallet confirmed.
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One plausible conspiracy theory is that Satoshi is CIA
Something like this makes the most sense to me.
I think bitcoin was created to lure out some of the underground players and monitor their transactions, which was very hard to do before that - you can't easily monitor cash flow on a massive scale. So someone(s) highly motivated and with very specific skill set designed and implemented a system that by itself offered mathematically proven anonymity and guarantees for transactions, etc. But by now we know that in the real world someone with the resources of
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Agreed that he probably didn't "lose his keys". Whoever "he" is has a vested interest in maintaining ownership access to that initial bloc of coins. It's a 1-time nuclear option for disrupting the network.
Manning and Snowden leaks not mention crypto is you jumping to conclusions though. There's a lot of compartmentalization in intelligence agencies. Manning didn't have access to anything like this, and Snowden's access and dumps are clearly related to the programs he was involved in, not a mass dump of ever
This (Score:2, Redundant)
Whoever the creator is or creators are, they have chosen to not go public. That is their right. Get over it.
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And if Satoshi's reason for not going public is for surreptitious intent?
So many people on Slashdot love to rant about how they'll never buy IoT devices because they don't trust a remote kill switch. Satoshi effectively has a remote kill switch by controlling a wallet containing 6.25% of the total bitcoin supply (4.76% of the maximum supply). That kill switch can only be used once, and revealing Satoshi's identity would likely trigger a panic in the network resulting in a fork in the blockchain to protect a
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1. Holding that value of coin doesn't give him the ability to "kill" anything. He can't stop his own creation, because it's implicitly de-centralized. There is no "owner". Unlike a shareholder who retains 50.1% of a voting stock, the holding has zero impact upon Bitcoin in that way.
2. If his [or her] identity were revealed, the most it could do wo
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I never said anything about patents. And that is not the concern around Satoshi potentially being a malicious actor.
If you dump ~5% of coins onto the market at once, it would cause prices to instantly drop to 0, with massive ripple effects to every other cryptocurrency since there's so much cross-network trading. The stability shock would cause lots of people to lose everything and leave the market, and the trust in bitcoin would be destroyed overnight. The network could fork, but as we've seen in the past,
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A right to not identify oneself is not the same as an obligation for everyone else to ignore you. If people can identify the individual using publicly available information, that's their right as well.
Sophisticated Chain Letter (Score:2)
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Chain letters require that the flow of value runs in only one direction. Bitcoin allows to be exchanged and returned countless times. So it is not a sophisticated chain letter. It is an exchange currency.
Bitcoin is legal in many countries. Even China surprisingly tolerates it.
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Always beggers. Do you walk around town begging for coins when you are not on slashdot?
Can we trust meta data though? (Score:3, Interesting)
Can we really trust meta data, though, particularly when we're talking about someone from the crypto community? They obviously valued their privacy, and went out of their way to protect their anonymity. I think it's doubtful they'd then leave such large clues laying around as to any identifying information.
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That's exactly what the article says.
The real evidence is from date/time stamps from 3rd party repositories, and, more interestingly, the Genesis block headline.
This article is the deepest dive I've seen into dead-tree edition availability vs online versions, even citing 3rd party confirmation of what the online version actually said.
I've long embraced the theory that Satoshi was a "citizen of the Internet", and got his news online. It's curious that he chose to use a version headline that would have only
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My point is; can we trust any data? If I were trying to keep my self anonymous, then I'd not only use VPNs, but I'd coordinate my use of VPNs/proxies with my sleep schedule, so if I were bouncing through, say, Australia, I'd be up and active at normal Australian times. Sure, sounds paranoid, but then again no one knows who this guy was, and that was apparently by design, so paranoia is the name of this game.
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One needn't implicitly trust a piece of information in order to investigate its veracity. Indeed, the whole point is to find out if the information is correct.
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I doubt it. That's what moderation is for.
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Distilling it down (Score:5, Informative)
To distill the entire article down to the relevant bits.
Personally, I don't think any of that is particularly strong evidence.
I think the data they have amassed is very interesting, however I don't think their conclusions are all that sound.
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Slashdot's Preview does not exactly match the final comment output. I used unordered lists, which formatted quite nicely into separate indented paragraphs, for the three points in each section. However I see that they do not have vertical spacing between them now that I saved. Oh well.
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I think 1 word sums all the little bread crumbs that people are finding...
Maskirovka
It is a Russian word that means "military deception". In other words, lots of little bits of info that are designed to hide something from observation.
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Maskirovka
It is a Russian word that means "military deception".
TFA written by Karaivanov. Makes sense.
