122 replies
1d2h
Satoshi having the foresight and discipline to take careful measures that would enable him to keep his identity secret, and succeeding to do so up to this point is almost more impressive achievement of his technical skills than bitcoin.
Even back in 2009, it was difficult (impossible?) to operate online without leaving tons of digital footprint, and we can guess that for sure state-backed actors tried to identify him and probably failed. Unless of course he was a state-backed actor(s).
Why do you assume state-backed actors failed to identify him?
I would guess he is probably known with a high degree of certainty to at least one nation's intelligence but that publicizing that knowledge and the documentation of it is not in anyone's interest.
I would assume that his entire identity is a little more than a cutout for a U.S. state intelligence agency.
This. I assume Satoshi is nation state actor. Most likely the US.
What makes you think the US would be motivated to hamstring its own Federal Reserve, or threaten the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency?
What makes you think that Bitcoin poses any threat to the dollar or the Federal Reserve?
It’s no threat at all for the foreseeable future. Make no mistake though, over the next decades, the core idea is an existential threat.
If a currency like Monero with further developed scaling and privacy features is able to gain a foothold in developing nations, and enough off-ramps are set up via decentralized exchanges like Bisq and through direct acceptance for goods and services, then it is difficult to see the spread stopping between nations with reasonably free Internet, especially as factions within each government will likely have some direct interest.
The US dollar will be least threatened, the longest.
Privacy features in a currency are a double-edged sword. It means that the money is very difficult or impossible to recover in the event of theft, fraud, or even user errors. It isn't a risk most people want to be exposed to.
That’s not an issue to replace cash, which shares the same flaws. But yeah, you don’t want to have your savings in monero (or in crypto, tbf).
However for decentralized people to people transactions, monero may have its chance.
Physical cash is typically used in face-to-face transactions, which somewhat reduces the risks. The scenarios in which a digital version of physical cash might make sense are few and far between. To suggest that such a currency could one day threaten the US dollar dominance is absurd, in my opinion.
Since I’m far from a crypto bro, I wasn’t suggesting this ;)
I don’t even own any crypto.
Sure... I was alluding to OP's comment, not yours.
My bad
Monero for instance is optionally transparent using view keys, which allow read access to incoming but not outgoing transactions.
As cryptocurrency already requires the safeguarding of a private key or a custodial partner doing so, and generally do not accept rollbacks on the base level, there isn’t that much added drawback to making strong privacy default.
Has bitcoin done either of these laughable things within any plausibility?
Bitcoin? No. But if you're asking whether digital currencies (which share a lot of the same underlying characteristics) might transform the global monetary landscape, well, they already have: 11 countries have issued CBDCs, and another 130 are actively exploring them as a more convenient alternative to USD for international transaction settlements. Several of those are in advanced pilot stages. No one with serious ties to the US financial system finds this to be a laughing matter, I assure you. The dollar is by far the currency of choice in trade invoicing (more than 50% of total trade) and foreign exchange transaction volume (almost 90% of the total) globally (Moronoti, 2022). This also means that US settlement authorities and financial institutions are involved in finalising most global transactions. If two countries have CBDCs, then they in principle would have the ability to settle transactions between themselves with near-instant finality, potentially bypassing the current dollar-based system.
I think we can safely expect at least one major CBDC-based cross-border payment system to launch by the end of the year. Soramitsu is the most promising candidate IMHO. A prevailing theory is that foreign corporations that operate domestically within a country will need to create accounts with a domestic central bank for CBDC payments to work efficiently. If this becomes a reality, the status of the dollar's "exorbitant privilege" will be up for immediate dispute. Its geopolitical hegemony over global finance won't be swept away overnight, but it will suffer a major blow. Only time will tell how serious.
You don't say why a CBDC would be a more convenient alternative to USD for international transaction settlements. A CBDC is simply a digital version of an existing currency. It isn't nothing new, since bank deposits already allow digital transactions with any currency.
