Mystery Creator of Bitcoin Identified, New HBO Documentary Claims (politico.eu) 67
A new HBO documentary directed by Emmy-nominated filmmaker Cullen Hoback claims to have revealed the true identity of the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. As Politico notes, Hoback "drew critical acclaim for his series 'Q: Into the Storm' that exposed the authors of the QAnon conspiracy theory." The bitcoin documentary is scheduled to air next Wednesday at 2 a.m. CET (Tuesday at 9 p.m. EST). From the report: [T]he exposure of Satoshi as its alleged creator threatens to raise some huge questions, not least his potential complicity in crimes that have featured Bitcoin use. It could also establish him as one of the world's richest people: Satoshi himself is estimated to control about 1.1 million Bitcoin, but it's unclear if he still has access to the cryptographic keys to the fortune. If he did, this would put his net worth at $66 billion at current valuations. Intriguingly, as the date for the airing of the documentary has drawn near, a number of high-value wallets from the "Satoshi era" have become active for the first time since 2009.
According to Bitcoin Magazine, around 250 bitcoins -- worth approximately $15 million at Thursday's bitcoin rate of $60,754 to the dollar -- were drained from wallets in the past two weeks. While the coins are not officially linked to wallets used by Satoshi Nakamoto, they have been dormant since the earliest days of Bitcoin, when the cryptocurrency was worth almost nothing. The wallets' creators would certainly have been Satoshi's earliest collaborators. Satoshi Nakamoto's true identity remains one of the biggest mysteries of recent years.
According to Bitcoin Magazine, around 250 bitcoins -- worth approximately $15 million at Thursday's bitcoin rate of $60,754 to the dollar -- were drained from wallets in the past two weeks. While the coins are not officially linked to wallets used by Satoshi Nakamoto, they have been dormant since the earliest days of Bitcoin, when the cryptocurrency was worth almost nothing. The wallets' creators would certainly have been Satoshi's earliest collaborators. Satoshi Nakamoto's true identity remains one of the biggest mysteries of recent years.
Probably we won't ever know who Satoshi is. (Score:3)
Cullen Hoback did a good job with "Q: Into the Storm" but he failed to definitly identify Q. We know who it probably is (several scuzzy people involved in an online forum) but no certainty. I suspect this new movie will be the same, but it would be cool if he finds anything new. I look forward to watching it, but I'm not holding my breath that I'll know who Satishi is at the end of it.
Re: Probably we won't ever know who Satoshi is. (Score:4, Informative)
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Q started with some individual or group, but a lot of their posts are by other randos. Analysis of their "encrypted" messages shows they are in line with what you get from mashing a QWERTY keyboard.
Re: Probably we won't ever know who Satoshi is. (Score:2)
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Does anyone care who Q is? An anonymous person who made a huge amount of predictions which all failed. Satoshi is clearly either dead, or some kind of a construct that was used to build confidence, or draw out people with extraordinary hacking capabilities. This whole thing gives you the feeling of the 80s hair and peg leg pants when viewed from the late 90s. Incredibly stale but it will not go away.
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I love it whenever the Voynich Manuscript is deciphered. It seems to happen about every 4 years now. You never know what they're going to say it is. The best part is the publications that say that its definitely solved this time and the scholars who say they've translated a bit but in a short time they'll translate the rest of it... and then are never heard from again.
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I'm still working on the rest of it, but this part of the Voynich Manuscript decodes to "be sure to drink your Ovaltine"!
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Re:We already know (Score:4, Informative)
Nah, whoever designed Bitcoin actually knew what they were doing and has remained under the radar for years without shouting their mouth off.
Definitely can't be him.
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Yes.. And if they are actually identified now without their consent it would potentially disrupt whatever life they are trying to live and breach their basic rights. Authors have the fundamentally right to publish things anonymously.
Hopefully if some media person truly unmasked them in a documentary without their consent they'd use whatever resources they had left to sue the pants off whoever published the private facts.
That is assuming they actually survived and don't get brought up on charges, bc th
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Nobody stopped the creator of Bitcoin from releasing it anonymously.
Exactly which law prevents people from uncovering the identity of an anonymous source?
