Comment by ifwinterco
7 days ago
Your timeline is a bit off - he got arrested on 26 September 2012 (around the time Satoshi disappeared), and he became a DEA informant after his arrest which is why he didn't finally get sentenced for 8 years.
So at the time of his arrest (after which he was in federal custody and the DEA were monitoring all his use of electronic devices) Bitcoin had only been in existence for three and a half years.
The drug trafficking and Le Roux's various other criminal enterprises all started happened in the mid-late 2000s, before Bitcoin was worth anything
Thanks for the details! I assumed he had at least some access, control or leverage.
(But losing keys is very easy, especially if the feds take your devices and your means of buying new ones, and freely accessing potential backups.)
We'll never know but I honestly think it might be him, there's other evidence:
Commonwealth English speaker (grew up in Rhodesia/SA) - Sassaman was american and it would be odd for him to adopt British english as Satoshi
Known Windows user and there are supposedly similarities in the tech stack and code between early Bitcoin client versions and TrueCrypt which Le Roux is widely believed to have developed
Early Bitcoin client versions included poker game code for some reason - Le Roux is known to have been interested in this and at one point was considering opening an online casino
On the other hand, evidence against Le Roux and in favour of Sassaman:
The whitepaper has weird references that suggest the author was involved in cryptography academically in the Benelux countries. Le Roux did live in the Netherlands at one point but afaik wasn't involved in anything academic whereas Sassaman very much was