You're missing the point. The reason the dollar is the global currency of choice is because it offers the infrastructure for any two parties to settle a transaction. The existence of CDBCs for wholesale purposes has the potential to fundamentally change that. Central banks could directly settle transactions between themselves in local currencies via dedicated corridors that bypass the dollar settlement system. That would mean more diversification of currency pairs, with increased liquidity for currency pairs that do not include USD.
It is though. The infrastructure to support cross-border payments with CBDCs is bleeding edge stuff. The term floated around in obscurity for a while, but it's only been in use since 2019 or so. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_CBDCs_by_country
The USD doesn't have a technological monopoly on cross-border payments. Before the introduction of the euro, European nations were trading with each other using their local currencies just fine.
Moreover, CBDCs are ill-suited for internation trade, or for any kind of trade, because they're cash-like. They're intended as a substitute for physical cash.
The speculative currency crises in Europe during the 90s helped drive the adoption of the Euro in the first place. It's a bit outside my ken, but I do wonder if Italians of a certain age would agree that the older system worked "just fine."
I think reasonable minds can disagree about whether CBDCs are any more or less suitable than the alternatives (which seem worse to me in some respects, and certainly are worse in others) but either way, the world's central banks are singing a similar tune in unison right now. Like it or not, the macroeconomic tailwinds favor a more decentralized approach to cross-border settlements and we'll soon have infrastructure to enable this at massive scale.
Again, that's simply not true. You can't point to a single instance where CBDC infrastructure has enabled or improved wholesale international payments that were impossible or otherwise costly to do before.
Give it until the end of the year. These systems are new. Legal and logistical frameworks are being created around them. Southeast Asia will have a streamlined import/export relationship with Japan by the end of the year. Where it goes is from there is anyone's guess, but there's a lot of momentum for this to be the first of several major events over the next 2-3 years.
Hypothetically, getting those who hate "the feds" to record their transactions on a public ledger would be criminal intelligence coup even bigger than when FBI's "Encrypted Phone" platform became popular with criminals[1]. In this hypothetical, the FBI would hack/subvert/operate their own mixer service and eliminate uncooperative services, so that all money-flows are transparent to investigators.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/fbi-s-encrypted-phone-p...
Not all cryptocurrencies use public ledgers. Bitcoin was the first, but it was always intended to add privacy tech - see MimbleWimble.
Zero knowledge proofs and other strong privacy protections are available on more modern projects. Some ledgers are entirely dark, granting a decent anonymity set.
How many of those cryptocurrency were created by Satoshi Nakamoto, the subject of the thread's speculation? I was speculating on the why a 3LA would have created Bitcoin, specifically.
Others like Monero also have mysterious origins. I don’t think Satoshi was behind the design even in part, but it’s one theory.
I’m pointing out that even if Bitcoin was the creation, the introduction of this concept and class of data structure is much more important and will have more lasting impact.
Surely any government agency would have considered the feasibility of new alternatives with similar designs.
Spitballing here… it could have been a test to see how easy they could get a digital currency into common use. The idea of a digital currency offers the Fed a lot of advantages… no money laundering, traceability, etc. it could actually advance them if well executed, not threaten them.
Does the fed employ a lot of cryptographers? I feel like people expect the U.S. gov to be omnipotent when the last 20 years have been just fumble after another
While not omnipotent, the NSA does hire a huge amount of mathematicians and has a budget in the tens of billions. Most of what they do is also behind (extremely) closed doors.
Seems like a very poor fit for the Fed's needs outside of a honeypot for people actually trying to launder money.
I don’t think bitcoin is some sort of intelligence thing, Occam’s razor, it is probably just a dude. I mean, what was his big feat of secrecy? Writing a paper needn’t necessarily leave a big footprint.
But! Bitcoins are too clunky to threaten the federal reserve really. And, a system that is widely understood by laymen to be anonymous, but is actually pseudonymous and inherently traceable, seems like Christmas for intelligence and police organizations.
The funny thing is, crypto is actually good for the dollar.
USDT/USDC are far easier to acquire than actual USD in third world countries. There’s a separate economy built up in Africa, Phillippines, etc. that operates entirely on USDT.