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Exactly which law prevents people from uncovering the identity of an anonymous source?
It's a civil tort. Publishing private facts about someone else that are offensive or that otherwise damage them to be released and not of genuine public concern gives rise to liability. Matters such as unmasking a burglar or serial killer would fall under an exception; Unmasking anonymous authors or software devs on the internet, not so much. Information of concern to the public (Not private details that the public
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They have the right to try, but others have the right to try to find out and to publish their results.
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I know who it is. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I know who it is. (Score:5, Interesting)
Shin is completely absorbed into abstract mathematics.
It's Adam Back. He has the right expertise in what was then an unusual combination of skills. The Bitcoin paper has the exact latex formatting style as Back's Hashcash paper and cites it. Back went dark academically during the time of bitcoin's invention.
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LaTeX formatting for academic use is pretty much identical everywhere. That's kind of the point of it. You just say "format this, it's a heading" and TeX runs off and does that for you without you ever having to worry.
Judging anything based on a TeX output would have a significant hurdle to overcome to prove any kind of stylistic correlation.
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I vote for Shinichi Mochizuki. Then again, I am Satoshi Nakamoto / Robert Paulson / Charlie / Spartacus.
I am DB Cooper!
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I am Banksy. I have all the bitcoin wallets.
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Complicity? (Score:5, Insightful)
not least his potential complicity in crimes that have featured Bitcoin use
That's a pretty ridiculous statement right there. Why not sue Visa or Mastercard any time they were used to move money for anything illegal?
Re: Complicity? (Score:2)
You'd man Alfred Nobel, whose invention has been used to kill millions.
Re: Complicity? (Score:2)
Bleh, glide error: "you mean"
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Why not sue Visa or Mastercard any time they were used to move money for anything illegal?
You can do that, if they violate the KYC and other relevant laws.
Re:Complicity? (Score:4)
Creating the thing and turning it loose is hardly the same as profiting from being in charge of it. It's not like they charged anything for the software.
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But there are restrictions for creating a specific dangerous thing. There's also potential liability when the thing itself has one specific purpose which is illegal. Several people who run services that basically launder money or anonymise transactions have already found that out the hard way. The "We just created it, how were we to know the criminal underworld will be our only customer and the thing will only be used for illegal purposes *makes puppy eyes*?" excuse didn't fly there either.
The statement in
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But there are restrictions for creating a specific dangerous thing.
Can you point to the "dangerous thing" law? There are laws against creating specific dangerous things without licensing and such, but I'm not aware of a blanket prohibition on dangerous things.
Several people who run services
Satoshi isn't and hasn't been running a service, as far as we know. That was my point. But maybe they are running one of the exchanges, in which case all of this would be relevant.
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Can you point to the "dangerous thing" law?
No, because we don't have laws banning individual things, we have laws banning a whole lot of practices. You don't need to look far for application of this. The example I used on money laundering I used specifically because it is both crypto related and has already been applied. People are currently in jail for facilitating money laundering despite never touching money themselves, and they used the "we only created a trading platform - how were we to know it would be used by criminals" as a defence. And it
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There is precedent. The creators of cryptography have been harassed by governments, but ultimately not held liable for all the crime it facilitated.
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One could argue for some kind of moral responsibility (as someone posted above, Mr Nobel felt pretty bad about inventing dynamite when he saw what it was used for), but any kind of legal responsibility seems quite a stretch, especiall
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It's Visa and Mastercard that does the suing, downward at the bank that was involved. There was one fine recently that was $25M.
Hal Finey (Score:3)
We all pretend not to know, because the mystery is fun, but we all know.
Re:Hal Finey (Score:5, Interesting)
My money was on Hal for a long time, then Lopp come along and proved it couldn't have been him.
https://blog.lopp.net/hal-finn... [lopp.net]
I'm now thinking that Satoshi may have been a group. There's far too many novel innovations released all at once in first release, plus it gives each member plausible deniability (Well, I have no experience in x, so couldn't have been me).
I think the fact that the network actually took off surprised everyone, and the early founder(s) didn't bother to keep the keys to coins for a theoretical pet project that was probably going to collapse in a month or two anyway.