But seriously, one thing to consider here is jurisdiction. Where did Mr. Nakamoto reside while crafting Bitcoin? Who has the right to subpoena witnesses and serve search warrants for evidence? Undoubtedly somewhere within a Five Eyes country. And they would hire independent experts to back up that conclusion. But if I were Satoshi, I'd leave my trail of breadcrumbs pointing to someplace with a tradition of secure banking and strict privacy laws. Someplace like Switzer
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The paper is positing that Satoshi was in London, and thus began working on Bitcoin daily by 4 to 5 PM, and was active until 4-5 AM. There was no activity at all (besides a few outliers) between 7 AM and 1 PM. The presumption is that he was a night owl and was active in the evening and late into the night. Or perhaps worked a "real" job between 7 AM and 4 PM, and worked on Bitcoin after finishing work and deep into the night.
There's something else about this that stands out to me more: Satoshi was regularly active over a 12 hour window. That screams "shift" to me. It makes me think that, whoever he was (including multiple people), it was either part of his regular duties or something that he worked on during downtime at a regular job that had a 12-hour shift. Which, given the technical ability required to create bitcoin, the only real place where someone with those skills would be working shifts would be government or milita
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Doesn't necessitate military. Could easily mean someone in a research department, economist at a university or think tank, etc. Regular "shifts" just rules out someone working purely in their free time as a passion project and likely having a regular employer. It doesn't provide insight into what type of employer that is.
One thing to note is that the graphs presented flatten the data to a weekly pattern. They don't really show if early on most of his activity is on Mon-Tue and a year later it's Sat-Sun. If
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Doesn't necessitate military. Could easily mean someone in a research department, economist at a university or think tank, etc. Regular "shifts" just rules out someone working purely in their free time as a passion project and likely having a regular employer. It doesn't provide insight into what type of employer that is.
Except I don't really see an economist at a university, or a researcher, working in 12-hour shifts. I mean, I could see it if it were something like a particle collider or nuclear reactor or something, but for working on a cryptocurrency there is nothing that would necessitate a set, 12-hour schedule.
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The graphs don't show (and the people doing the study didn't say whether they analyzed) frequency. The graphs just shows that all of Satoshi's activity happened during a 12 hour window if you flatten multiple years of activity into a single week-long view. There's no timeline analyzed, so there's no insight into things like, perhaps for the first 6 months everything is before 9am ET, and in the next 2yr the activity is all after 6pm ET. I think you're concluding a 12 hour activity window means a 12 hour man
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I know some tech people who work a night shift job because there are no managers and they can work on their own projects as long as the machines keep running.
This seems more likely than a British-English fluent North Korean during a famine.
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I think postulating that because he was British and was in the UK he was therefore in London is something of a massive unsubstantiated leap. He could just as easily been outside London as inside London.
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In other words, there is nothing that contradicts "him" posting from Cheltenham.
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Quiet true though I was more thinking of either Oxford or Cambridge or random other University town. However you are correct GCHQ is a much more likely scenario.
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That suggestion comes from them identifying the phrase which comes from the printed version of the newspaper, and 50% of that paper's readers live in London.
Given that London is one of (if not the) leading banking centers of the world, it stands to reason that someone in the UK with strong skills in both computational theory and currency theory is most likely living in the London metro area and not remotely in Llanfairpwll-gwyngyllgogerychwyrndrob-wllllantysiliogogogoch, Wales.
Re: Distilling it down (Score:2)
Yeah, the timestamp data isn't really indicative of anything in particular.
So basically all they have boils down to the genesis block message. This is hardly a revelation, being in the source code for over a decade now, and the language is informative of someone who learnerd a variant of British English when they grew up, but that doesn't indicate anything about their physical whereabouts later in life.
I've seen other analysis of the actual blocks Satoshi mined that concluded they were all mined on a single
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If you look again at the total activity, being Pacific means Satoshi would sometimes be starting activity at 4-5am on Sundays, which is highly unlikely for someone also working late into the evening on Fridays. If people work late on passion projects, they're not likely to be early starters on the weekends.
If the person was doing this during "working hours" (researcher, paid job, etc) then you'd want to look for activity starting late morning on Mondays (clear out your Monday morning meetings and inbox befo
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Yeah, I'm more inclined to believe he's an Australian or a New Zealander. Indians use British English spelling, but they also tend to have problematic use of verb tense, participles, and definite vs. indefinite articles, even among the very well-educated. Not all of course, especially if they grew up abroad (relative to India), but native Indians certainly. (This is not a criticism, just an observation. Their English is certainly better than my Hindi.)
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And then there is that one transaction that Satoshi did with Hal with an IP address in Southern California.
