Bizarre New Theories Emerge About Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto (cointelegraph.com) 133
"I am not saying that Neal Stephenson is Satoshi Nakamoto," writes the features editor at Reason. "What I am saying is: Would it really be surprising if he were?"
This prompted a strong rebuke from CCN Markets: The article starts, "Consider the possibility that Neal Stephenson is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin."
Let's not do that. That's like saying let's consider the possibility that anyone at all is Satoshi Nakamoto. In one respect, it doesn't matter. In another, it's exhausting the lengths people will go with this... if someone doesn't advance the idea that they are Satoshi Nakamoto themselves, there's no reason to put that sort of grief upon them. If someone is just brilliant, you can tell them that without insinuating that they invented the blockchain and Bitcoin.... You don't just off-handedly claim someone might be Satoshi Nakamoto. There needs to be a reason.
Reason had written that "For nearly three decades, Stephenson's novels have displayed an obsessive, technically astute fascination with cryptography, digital currency, the social and technological infrastructure of a post-government world, and Asian culture," and that the science fiction author "described the core concepts of cryptocurrency years before Bitcoin became a technical reality."
They also note later that "Satoshi Nakamoto's initials are SN; Neal Stephenson's are NS."
Coin Telegraph writes that the question "has seemingly come to a head over the last couple of months, as a number of people have gone a step further" -- not only publicly claiming to be the creator of bitcoin, but even filing copyright and trademark claims. Their list of "Satoshi posers" includes Craig Wright, Wei Liu, and the brother of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. (And another new theory also suggests "global criminal kingpin" Paul Le Roux, the creator of encryption software E4M and TrueCrypt.
This prompted a strong rebuke from CCN Markets: The article starts, "Consider the possibility that Neal Stephenson is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin."
Let's not do that. That's like saying let's consider the possibility that anyone at all is Satoshi Nakamoto. In one respect, it doesn't matter. In another, it's exhausting the lengths people will go with this... if someone doesn't advance the idea that they are Satoshi Nakamoto themselves, there's no reason to put that sort of grief upon them. If someone is just brilliant, you can tell them that without insinuating that they invented the blockchain and Bitcoin.... You don't just off-handedly claim someone might be Satoshi Nakamoto. There needs to be a reason.
Reason had written that "For nearly three decades, Stephenson's novels have displayed an obsessive, technically astute fascination with cryptography, digital currency, the social and technological infrastructure of a post-government world, and Asian culture," and that the science fiction author "described the core concepts of cryptocurrency years before Bitcoin became a technical reality."
They also note later that "Satoshi Nakamoto's initials are SN; Neal Stephenson's are NS."
Coin Telegraph writes that the question "has seemingly come to a head over the last couple of months, as a number of people have gone a step further" -- not only publicly claiming to be the creator of bitcoin, but even filing copyright and trademark claims. Their list of "Satoshi posers" includes Craig Wright, Wei Liu, and the brother of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. (And another new theory also suggests "global criminal kingpin" Paul Le Roux, the creator of encryption software E4M and TrueCrypt.
Oh boy (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe he used a pseudonym so he doesn't get curb-stomped
It's someone in prison (Score:5, Interesting)
1. SN is likely someone in prison perhaps with large debts. They can't reveal who they are or their assets would be seized.
2. They lost their passphrase and had no backups. Oops. Can't actually prove who you were. Even if you did the coins cant be accessed. And instead of being a mysterious legend you'd be seen as the all time loser. So you just stay quiet.
3. Someone did figure out who he was. Kidnapped him to steal the coins but actually killed him.
4. He lives in some country where this would be illegal, and he's already rich anyhow,
The core problem with all other theories (Score:2)
Other than, he died. The core problem with every other theory is not a single suspect would not have a lot to gain from proving they were SN.
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There would probably be a lot of people suing as well. Not just those hoping to get a payday despite having no actual issues, but everyone who lost "money" when the bitcoin had a downturn. Stockholders routinely sue companies when stocks lose value these days, you know damn well that if they could identify the creator of bitcoin they'd try to nail that person to the proverbial wall as well !
If alive, staying under the
At a minimum (Score:2)
He could give it all to charity and thus by not receiving any benefit it would be untracable to him.
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#1 doesn't make sense. 1.5 years ago his bitcoins were worth $19 billion. Are you trying to say his debt is greater than $19 billion and so he can't buy his way out of prison? Who would rather languish in prison than buy their way out?
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Well, yes and no. It's often a condition of imprisonment that you can't profit on something related to the crime. Even writing a book about it can be scurinized by a judge. But it could be simpler that that. What if he is in a russian gulag. Might not be safe to try logging on.