You can see this in the price of USDT vs USD in these countries - USDT commands a premium.
Crypto via coins like USDT means that Nigerians increasingly want to work for USDT, not Naira. Bad for Naira, good for the USD
Silver (#8 asset in the world) is also "clunky" but it is close to being surpassed in market cap by Bitcoin (#10 asset in the world).
A large part of that value is derived from a market cap based upon the stability created by the dormant coins, like gold sitting dormant in fort knox used to stabilize the USD value.
It really does seem like an intelligent design passes Occam's razor more than "oops i conveniently formatted that harddrive then disappeared"
The Bretton-Woods paradigm was already in collapse at the advent of bitcoin due to the corresponding growth of the US trade deficit as the US stopped producing/exporting and began massive consumption from the east.
The USA is in a debt spiral spending $659B on interest on debt annually (13% of tax revenue) while running larger and larger deficits. This cannot really be escaped, and it's impact on inflation is becoming unavoidable.
For the same reason it created tor. For cover. And to move assets beyond enemy lines?
Or a GPU manufacturer. ;)
Even though you are joking he didn’t anticipate Gpus or ASICS at all. The paper says “one cpu one vote”.
The inevitable rise of GPUs and more specialized hardware was being discussed by Satoshi and others on bitcointalk around early 2010. Just my memory as a source, or you can see some discussion of emails between Laszlo Hanecz who bought the 19K BTC pizza and was GPU mining and Satoshi.
Wasn’t it 10k btc for 2 Papa John’s Pizzas?
Typo, thanks
Still a dumb idea even if it managed to hold. One CPU one vote is it's not even as "fair" as $1 one vote, because it isn't a bare CPU that does the hashing, but the necessary power, space, cooling and network connectivity as well. The result would have been no different than if GPUs never came into the equation: people in a position to buy an extravagant share of mining resources, no matter what form factor they came in or how they approach the problem of calculating hashes, would always have had a massive and self-amplifying advantage getting started in the network, being awarded more coin bases and controlling more of the leverage over liquidity than anyone else. in the process creating the basis for a shadow banking system even more inscrutable and free from accountability than any central government or bank could hope to be.
The meme of crypto people claiming to be fighting against the central banking or currency is cynical to put it mildly.
I think you massively understate this advantage. Those with existing resources have advantages in nearly every endeavor possible.
This can only be mitigated, not prevented, and not likely in the first example of a currency outside nation state control, which was unthinkable previously. It’s a possible option for evading asset seizure or hyperinflation from a despotic government to not insignificant numbers of people already. One step at a time.
Ethereum 2.0’s proof of stake eliminates the ability of the biggest actors to stockpile and control supply of hardware, while also providing stronger security and massively reducing energy use from mining.
On its face, directly staking coins over accurate security validations makes the problem even more obvious, but the result is that the rich accelerate their ownership slower.
You may be well served by speaking with some of the very well intentioned people working on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero. From my experiences the majority of them do believe they are bettering the world, as do most who work in open source anywhere, and they continue to strive much more for that reason than any indirect personal enrichment.
A GPU vendor would of course try to avoid being too obvious.
Or a nation state where energy is very cheap and people can live anonymously over the internet ie. Russia or China.
Those countries want way too much control for a decentralized currency.
The control in place, esp in China, allows for the ability to very well track Bitcoin. Also, what do you think Russian criminals use to stay under radar, also given sanctions? Monero seems a great candidate. Unlike its predecessor it provides anonymity.
What makes you think Russia or China make living 'anonymously over the internet' easier than other places?
About energy: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price... says that China and Russia both have lower absolute household electricity prices than eg the US. But they are higher when compared to average incomes.
Those in China essentially have a get out out of jail free card for hacking. Just like we do for Chinese targets.
Any rich Chinese could've banked on cryptocurrency. Also, the poor in China and Russia are very poor. While the rich and middle incomes could easily afford energy prizes.
I don't know about China but Russia is a maffia state in disguise where a criminal rich club runs it with Putin. The middle class (those living in St. Petersburg and Moscow) need to be kept happy enough as a kind of unwritten deal between Putin and those people.