I'm going to be very disappointed if it turns out (Score:2)
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Why would the CIA create BitCoin, and why would the NSA help? If anything, the NSA has the computing and mathematical know-how, so it would be more in their wheelhouse, but I fail to see any benefit they might gain from introducing it to the general public.
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Perpetuating the myth (Score:2)
... that you can do something significant on internet and still preserve your privacy.
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Looks like Satoshi did just that. No one knows who he was or where he did his work from then nor now.
How is Bitcoin ever going to work? (Score:2)
When bitcoin first blew up, I spent some time studying how it worked and how other cryptos worked. The blockchain was a great and useful invention, but the practical application of bitcoin itself remains a mystery to me. Can someone answer these questions?
1. Transactions have become very expensive and rely on volunteer miners, mainly in China. Is this really a reliable basis for a payment network?
2. Central banks around the world have taken crypto tech and will implement their own digital currencies, backed
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> 1. Transactions have become very expensive and rely on volunteer miners, mainly in China. Is this really a reliable basis for a payment network?
They should be a heck of a lot more expensive on L1. You are talking about a global value settlement system. something smaller than a house purchase probably doesnt belong on L1. You will see tiny transactions on other layers of the bitcoin system; L1 is the big settlement layer where payment networks go to close the books.
And china has no monopoly on mining; t
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Thanks for thoughtful response.
Bitcoin will be around for a long time, but is it practical to use as currency now or over the last 10 years? I don't think so. I've found some credit/debit cards you can link to a Coinbase account, but there is a transaction fee for using it. It would be very expensive to use it for Starbucks or groceries or anything compared to something like the Amazon VISA card.
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> something smaller than a house purchase probably doesnt belong on L1
This is an aesthetic excuse that contradicts the very /title/ of Satoshi's whitepaper for the profit and benefit of a few elites.
Fortunately the Cash chain community continues to work on bringing peer-to-peer electronic Cash to the entire world and is valid Bitcoin all the way back to the Genesis Block.
Every impediment to adoption is being methodically engineered away while grifters and fraudsters have been routed from the community, l
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It works like all currencies - it depends on the people to make it work. When a country fails to make it's currency work then it usually ends in an inflation where it losses more and more of it's value until nobody accepts it any longer.
One can dislike Bitcoin, but it doesn't seem to go away, so it looks like it's here to stay.
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>> It works like all currencies - it depends on the people to make it work.
National currencies depend on legal tender laws and officially sanctioned banks to make it work. Bitcoin is not legal tender and it not created though credit by banks. There are very different things.
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No, they don't directly depend on it. Modern laws and banks provide added safety and so increased the value of a currency, but the concept is much older and has been successful long before the interference by governments and banks.
It's good to see value in what governments and banks do for a currency, but currencies have failed after too much control had been taken. Best is to allow for a currency to flow freely and independently just like with trade itself.
Isn't it obvious? (Score:2)
that Satoshi was really Trump posting from his Scottish golf course?
On 2021-01-21 we'll see most of those bitcoins get sold to finance the next presidential bid...
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I don't agree with London, maybe NY? (Score:2)
Unless this guy is really a night owl, it sure looks like he was on the East Coast or Central TZ in the USA to me.
I know the normal hacker hours are centered on the dead of night, but the plots would put that habit in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.
IMHO - Somebody working "normal" hours, even shifted to afternoon evening, sure looks like East Coast or Central Time Zones to me.
Based on a doubtful premise (Score:2)
All this conjecture about the identity of "Satoshi Nakamoto" is based upon a premise that is most likely false: That he has (or had) a single identity. The evidence is much stronger that the pseudonym was used by a small group, not a single individual. If people using different methods then come to different conclusions about his "identity", that should be no surprise.
too much time (Score:3)
Some people have way too much time on their hands. So what if we do find this person? Then what?
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Then what? No more PRIVATE life for Satoshi! (Score:2)
Satoshi wants privacy!
Also see below comment about raiding his house looking for private keys or clues to find them.
What would you do if you were Satoshi?
Offtopic: What if quantum machines can suddenly do 51% attacks and even reverse the blockchain back to the genesis block? Does anyone know if or when that is projected to be possible? RSA? P=NP
too lazy to search ...
Interesting discussion (Score:2)
But it's way past my bedtime and I've got to get some sleep.
Reasons why Satoshi May be Elon Musk (Score:2)
Here's the argument:
1. Elon is bipolar. Not in the sense of bipolar "I" (people who need lithium) but in the sense of bipolar "II". Bipolar people are hypercreative because they are hypermotiva
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8. Elon is well-known to be humble and self-effacing, which very much fits with the Satoshi mystery.
Weird conclusions - much like Wayfairgate (Score:1)
https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com]
Even if Satoshi was in London in 2011, I am not sure how that helps you now.