But the larger point is simply this: any IP od SN has to start with an explanation of why it would not be to his advantage to claim them.
that's the unfathomable aspect that overrules all other circumstantial evidence.
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Remember that most countries have laws against people making their own money. Not just copying the government money, but making money of their own design.
Some of them wouldn't prosecute, but there are at least a half dozen that have already indicated they have prosecutors that want to.
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They are probably just some nerd who did it for the enjoyment of doing it, and doesn't want the attention that would come from going public.
If they are Japanese it wouldn't even that unusual. This kind of thing happens semi-regularly over there, because people really value their privacy.
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privacy worth a billion dollars?
Neal's education (Score:1, Interesting)
couldn't remember his educational background, BA from Boston U with major in geography and minor in physics, he switched from physics major when he found out geography would give him more time on campus mainframe
well, now, how about that
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Neal Stephenson does not have the technical skill to program something like Bitcoin. What known software has he even created?
His books are full of imagination and mostly just surface technical detail. He himself couldn't actually do much of anything described in his books.
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pfft you imagine the mathematical algos of bitcoin are complicated?
no, they really aren't, just sha-256 and reversing the bytes
you can mine bitcoin by hand with pencil and paper! look it up
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Merkle trees might be an obscure encryption topic, but they're not obscure at all when you're not talking about encryption.
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You may have heard of tor and git? Guess what they use? It's common in P2P systems.
yeah, it's well known stuff and any motivated person could learn and code for it.
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What are they used for (besides bitcoin)?
BitTorrent, for one. Rsync for another.
Re:Neal's education (Score:4, Informative)
Hash trees have been around for a long time (more or less since the 80s, I think). They're great whenever you need an updatable data structure that's easy to verify integrity. Git is the obvious example, where commits are tracked using one. The defining characteristics are (1) that a hash is computed for each node of the tree and (2) each node contains the hash(es) of the parent node(s).
I suspect most of the "blockchain" applications that sound stupid are actually hash trees, without all the other crypto-currency style infrastructure.
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Hash-based signature schemes based on Merkel trees (such as RFC 8554 and RFC 8391) are one of the options for digital signatures that can't be broken or forged by an adversary with a quantum computer.
Citation: In my day job I work at implementing quantum-safe algorithms.
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so what, you don't need a CS degree to understand or code any of that, not obscure at all. Any motivated person with math background could do it
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In Cryptonomicon (1999), which is about cryptography and money, he paid an expert to design a custom encryption algorithm that is used (by hand) in the book.
He absolutely understands the technology well enough to undertake something like that. As an engineer, he already knows what books he'd have to read first. And he does a huge amount of technical research for his books from a wide variety of topics.
I think it is a great conspiracy theory, now a bunch of people have to buy and read a 918p book that he wro
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To anyone that wants to complain about dealing with data that's larger than the machine language used to manipulate it, that's actually pretty normal for simple things, it's not the same as the total memory used when running, or even the space it takes on a drive. (3 different things after all)
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Re:Neal's education (Score:4, Insightful)
couldn't remember his educational background, BA from Boston U with major in geography and minor in physics, he switched from physics major when he found out geography would give him more time on campus mainframe
well, now, how about that
My buddy is pretty good at fixing cars. I wonder if he can build a DYI satellite.
I respect Neal Stephens' technical abilities as a writer, he clearly understands tech well enough to write and speculate about it convincingly. Heck, he probably could have even come up with the concept of Bitcoin, it's not the first time someone came up with a scheme for secure digital currency and I'm sure a few people even came up with something very similar to Blockchain but didn't do anything other than chat about it with friends. But there's a huge gap between that and what Nakamoto did.
But Satoshi Nakamoto did a lot more than speculate. He wrote a white paper, the original reference implementation, and did a lot of the early development. That's not a technically competent writer, that's either a professional software developer (probably a pretty good one), or someone like a mathematician/cryptographer/physicist who's really comfortable with the math but also spends a lot of time coding.
Neal Stephenson is a great writer, but it's ridiculous to assume he created Bitcoin based on the fact he's a famous person who can write about tech and has kinda similar initials.
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My buddy is pretty good at fixing cars. I wonder if he can build a DYI satellite.
Yes, he could. But it isn't a satellite unless you pay somebody to launch it into orbit.
School children can build a DIY satellite, it isn't harder than fixing a car it just takes longer. Check youtube for examples.
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Speaking of initials, what does DYI stand for? Driving you insane? Driving yonder the influence?
Not new (Score:1)
Stephenson already debunked it himself years ago. And nobody who is really this guy if he exists is going to just out themselves and the billions in that wallet.
Re:Not new (Score:4, Funny)
Stephenson already debunked it himself years ago. And nobody who is really this guy if he exists is going to just out themselves and the billions in that wallet.
