Peter Todd In Hiding After Being 'Unmasked' As Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto (wired.com) 77
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: When Canadian developer Peter Todd found out that a new HBO documentary, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, was set to identify him as Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, he was mostly just pissed. "This was clearly going to be a circus," Todd told WIRED in an email. The identity of the person -- or people -- who created Bitcoin has been the subject of speculation since December 2010, when they disappeared from public view. The mystery has proved all the more irresistible for the trove of bitcoin Satoshi is widely believed to have controlled, suspected to be worth many billions of dollars today. When the documentary was released on October 8, Todd joined a long line of alleged Satoshis.
Documentary maker Cullen Hoback, who in a previous film claimed to have identified the individual behind QAnon, laid out his theory to Todd on camera. The confrontation would become the climactic scene of the documentary. But Todd nonetheless claims he didn't see it coming; he alleges he was left with the impression the film was about the history of Bitcoin, not the identity of its creator. Since the documentary aired, Todd has repeatedly and categorically denied that he created Bitcoin: "For the record, I am not Satoshi," he alleges. "I think Cullen made the Satoshi accusation for marketing. He needed a way to get attention for his film."
For his part, Hoback remains confident in his conclusions. The various denials and deflections from Todd, he claims, are part of a grand and layered misdirection. "While of course we can't outright say he is Satoshi, I think that we make a very strong case," says Hoback. Whatever the truth, Todd will now bear the burden of having been unmasked as Satoshi. He has gone into hiding. [...] Todd expects that "continued harassment by crazy people" will become the indefinite status quo. But he says the potential personal safety implications are his chief concern -- and the reason he has gone into hiding. "Obviously, falsely claiming that ordinary people of ordinary wealth are extraordinarily rich exposes them to threats like robbery and kidnapping," says Todd. "Not only is the question dumb, it's dangerous. Satoshi obviously didn't want to be found, for good reasons, and no one should help people trying to find Satoshi." "I think the idea that it puts their life [at risk] is a little overblown," says Hoback. "This person is potentially on track to become the wealthiest on Earth."
"If countries are considering adopting this in their treasuries or making it legal tender, the idea that there's potentially this anonymous figure out there who controls one twentieth of the total supply of digital gold is pretty important."
Documentary maker Cullen Hoback, who in a previous film claimed to have identified the individual behind QAnon, laid out his theory to Todd on camera. The confrontation would become the climactic scene of the documentary. But Todd nonetheless claims he didn't see it coming; he alleges he was left with the impression the film was about the history of Bitcoin, not the identity of its creator. Since the documentary aired, Todd has repeatedly and categorically denied that he created Bitcoin: "For the record, I am not Satoshi," he alleges. "I think Cullen made the Satoshi accusation for marketing. He needed a way to get attention for his film."
For his part, Hoback remains confident in his conclusions. The various denials and deflections from Todd, he claims, are part of a grand and layered misdirection. "While of course we can't outright say he is Satoshi, I think that we make a very strong case," says Hoback. Whatever the truth, Todd will now bear the burden of having been unmasked as Satoshi. He has gone into hiding. [...] Todd expects that "continued harassment by crazy people" will become the indefinite status quo. But he says the potential personal safety implications are his chief concern -- and the reason he has gone into hiding. "Obviously, falsely claiming that ordinary people of ordinary wealth are extraordinarily rich exposes them to threats like robbery and kidnapping," says Todd. "Not only is the question dumb, it's dangerous. Satoshi obviously didn't want to be found, for good reasons, and no one should help people trying to find Satoshi." "I think the idea that it puts their life [at risk] is a little overblown," says Hoback. "This person is potentially on track to become the wealthiest on Earth."
"If countries are considering adopting this in their treasuries or making it legal tender, the idea that there's potentially this anonymous figure out there who controls one twentieth of the total supply of digital gold is pretty important."
Re:I'm actually surprised... (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine you're North Korea.
Or just some psycho huffing paint thinner and playing with your knife collection in a basement.
Hey! Look! They found this guy who has billions in untraceable, easily transferrable money and he doesn't seem to have body guards or a secure house or anything. Why not go over there, tie him up, attach a car battery to his nuts and find out the codes. And if he doesn't give them to us, no problem, we shoot him in the head.