I've always figured some intelligence agency figured out how to reverse SHA-256 by calculating hash collisions on a global scale while wresting some capital and power from the international banks in one move.
IMO you have way too much faith in state agencies' ability to keep secrets. It's information the world would like to know, so it's a hard secret to keep. On top of that anyone with access to the keys of big wallets would be very tempted to just use them. This doesn't seem like a situation that can be kept secret by a mid-sized conspiracy. If this was a state project, how many people would have to know about it and still keep quiet, despite all the advantages of not keeping it quiet, or the risk of leaks?
It'd be tough to get three people to keep this quiet. The dozens that would have to be involved at an intelligence agency, if this is really a project that was started in one of them? The specifics would have leaked by now.
Incompetence fallacy and impossibility complex. Just because something seems difficult or impossible doesn't mean it is. Especially when it's the most logical explanation. People often like to think the government is just a bunch of incompetent bureaucrats. Yet the U.S. government is the most powerful entity on earth. There's not a single reason to believe that any large number of government employees could keep a secret on the level of Satoshi's true identity.
Honestly somebody should put a bounty to be paid of course in BTC for definitively identifying Satoshi. With enough incentive I’m sure can be figured out. Recent AI improvements should be able to be used to scan all his/their writings and code.
Isn't there effectively a multi-billion dollar bounty on finding out who Satoshi is and deploying a bit of "Rubber-hose cryptanalysis"?
All three good candidates for Satoshi are beyond said cryptanalysis: Sassaman and Finney are dead, Paul Le Roux is in a federal prison and it is not known to the public where, even without Bitcoins, quite a few people want him dead so the feds are not going to make it easy to get access to him.
He's probably dead. My two top picks for who Satoshi might be are Len Sassaman (died 2011) and Hal Finney (died 2014)
There's little point in unmasking somebody who's already dead - their ability to influence future events is gone. So even if state intelligence surveys knew who it was, there'd be no benefit to unmasking it.
This would also neatly explain why the Satoshi coins have not moved.
Or why Hal Finney was cryopreserved. :-)
In the future someone steals his frozen head to scan it and try to recover the Satoshi wallet keys...
in the real real far future you don't need his head, but maybe a single hair or a bone? Assuming every DNA cell keeps all memories or perhaps like a chicken running with a cutoff head maybe if his hands to be reconstructed, given enough time over a keyboard he would finally "twich" a password? Just thinking out loud...
You have played too much assassin's creed. DNA determinism has not been realistic ever.
Assassin's Creed thing is more like ancestral memory. DNA determinism is more of a Dune thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technology_in_the_Dune...
You need to read a middle school biology textbook
What.
I don’t see any reason to believe this is remotely feasible, ever?
Are you sure he's not cryptopreserved?
He couldn't upload himself to the blockchain because Ordinals hadn't been invented yet.
Paul Le Roux also fits. He had the crypto knowledge and the coins haven't moved because he is in federal custody. He was also quite good at opsec.
I don't know his story, but I had a little chuckle at the juxtaposition of "quite good at opsec" with "in federal custody"
You can be perfect 999 times and still get fucked by that 1 mistake.
999 people can have a little opsec error and 1 person can still have perfect opsec.
One probably has to be perfect - not just good with opsec - to maintain anonymity from the government. The FBI has multiple side-channels, such as agents physically tracking if you're home at your "super-secure" 7-VPN computer when your Internet persona is active online
You can be good and yet the heavy hand of the law still gets you. They got Escobar and "El Chapo" Guzmán too. And his operation was smaller than either of those fine gentlemen's.
It's a riveting read https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind/
He created truecrypt for his, well buisness. But are there any other indications, he also did anything towards cryptocoins? This is the first time I heard of this theory and so far I really doubt it. Satoshi seems to have been one tinkering alone and in peace with his concepts. Le Roux seems to have been more involved in action, too busy to create bitcoin.
Hal's final words to his family lead me to believe that he was not the creator of bitcoin.