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I'm now thinking that Satoshi may have been a group.
The biggest counterargument is that a group can only keep a secret if all but one of the group are dead. It seems odd that of all the claims we hear of individuals claiming to be Satoshi, no one claims to be a part of such a group (at least, not in my tech news reading).
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Hal was a hardcore cypherpunk, anonymity advocate, privacy fanatic, and libertarian. Hal literally wrote and ran the first anonymous remailer. This is exactly the type of person who would break your "occam's razor" that assumes a normal person would not go to lengths to hide their identity by scripting email responses or transmissions to avoid leaving a cookie trail.
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It's Me (Score:1)
Hi guys, you finally caught me. I am the creator of Bitcoin, and I'm here to give away my billions.
If you send me Bitcoin and I will 10x your money and return it:
0.01 BTC = 0.1 BTC returned
0.02 BTC = 0.2 BTC returned
0.03 BTC = 0.3 BTC returned
0.04 BTC = 0.4 BTC returned
0.05 BTC = 0.5 BTC returned
0.1 BTC = 1 BTC returned
1 BTC = 10 BTC returned
10 BTC = 100 BTC returned
100 BTC = 1000 BTC returned
This offer is valid until the next blood moon.
My wallet details are as follows:
Public Key: 031be840d4235dfecb20fdc94
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Brings back memories of the Jita undock.
I am Spartacus! (Score:2)
I am Satoshi Yakimoto!
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I am Satoshi Yakimoto!
And so is my wife!
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Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?
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AI written articles based on AI written article? (Score:5, Informative)
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An AI would have produced a wrong name.
Hoping for the obvious (Score:5, Funny)
I think the best outcome if it's literally just a Japanese guy named Satoshi Nakamoto.
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It would suck for the poor bastard who actually has that name. I hope there is no such real person for their sake.
I know it's a long shot but I'm sticking with CIA/NSA creation to move money around for their black ops jobs.
Re:Hoping for the obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Already has:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitco... [reddit.com]
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Call me crazy but I wouldn't want a worldwide currency to be one small software bug away from utter collapse.
It's Sergey Nazarov (Score:1)
It was... (Score:2)
...Barron Trump all Along.
It is an AI (Score:2)
Outdated news (Score:3, Interesting)
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An anonymous reader shares a report:
The 'creator' of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is the world's most elusive billionaire. Very few people outside of the Department of Homeland Security know Satoshi's real name. In fact, DHS will not publicly confirm that even THEY know the billionaire's identity. Satoshi has taken great care to keep his identity secret employing the latest encryption and obfuscation methods in his communications. Despite these efforts (according to my source at the DHS) Satoshi Nakamoto gave investigators the only tool they needed to find him -- his own words. Using stylometry one is able to compare texts to determine authorship of a particular work. Throughout the years Satoshi wrote thousands of posts and emails and most of which are publicly available. According to my source, the NSA was able to the use the 'writer invariant' method of stylometry to compare Satoshi's 'known' writings with trillions of writing samples from people across the globe. By taking Satoshi's texts and finding the 50 most common words, the NSA was able to break down his text into 5,000 word chunks and analyse each to find the frequency of those 50 words. This would result in a unique 50-number identifier for each chunk. The NSA then placed each of these numbers into a 50-dimensional space and flatten them into a plane using principal components analysis. The result is a 'fingerprint' for anything written by Satoshi that could easily be compared to any other writing. The NSA then took bulk emails and texts collected from their mass surveillance efforts. First through PRISM and then through MUSCULAR, the NSA was able to place trillions of writings from more than a billion people in the same plane as Satoshi's writings to find his true identity. The effort took less than a month and resulted in positive match.
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Curious Timing (Score:2)
Some people in the Satoshi group have been doing interviews lately but I can't imagine HBO doing a doxx on them.
They don't need the money or fame and claiming credit would be disadvantageous to their beliefs.
My guess is HBO will name the deceased French dude who has already been disproved but can't speak for himself.
Just drama, trading on others' good works, most likely.
The trailer ,,, (Score:2)
Having watched the trailer I have to say it seems more like its trying to ride the wave of hype.
Maybe Satoshi is two people (Score:2)