I am pretty sure he isn't Satoshi, but other people might have a different opinion and actually do this kinda thing.
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"we shoot him in the head." at that point the ball is ripped up and deflated and everyone should just go home, because there is no getting the codes now.
No, it isn't that simple. The criminals are in deep whether or not they realize the fact The group can be charged with a conspiracy which legally means everyone in the group is guilty for any crimes any individual of the group may have committed. There might be no payoff or profit, but the legal costs are very high and unrelenting.
Re:I'm actually surprised... (Score:5, Interesting)
The only reason Bitcoin has any value is because people have decided it has. There is no underlying asset to give it value other than the real-world currency invested in it, and that's a fraction of it's reported value. If any of the'big players' tried to withdraw their Bitcoin we would very quickly discover that there are not enough suckers available to buy it at the value it's currently given. This would collapse it's value very quickly, and the whole scam would be over.
Remember how a run on the banks collapsed them back in 2008? Those banks for the most part actually did have the underlying assets to cover their debts. They just didn't have the cash on hand. And yet this collapsed whole economies. Luckily, Bitcoin hasn't been integrated into our economies the way banks are, so when it collapses it shouldn't take whole economies with it, just the paper fortunes of some people who are using this scam to inflate their declared assets.
This myth of their being one person who has such a huge amount of value in Bitcoin is part of the myth that keeps the whole scam afloat. It doesn't even matter if this person exists. They can never claim their supposed fortune because if they did it would turn out to be near worthless, and so would the whole crypto scam.
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ALL value is subjective.
Bitcoin isnt debt, its a comodity.
The Bitcoin held by the keys attributed to Satoshi are irrelevent. They are considered lost for ever.
You havent studied money or Bitcoin enough if you still think its a scam. You simply have no idea what money is.
I would suggest more studying.
Broken Money by Lyn Alden
The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Amous
Or even The Creature from Jekyll Island for historical context on money.
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To some degree I agree with that.
However there is historical context to wearing ones wealth as jewlery.
Its easier to protect something on you.
You can carry your wealth with you everywhere you go.
The historical context was early hunter gatherer tribes wearing bone necklaces that where very difficult to craft.
Someone in the tribe took the painstaking time to craft them, and those who contributed most (hunting, etc...) exchanged their catches for them.
They could exchange their necklaces or parts of them for o
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Bitcoin is the best ledger that cannot be stolen, confiscated, censored or inflated.
Two of those are incorrect. Many people have had their Bitcoin stolen, either by trickery, or by force (beating with a hammer to get the password).
If Elon Musk tweets about Bitcoin [vox.com] then the price goes up or down.
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1. Nothing can prevent fraud, or a hammer attack of you care for your life
- However, if you do not care for your life, you CAN protect your bitcoin from violence
- 2 of 3 multi signature and you can give it up even to save your life
- As for fraud, this is irrelevant. The person could have been defrauded regardless of their asset. You cant attack the network.
2. You need to understand inflation before ma
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We might be saying the same thing, but your wording is confusing me.
Price inflation is a result of monetary inflation.
When you inflate the money supply, prices will rise.
Bitcoins price going up is a direct result, over time, of monetary inflation around the world, including USD.
And yes, as you say, when the price of Bitcoin goes up, in USD terms, or any other currency, its costs less BTC to purchase an item denominated in that currency.
This is a good thing. We should be in a permenant state of deflation as
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"If I can't have it, no one can" isn't exactly a rare attitude.
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With about 1.1 million BTC in Satoshi-controlled wallets, that's about $66 billion. For even a fraction of that, there are a lot of fucks to be given.
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Agreed. People get killed over $200 shoes; It's naive to think someone wouldn't abduct, torture, and kill Mr. Todd if they think he's hiding tens of billions in untraceable cryptocurrency.
The risk is nontrivial.
There is still no evidence supporting the claim... (Score:4, Informative)
This guy is a spammer who's getting spammed. From what I can tell, Peter Todd is just one of thousands of generic crypto spammers on twitter. His job has been generating false metrics for false narratives. The documentary is just another version of that. Scammers like
Peter Todd aren't the victims of the internet. They're the predators.