Spare us a search please. The top results are final forum posts, not words with his family.
Looking again, he _mentions_ what he told his children, but it's written on Bitcoin Talk.
It doesn't invalidate that he created Bitcoin, but what he wrote over the years sounds much more like a devoted hobbyist who was far from extremely wealthy, for example taking a public bus to UC Santa Barbara to do his research [1]. Once afflicted with ALS, he became an avid ALS fundraiser. For someone in 2014 with 1,000,000+ BTC @ ~$500 per, and trying to be anonymous, I doubt whoever Satoshi is would have taken the path that Hal did.
[0] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0 [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130625223546/http://www.noozha...
Thank you!
If you dig a lot you will find a footprint. There is evidence that there was a small core team and that satoshi may not be a single person, if it is, he is most likely to be Wei Dai. The other likely alternative is of course the hypothetical state-backed actor.
What is the rationale behind a state creating BTC?
Fund or obfuscate funding for programs they want but the public or political appetite doesn’t want to know about it.
That's already what black budgets are for. And funding drug cartels.
Moving money in/out of places which are hostile to USA. Paying assets in hostile locales.
I'm pretty sure the US can already do both, and that neither of those would be easier with a US backed cryptocoin.
Literal American cash dollars (which tend to work everywhere, even anti-American regimes) under the table would be more secure. But then assets in other countries are probably just paid through shell companies in those countries with local currency or something.
And Tor?
Similar possibilities.
I have a pet theory that the smart people at the NSA are aware that politicians with 4 year terms aren't effective at long term financial planning. The current debt situation coupled with the last ~30 years of mostly loose monetary policy has set the US up for serious problems if it doesn't come up with another world-changer like the ICE, electric light, or internet. Hence, Bitcoin is a hedge industry could embrace against a failing dollar.
I know the US isn't solely or originally responsible for those, but boy it sure ran the ball a long distance.
As far as the US government is concerned, this primary effect of Bitcoin and other crypto is a weakening of their ability to enforce sanctions and prevent money laundering.
If Bitcoin was a government program, it probably wasn't the US government. I'd guess North Korea, Iran, Russia, etc. One of the countries heavily bothered by US-led sanctions, or at least one that doesn't already have an important ~global currency to disrupt.
It seems to have grown mostly in the English-speaking world to start with, but that doesn't seem like a fatal flaw of my theory.
The same could be said for Tor and onion routing, which was a US government program.
Tor was created to allow contacting people securely from within restrictive regimes, wasn't it? Doesn't seem like the same thing to me. The US has a history of free speech advocacy, not of encouraging others to be able to spend money freely.
It's also a big government though, it is quite possible that some part would have driven something like Bitcoin for its own reasons. It just doesn't strike me as very likely compared to the alternatives.
Most likely, in my estimation, is still probably it being started by non-government to be clear.
Trust me, If USA's economy collapses, no amount of bitcoin will save you. Nothing will
On 21/08/2008 Satoshi claims he was not aware of Wei Dei’s “B-Money” paper.
On the other hand, if they were Wei Dei, they wouldn't exactly say "Ah yes of course, I wrote this paper but don't use that name, use Satoshi" but they would of course say "Oh I didn't know, I'll put a reference to it in my paper".
Wei Dei is one of my suspects too, mostly because of Crypto++, but not only.
Why do you suspect is Wei Dei, was there any reveals regarding this in the lasts few years?
"Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead." - Benjamin Franklin
It seems highly improbable that a team of any size would have been successful at keeping this a secret for this long, let alone not wrestle for control of vast BTC wealth.
That's silly. The fact that you don't know who somebody is says nothing about what some "state-backed actor" knows. If anything, I'm fairly confident that some people in NSA/CIA know who he is for a decade at least, and "probably" have it written in some documents that will long outlive you. Of course, this is as proofless statement as you saying that they "probably failed" to figure it out, but what you are saying basically amounts to "it is so unlikely for this to happen, so it's such a miracle it probably happened!" A more reasonable thing to say would be "it is so unlikely for this to happen, so it probably didn't happen".
