Comment by kaladin-jasnah
8 days ago
> I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography.
> So does Bitcoin. A Bitcoin user has two keys: a public key, from which an address is derived that acts as a digital safe deposit box; and a private key, which is the secret combination used to unlock that box and spend the coins it contains.
> How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptographic technique that Satoshi had repurposed.
I read up to here, but I wasn't convinced that this is the revelation that the author claims. To my knowledge, asymmetric cryptography is widely used. I have no opinions on the rest of the article, though.
>I read up to here, but I wasn't convinced that this is the revelation that the author claims
The rest of the arguments is as weak:
1) both released open-source software
2) both don't like spam
3) both like using pseudonyms online
4) both love freedom
5) both are anti-copyright
etc.
Basically, the author found that Adam Back used the same words on X as Satoshi did in some emails (including such rare words as "dang," "backup," and "abandonware") and then decided to find every possible "link" they could to build the case, even if most of the links are along the lines of "Both are humans! Coincidence? I think not."
It's weird they spent so much time on the written word similarities, when the biggest reveal here is that Back disappears off the email lists (on a topic he is VERY interested in and has historically corresponded on) when Nakamoto appears, and then comes back when Nakamoto disappears.
This is one of the few real clues in this article, I would say.
Befitting a writer, though.
I use "dang" as a nod to Gary Larson.
Yep, As fans of Larson's The Far Side, probably every American and Americo-phile computer geek and cypherpunk used 'dang'
Same goes for the rest of your list.
I think this misses the point. The point is that interests and writing style matches, which means there's a higher chance they are the same person.
The more similarities you find, the closer the match. It's in no way proof, of course. But it does provide good reason to look closer
Only if those similarities are indicating more than 'generic internet hacker' for both of them. You only need 23 bits to identify a person but those are 23 uncorrelated bits, and all the 'similarities' presented here are extremely strongly correlated with themselves.
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Similarities in style and word were common enough in small circles such as the cyphyrpunks that spawned those discussions.
Then there's not altogether unlikely chance that Satoshi is a nodding homage to Nicolas Bourbaki, each contributor holding part of a multiparty voting key.
The interests and writing style differentiate Mr. (Dr.?) Back from the general public, sure. But from what I’m reading, they don’t do a great job of distinguishing between 90s hackers.
“Get this, his PhD thesis dealt with a computer language called C++, just like Bitcoin papers used” seems both confused and impossibly lazy to me.
> “Scrap patents and copyright,” Mr. Back wrote in September 1997.
> Satoshi did a similar thing. He released the Bitcoin software under M.I.T.’s open-source license
Really?
Like saying “get this, his college-aged musical interests included the Urban American musical style known as ‘Hip Hop’; therefore Tupac didn’t really die and this is him.” Heavy on insinuation, light on seriousness. Strong “…you’re not from around here, are you?” vibes.
What does this kind of journalism hope to accomplish, anyway? Beyond bothering middle-aged nerds for gossip? And providing a frame for the author’s cute little sleuth jape?
“Good reason to look closer” assumes there’s good reason to pick through ancient rubble in the first place.
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TIL I am Satoshi.
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I remember having conversations with my brother about Hashcash at the time. There were plenty of nerds that followed that mailing list that had similar technical and political ideas, so I think you'd find a high number of coincidences within an audience that I'd guess was a small multiple of the number of people active on the cypherpunks list. There definitely were a lot of people at my brother's college discussing the same ideas.
FWIW my brother did his own bit of Satoshi hunting with coworkers at his hedge fund. They didn't come to a strong answer but my brother believed Nick Szabo was probably part of a group that helped edit the paper. He suspected Hal Finney was involved similarly at a minimum.
It's been extremely widely known that whoever created Bitcoin had a strong interest in Hashcash, and perhaps created that or worked on it, for years and years. If that's the only smoking gun, why didn't we identify Satoshi long ago?
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I agree with the parts worth engaging with. I hate when people weak-man arguments.
But interesting as this is, there are others who fit at least as well. That bit gold was the closest proposed scheme to Bitcoin is well known, and we know the proposer of bit gold (Szabo) was actively soliciting partners to help implement it as a real system right before Bitcoin appeared.
Also, people leave mailing lists and come back randomly months later all the time. Adam could have simply been unlucky, and busy with other projects at the time of the launch. Lots of people were, and kicked themselves for it (which honestly, it seems Adam did too!).
Adam Back is credited in the Bitcoin whitepaper as the inventor of Hashcash. W. Dai is credited as the inventor of b-money. But Nick Szabo is not credited as the inventor of bit gold, by far the most mature of these ideas floating around at the cipherpunks mailing list at the time. That's a conspicuous absence.
All of those similarities can be explained by Satoshi having read what Back wrote.
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This article is a great example of "strong + weak = weak".
I only made it to the interesting stuff because of Carreyou's name, otherwise I would have stopped.
The email timing and lack of email metadata were also strong, in my opinion. But all of this nonsense like "Wow, these guys both talk about PGP??" distracts from it.
I don't blame you for this initial reaction, which would have been mine too had I not known who the author was. I don't mean that I automatically trust anything published by the reporter who busted Theranos (and won two Pulitzers for other major investigations). But I do mean that if John Carreyrou and his editors decided to publish something this long, that means they (and they're lawyers) are willing to die on this hill, no matter how meandering the first paragraphs of his 1st-person narrative.
Since the story doesn't end with: "And then Adam Back bowed his head and said, 'You have found me, Satoshi'", I'm guessing they preferred to go for the softer "how we did this story" first-person narrative. There is no explicit smoking gun, like an official document or eyewitness who asserts Satoshi's identity. But the circumstantial and technical evidence is quite thorough, to the point where the most likeliest conclusions are:
1. Adam Back is Satoshi
2. Satoshi is someone who is either a close friend or frenemy of Back, and deliberately chose to leave a obfuscated trail that correlates with Back's persona and personal timeline.
If Mr Carreyrou is such a good writer then he should be embarrassed to publish trash:
> In keeping with this belief, Mr. Back made his Hashcash spam-throttling software open source.
> Satoshi did a similar thing. He released the Bitcoin software under M.I.T.’s open-source license, which allowed anyone to use, modify and distribute it without restrictions.
The numerous observations such as this only seem impressive to people who don't know anything at all about the subject. Occam's Razor suggests that the reason that such irrelevant observations were included is because Carreyrou doesn't know anything at all about the subject.
> When we compared those errors with the writings of our hundreds of suspects, Mr. Back was a clear outlier. He shared 67 of Satoshi’s exact hyphenation errors. The person with the second-most matches had 38.
The article does not improve.
You’re talking about “Occam’s razor” while noticing things in an article that may not be relevant while informing huge swathes of the article.
Occam’s razor suggests you’re doing this because you want the article to be wrong and want to pretend to be a genius, not because you actually think it is
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wrt (2) that is if satoshi had the foresight btc would ever blow up in the way it did. obviously, he had some intuition, remaining anonymous, but deliberately creating a fake trail does not seem super plausible to me
I got about two sentences further, it turns out another smoking gun is Mr. Back using c++ in his graduate studies, just like the original bitcoin implementation.
Yeah, based on the list of interests, I guess I've been Satoshi all this time and didn't know it. A shame my memory must have been wiped as I'd quite like all of those bitcoins.
All of us "olds" had this as a hobby. Or used it regularly.
Just a bunch of weird stuff in this article.
I quit here too. This article is an embarrassment that should never have passed the editorial process.