Reminds me of Dan Brown and Linus Torvalds (Score:3)
This reminds me of the time Dan Brown (during the SCO era) went about claiming Linus Torvalds hadn't written Linux because Dan Brown couldn't believe that Linus was able to write 10k lines of code over a summer. And this in spite of the fact that everyone he interviewed told him otherwise. The rest of us just look at this from afar and wonder if this guy did it to himself or if it was just some calamity that happened to him, the metaphorical career equivalent of having your house fall off a cliff.
Victim Predator. (Score:4, Insightful)
There is still no evidence supporting the claim that Peter Todd is Satoshi. The entire narrative around this guy being Satoshi is just marketing for a documentary. There is no new evidence and no one has actually done the work of proving that this guy had anything to do with the founding of bitcoin. This guy is a spammer who's getting spammed. From what I can tell, Peter Todd is just one of thousands of generic crypto spammers on twitter. His job has been generating false metrics for false narratives. The documentary is just another version of that. Scammers like Peter Todd aren't the victims of the internet. They're the predators.
If he’s more the predator, he’s in hiding. From the kind of greed that would murder his children in cold blood without a second thought, for a mere fraction of the wealth he allegedly owns.
If he’s more the victim, he’s in hiding. From the kind of greed that would murder his children in cold blood without a second thought, for a mere fraction of the wealth he allegedly owns.
Regardless of the label you want to use, I sure as shit wouldn’t want to be in his shoes. Not on this planet.
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If you really do have that level of wealth, you use some of it for personal security. It's a tried and tested process, used by centuries by royalty etc.
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If you really do have that level of wealth, you use some of it for personal security. It's a tried and tested process, used by centuries by royalty etc.
Security is an illusion. And paranoia can become a prison.
IMHO, the key to having that kind of wealth, is to not flaunt it wildly and keep your wealth a private matter. The problem with a society that rewards narcissism, is very few want to keep that a private matter.
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Nick Szabo also likely knows who it is since it seems likely Satoshi consulted with him.
Re:There is still no evidence supporting the claim (Score:4, Insightful)
Bake him away toys!
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Peter Todd is just one of thousands of generic crypto spammers on twitter
He was a Bitcoin Core developer. You seem to imply he only has tangential association by being a shitcoin shill
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Peter Todd aren't the victims of the internet. They're the predators.
Are you in hiding from Peter Todd? That must have been one hell of a tweet about crypto he made if that's the case.
Here's the thing: You can be both a victim and a predator. There's zero reason it has to be one or the other.
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Why do we care if there isn't reliable proof? We aren't the people who are now incentivized to go abduct an innocent man and beat them until the magic internet beans fall out.
"The internet" didn't do this, Hobeck did. Hobeck is a jerk who did an awful thing, and you somehow wanna jump straight to smearing the victim? What the heck is wrong with you?
Asymmetry begets asymmetry (Score:3, Insightful)
The fundamental asymmetry of cryptography, the one way function begets another kind of asymmetry. If he were Satoshi, he could easily prove it by transferring coins from a Satoshi wallet. What he can't do is prove he ISN'T Satoshi. What a giant hassle--all of the fame, and probably none of the money. The exact opposite of what a lot of us want.
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Well, that's sort of the central theme here. That the key and passphrase are considered guaranteed proof of identity which is why no one social engineers money out of the blockchain, just unsophisticated users.
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Hoback needs a head shake (Score:4, Insightful)
Hoback has gone out to everyone on planet earth and said "hey, see this guy over here, he secretly is in control of hundreds of millions of dollars, and acts like he isn't"
This immediately makes Todd a target for theft, kidnapping, extortion, and innumerable other threats.
Now let's assume for a moment that Todd is not Satoshi.
He is in this situation, and, unlike other celebrities and wealthy individuals, *he has no resources to deal with the problem*.
I smell a lawsuit.