There are limits on secrets lifetime that's highly dependent on number of people in it. Someone even tried to calculate a formula
In democratic societies it's very hard to keep a thing secret that involved 10+ people for 20+ years.
If that calculation was completely wrong, how would anyone know? We never get a perfect snapshot of the world to compare with.
What that stat really says is any conspiracy involving 10+ people, if the details manages to stay secret for 20 years, will likely never come to light.
With the US at least, it can probably be loosely tested by comparing declassified records (50 years on) with program size at the time.
This is Grimes' "On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs" (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0147905).
Bummer I was excited for a scholarly paper by Claire Boucher.
Well, the Manhattan project is a good example of something that remained secret from the public for far longer than any formula would predict, given the gigantic amount of people involved (though of course other state actors knew about it long before).
The details of the Teller-Ulam design are still quite secret despite being known to several hundred people for 50+ years.
That's unnecessary and a bit childish and devalues the rest of your reply
I would argue that saying "childish" is just as unnecessary as saying "silly"
I think you are over reacting.
That's unnecessary and a bit silly and devalues the rest of your reply
It took ten years to find Osama Bin Laden, which we can fairly assume had a lot more resources directed at it.
You seem to falling into this common trap of intel agency omnipotence when we have plenty of examples to the contrary.
yep, they absolutely use propaganda’s to achieve a scarecrow effect. Remember all the info they fed journalists about bin Laden hiding in networks of underground caves? Then it turns out he is hiding at a family members house with all his relatives?
You seem to be falling into this common trap of confusing "finding a human's body hiding offline in mountains of Pakistan" and "figuring out the name of a guy thinking he is shitposting anonymously on the internet" (and that if we assume that the "shitposting guy" was just that, and not some remarkable researcher with some very specific skill-set, and also not affiliated with any 3-letter agency in the first place — which is hell of an assumption as well).
(Also, doesn't matter, but just for the record, I don't recognize your assumption as "fair". It's not like a I deny it, it's just way too many assumptions for a discussion involving more unknowns than any real factual information at all.)
State backed actors in the West don't go on a hunt without orders. Who would be so interested to order his identity discovered? And for what purpose?
They found Bin Laden who didn't allow anyone of his associates to come within 50 km of him with an electronic device.
We will only find out what FBI/CIA is capable of when the Justice Department orders the identity of Satoshi to be discovered.
Ughh, it's somewhat important to national security who's behind a multi-trillion dollar shadow market larger than most national economies
Is he? He cannot move those amounts.
You all know Satoshi Nakamoto translates exactly to Central Intelligence... Sell all your things and invest in bitcoin. its annonymous, tho (social security number required to buy a piece of bitcoin)...
We got him, look at the map! See the 50' no-radio circle in the middle of that city? He's there.
Sometimes a lack of signal is a signal itself.
Read again, of his associates. He lived in a village, among other houses and people with phones.
he's a human. only 7 billion of them
I can’t believe we haven't figured it out yet.
- What about the email at gmx.com? Can an insider get into it?
- Access logs with browser agents and ips?
- White paper writing style and code analysis and heuristics.
Didn't he also register bitcoin.org?
Not sure, whois showing:
Registered On: 2008-08-18
Expires On: 2029-08-18
Updated On: 2023-10-31
I'd be even more impressed if some state had the foresight to come up with Satoshi
Well, one of the theories I fancy is that we know that Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto worked on a classified defence project, now it is almost impossible that he was the creator of btc, however there is a chance that a group of security service hackers who interacted with him while he worked there were inspired by this eccentric persona and thus decided to adopt his name as a joke when they were thinking of made-up moniker.
Unless of course, the NSA or other government agency created bitcoin.
Bitcoin didn’t succeed, define “succeed” however you want, but because of how it was marketed. Bitcoin is the OG shitcoin.
If there is one thing we can all agree on: NSA isn’t good at marketing. This whole thread is evidence of that.
Well, Craig Wright tries very hard to unmask the creator(s), by pretending to be Satoshi.