And... that's EXACTLY why Neal Stephenson MUST BE Satoshi Nakamoto: if nobody in his right mind would admit to being Nakamoto, and Stephenson denies it, then it's gotta be him! Logical, right?
If Stephenson had been clever, he'd have said "Of course it's me!... Naah, I'm just kidding. Then again it might be me!... Or maybe not..."
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Who else but Neal Stephenson can sell books based on the answer being unknown? If he admits it, he could cash in the coins. But nobody would buy Cryptonomicon (1999) trying to figure it out. If he doesn't admit it, he can still sell the coins if he wants, and sell more books too.
And if it isn't him, he also sells more books. So regardless of the truth, he should deny it enough that we can't tell if he's being honest or protesting too much.
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Doesn't this somehow end up with us contacting the devil in a tower in France?
Oh, wait, that's Johnny Depp.
Re: The source seems credible (Score:2)
A group (Score:2)
The theory of him being a group sounds more plausible than this drivel.
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DEVO
Blockchain and the Standard Model of Physics (Score:2, Funny)
Dissociated Press (DP) — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Physicists identify new fundamental particle
May herald a new particle family and restructuring of the Standard Model
Geneva, Switzerland — August 2018
Keywords: hypino, shinyon, blockchain
High energy particle physicists at the CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nullité) facility have confirmed the existence of the long-conjectured hypino (hy-PEE-no). It is thought to be the first member of a new class of particles known as shinyons (SHY
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I propose that the unit of measurement for the hypino be the tulip. 1 tulip = 100 stories referencing Bitcoin.
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In keeping with the hypino's insubstantiality, should we prefer something dimensionless, perhaps akin to the Reynolds number ? But a tulip will do for now, thanks for the suggestion.
Sigh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mix Satoshi and Nakamoto and you get Nakatomi ...
I therefore declare that John McClane is the creator of Bitcoin.
Makes about as much sense as some of that drivel.
Missing a vowel at the end there ... (Score:4, Insightful)
My pet theory is that the Bitcoin network would have had in actuality been created as a form of "Chinese Lotto" attack (massively distributed brute-force by unknowing participants) against the world's most used hash function: SHA-256.
Whenever the progenitors of the system would have wanted a reverse hash, they would have targeted specifically a randomly selected group of "miners" and none would have been the wiser. Everyone auditing the system would look at the bitcoin algorithm implementation, not at how to penetrate the implementations.
The participants would keep maxing out their hardware doing the same calculations all the time anyway and thereby not noticing any change.
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"Satoshi Nakamoto's initials are SN; Neal Stephenson's are NS."
By that token, Satoshi Nakamoto forked off Slashdot to create SoylentNews, and Neal Stephenson invented the DNS system.
What a stupid theory...
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Why would you want to mine Bitcoin? It seems so tedious and not fun.
Most people don't do it with a pen and paper you know...
Re:Missing a vowel at the end there ... (Score:4, Informative)
My take (Score:3)
Bitcoin doesn't need Satoshi Nakamoto. The project has long overgrown him and it's not likely Satoshi alone will be able to change the direction of the project and it's not even clear if that's required. Bitcoin surely could use some substantial changes in order to become an alternative to Visa/Mastercard/whatever but that might require a Bitcoin hard fork which the crowds behind it want the least. We now have companies with a valuation in billions of dollars who are content with Bitcoins transactions being relatively slow and expensive. The Lightning Network IMO is not the solution.
What's more, if he's to reemerge, it might be a disaster for Bitcoin valuation since Satoshi owns over a million bitcoins [bitslog.com].
I'm inclined to believe Satoshi Nakamoto isn't/wasn't a single person behind the project though a single person could represent it publicly. Anyone could devise it in order to have a financial system independent from governments, e.g. mafia, billionaires, anarchy groups, etc. etc. etc. Some believe three letter agencies could stand behind it.
Whoosh (Score:5, Insightful)
The Reason article was about Neal Stephenson. The allusion to Nakamoto was commenting on how the ideas behind Bitcoin line up with some of Stephenson's work. They weren't making a serious claim that Stephenson *is* Nakamoto.
Given this, CNN complaining about this comparison is pretty stupid.
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Given this, CNN complaining about this comparison is pretty stupid.
The fact that I just wasted 5 minutes of my life reading this thread is pretty stupid, too.
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At least you didn't run to the bookshelf and reread Cryptonomicon for background first. 5 minutes is not the worst case scenario.
Before I had internet, I once spent hours at night sitting on the kitchen floor reading soup labels. I was out of books.