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Hundreds of millions? Try tens of billions. If the real Satoshi could slowly liquidate their Bitcoin wallets without creating a market panic (fat chance, but for sake of argument), they would have enough money to be solidly in the middle of the Forbes top 100 list of wealthiest people.
Re: Hoback needs a head shake (Score:2)
Even worse
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If the real Satoshi could slowly liquidate their Bitcoin wallets without creating a market panic
Actually that's not how it works. Everyone in the Forbes 100 list has paper wealth they can't easily liquidate. Just by showing he has the wallet he is in the list, no requirement to sell anything. People's wealth are judged by their assets, paper or otherwise, not by their cash on hand.
The real Satoshi is in the Forbes 100 list, even if he forgot his password.
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It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World. (Score:3)
You see that actually makes Hoback more of a scumbag, right?
If the real Satoshi is still alive and has the keys to the wallet, the only ethical move at this point is to publish the keys and quash this dangerous foolishness once and for all.
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declared to be the means by which people could be freed from banks/governments
This doesn't make sense: as the market value of a crypto on average is ultimately determined by banks and governments. They would be completely worthless if banks/government-regulated crypto exchanges did not exist who are willing to deal in it.
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Your ideas intrigue me, and i would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
If countries are... (Score:5, Insightful)
From the summary:
That it's even possible for one unknown person to control 5% of the total money supply is a really good reason why countries should absolutely not adopt it. There are many others, but that one alone is enough.
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Musk is worth $246.4bn
~1% of US GDP on his own.
Everyone know who that twit is.
And that's bad enough.
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GDP (Score:3)
GDP is not money supply. OP is talking about money supply. GDP is fluid, wealth is static.
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Musk is worth $246.4bn. ~1% of US GDP on his own.
GDP is not money supply. Illiquid assets like Musk's ownership of Tesla and SpaceX also aren't part of either the money supply or GDP. And even if the comparison made any sense, Musk wouldn't "control" or "own" X% of US dollars, because the US can always create or destroy US dollars as needed. (BTW, the inability of governments to regulate the supply is another reason adopting BTC is a bad idea... even worse than using precious metals as a currency base.)
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Any fiat currency is controlled by a single entity.
With bitcoin, 1 person has a known quantity but can't arbitrarily make more. With fiat currency one entity has the ability to make any quantity of currency they wish.
Holback is a shithead (Score:5, Insightful)
>"I think the idea that it puts their life [at risk] is a little overblown," says Hoback. "This person is potentially on track to become the wealthiest on Earth."
Well, what do you think puts their life at risk, idiot? The fact that they have no money and can't hire a bodyguard means that any crazy with an idea to torture the key out of Satoshi is perking up right about now.
This irresponsible idiot should be framed for something that would put him in a similar target category.
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There's a reason that wealthy people have private security. They have been targets for ransom, extortion, and murder since time immemorial.
Truly a scummy approach to "reporting" (Score:2)
Of course Todd has to go into hiding, because a documentarist wanted to show off, and apparently didn't even give him advance warning that this was going to happen. This is a terrible thing for someone to do to a normal person who doesn't have an armed security detail on staff because they're not a millionaire.
Declaring Todd to be Satoshi like that just turns the poor guy into a Magic Internet Money Pinata. Any number of criminal organizations now might readily take a chance that if they grab him, dangle
Re:Truly a scummy approach to "reporting" (Score:5, Insightful)
I would say the accusation rises to the level of criminal - reckless endangerment.
Of course he's not Satoshi. NOBODY would still be sitting on those coins by this point, they'd have been bleeding them off from the first sudden rise in value.
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NOBODY would still be sitting on those coins by this point,
But we do (or should) know Nakamoto's address. Even if we don't know the individual in meat space who holds the corresponding private key. And it would be a simple matter for people to examine blocks in the blockchain, all the way back to the genesis block, to detect coins being "bled off".
And just for morbid curiosity, or the motivations of numerous regulatory agencies, this activity would not go unnoticed.
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The reason they're such a big deal NOW is because they're a giant horde and the already touchy ecosystem would crash if those coins moved. ...But if they were being moved from the very beginning, it wouldn't be such a big deal today.