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AI is the best explanation (Score:2)
My favorite theory is an AI created it. What better motivator to create the biggest computing network than pure profit, gobble up the most amount of power possible to calculate a worthless result. The AI is waiting until a critical time when the network is big enough.
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Or the reason it's about Neil is that he just released a new book.
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Given this, CNN complaining about this comparison is pretty stupid.
You misread. It was CCN (Cryptocurrency News) doing the complaining, not CNN (Cable News Network).
Good call (Score:2)
I did. CCN. Still, no less stupid.
I'm Satoshi Nakamoto... (Score:1)
... and so is my wife!
Editors. Please, RTFA. (Score:2)
Peter Suderman is not making a claim about Satoshi's identity; he's writing that Neal Stephenson has highly influenced the development of digital currency probably influenced Satoshi. The title is just clickbait.
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Yeah, in the book Stephenson backs his cryptocurrency with Secret Gold(TM) not just nothing.
#WWG1WGA (Score:2)
Whoever invented Bitcoin, I think we can agree that he and the inventor of #Qanon are sharing a drink right now, laughing their asses off.
https://youtu.be/5IBnt-wCXBY [youtu.be]
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I'm a fan of deranged fantasy fiction. What can I say?
"Actually!" (Score:2)
*I* am the real Satoshi Nakamoto!
(From the audience, twenty sequential cries of, "No! *I* am Satoshi Nakamoto!")
Not Neal (Score:1)
I was recently at his book release in Seattle for Fall or, Dodge in Hell, and someone awkwardly asked him if he was Satoshi. Neal described the technology as something that hasn't gone anywhere much, and as a solution in search of a problem. When pressed, his emphatic 'No' on whether he was Satoshi was pretty believable - Neal likes technology as much as any Sci-Fi author, but pretty clearly doesn't have any particular love or investment in the idea of e-currencies.
The truth is (Score:2)
I am Satoshi Nakamoto
Bitcoin! Coming soon to a theater near you (Score:1)
The "kingpin" link is a great story! Somebody dig up Marlon Brando!
Le Roux is a better conspiracy (Score:1)
Neil Stephenson does not quite seem like the guy. It is an entertaining thought though.
I find the story for Le Roux more plausible. Going from developing TrueCrypt and some other encryption software, posting privacy manifestos, to writing Bitcoin. Working together with Craigh Wright on some things. Le Roux put to prison around time when Satoshi goes quiet. Wright getting Le Roux's hard drives thinking the Satoshi wallets are there. Setting up mining operations as a front to try to crack the drive encryption
You gotta be kidding . . . (Score:2)
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and even more mediocre at coding,
Have you seen his code?
Neal would have let it slip by now (Score:2)
He just doesn't seem to be the guy to wrote Anathem these days.
Turns out now that Enoch Root was from Arbre. What the hell? Why did it just pop up now?
I don't think so (Score:2)
Stephenson likes to write about cryptography, but he does not really understand it. Bitcoin is a pretty bad design overall, but it does work. Getting it there requires either a competent team or a very competent individual. Stephenson is neither with regards to cryptographic protocol design and implementation.
Finally (Score:2)
A cowboyneal post resurfaces on /.
Never mind, carry on.
Speculation is not News (Score:1)
The media would do well to remember this one simple truth:
Unless you have the evidence to back it up, we neither care nor want to hear about it.
Speculation, for all intents and purposes, is a complete waste of everyone's time.
It wasn't one person (Score:2)
This idea one person did this is really rather silly. it was a team and probably one where members are under an NDA, such as what one would expect of the likes of NSA.
I'm sure many might laff or downgrade this post but the fact is, it was promoted as being secure and anonymous wherein application fact it is neither. The US government spent billions researching blockchain via numerous university's where the idea of testing in a controlled network would also create a mirror network and with endpoint intercept
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BTW, I do recall a claim NSA knows who...
Doing a search now on this and hmmm... seeing more on this that I had way back when...
honeypot (Score:2)
I thought it was pretty obvious that Bitcoin was created by Uncle Sam's boys as a honeypot for money launderers, traffickers in illicit goods, people evading controls on movement of capital, etc.
A little media propaganda to convince the rubes that Bitcoin is "anonymous". They mostly convince themselves, they _want_ to believe. Then sit back and watch the global money flows in the big ledger.
Satoshi Nakamoto (Score:2)
I know who it is! (Score:1)
I'm not saying you ARE an idiot... (Score:2)
"What I am saying is: Would it really be surprising if he were?"
Neal Stephenson works hard (Score:1)
Essentially they are the product of labour.
Neal in my opinion is a researcher, who makes up stories by connecting dots.
I guess I just said that Neal Stephenson is only interested in this process, works hard while at it and has no time (nor interest) in delivering a project like bitcoin.