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But if they were being moved from the very beginning,
I'm not sure what sort of access to historical blockchains the public, or at least analysts have. But conceivably someone could have been archiving them since day 1. And if that's the case, that movement would have been detectable. And with a bit of digital forensics, we (or the regulators) might have outed Satoshi a long time ago.
My guess: the founders Bitcoin probably exists under the original ownership. And it does indeed represent a threat to the market. Perhaps Satoshi is altruistic and plane to leave
Re:Truly a scummy approach to "reporting" (Score:5, Insightful)
They cannot possibly unload them as people would notice immediately i believe. In that situation, it is far better to have two accounts, or 10 or 100. each with an amount in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. just convert pieces of that when you need some cash.
So he had the first coins. Saw the price going up and purchased a few thousand over different wallets while they were still 19 cents or whatever. Just spends those off one account at a time. Never needs to touch the main account because no one can spend billions of dollars with no accountability of where that money came from.
And practically, no one actually needs billions of dollars. a few million tax free over 10 years would be plenty for almost everyone.
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a few million tax free
I have to believe they'd get hit by some sort of capital gains, at least, right? I'm no tax expert, but if your investments increase in value, and you cash out, you pay the tax on the gain, I thought.
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I have to believe they'd get hit by some sort of capital gains, at least, right?
If Nakamoto was smart enough to create this currency, then he is probably smart enough to relocate himself to some forward-thinking jurisdiction that doesn't tax its citizens for innovating and creating wealth.
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Yes,
Human nature would have prevailed.
Would anyone miss out the chance to cash in on literally billions of value?
You have to be extremely altruistic. And given the profile this person is not it.
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I am not sure; those are probably some of the most watched assets in the world.
The moment someone even begins to slowly bleed them off, it will be noticed. Further because of the current ownership and the overall 'newness' of crypto in the financial world, I think it will create some kind of instant panic. In fact selling them slowly will make people panic because the panic-ers will assume it is being done that way to avoid a panic!
Of course "cooler" heads will step in and suggest - that well if "Satoshi"
Satoshi was actually (Score:5, Interesting)
Dave Kleiman. See also https://casetext.com/case/kleiman-v-wright-14 - where did all those Bitcoins come from?
Actually there's plenty of reasons to believe Dave wasn't, but until there's a better candidate I'm going with him. The man was Army, supposedly an ex-fed, was on the proper mailing lists to be Satoshi, and knew his stuff when it came to security, given how often he was a technical editor or contributor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Kleiman#Publications
If Satoshi were not dead (as Kleiman is, passed in 2013) how could he resist doing something with the billions of dollar of Bitcoin he would have, at least moving them around to another wallet?
Also, Dave Kleiman's specialty was Windows security - the first release of Bitcoin was Windows only? https://github.com/Maguines/Bitcoin-v0.1/tree/master/bitcoin0.1
Keeping my betting chips there for now.
Lie down with dogs (Score:1)
"I think the idea that it puts their life [at risk (Score:2)
Why does no one mention the obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whoever Satoshi is or was, Bitcoin was an experiment. A prototype. There was no reason to expect it to get so big. Those early coins were not worth much.
The key is lost.
Mr 5 percent? (Score:3)
Over 100 years ago Calouste Gulbenkian, an extraordinarily smart petroleum engineer, negotiated to develop oil fields discovered east of Istanbul. His fee was 5 percent of the value extracted. He became extraordinarily wealthy. Not a dickhead too, according to common history.
Translation (Score:2)
What I want (to sell my product) is more important, so it's all good.
HBO == irresponsible, junk, evil "journalism", and (Score:2)
Cullen Hoback is an arsehole of titanic proportions. May the Jigsaw killer get him and hang him by his putrid balls.
They both deserve to be sued into oblivion... Life-destroying bastards. Too bad that their victim will be too busy hiding in some mouse hole from now on...
I'm furious right now. I know that it doesn't mean much, but I cancelled my HBO when this sh!t hit the fan, and will never use it again. And I'm asking my friends to do the same.
The dude is like 30 years old. (Score:2)
He didn't invent bitcoin when he was 12.
Maybe just not interested (Score:2)