This article is a TL;DR quick overview for you to understand some of the main holding points of this Satoshi Nakamoto theory, the statements have not been fully verified. The pure goal is to structure supporting arguments and concepts around the above theory as well adding some mystical concepts to the end of this article.
(Whats life without some mystique guys…)
The below texts are excerpted from multiple sources and discussions to fit a short and easy to read summary. I`m assuming you know the basics of Bitcoin history, but it should be interesting anyhow.
Hope you enjoy it.
THE INSPIRATION
The curiosity that led me to write this post was ignited when I heard Nick Szabo potentially doing what we might call a "Freudian slip" during a podcast interview on the Tim Ferriss show.
Listen: 19 second MP3 clip from the Tim Ferriss show
Transcript - Nick: Oh no, I'd definitely go for a second layer, I mean I
designed Bitcoi... gold with two layers because... [brief pause]
Theory: Satoshi Nakamoto was a group of people maybe as few as 2-3 and highly probably consisted of at least Nick Szabo and Hal Finney.
ENTER NICK SZABO
1 - His blog is literally a white paper. One of his posts from 2005 describes a Bit gold concept very similar to bitcoin
Read his blog: http://unenumerated.blogspot.co.uk every single post
there is a "Bitcoin white paper" in it's own right
2 - Did he solve his own 2005 Bitgold issues in the 2008 white paper?
In his 2005!! post about Bitgold
(http://unenumerated.blogspot.co.uk/2005/12/bit-gold.html) he's
mentioning that unfortunately "The main problem [...] is that proof of
work schemes depend on computer architecture, not just an abstract
mathematics based on an abstract "compute cycle.". In the Bitcoin
white paper "Satoshi" states that "The proof-of-work also solves the problem
of determining representation in majority decision making. If the
majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted
by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially
one-CPU-one-vote".
3 - Satoshi never mentioned Bit gold in the whitepaper even though it modeled upon it.
Bitcoin white paper doesn't reference Nick Szabo or Bitgold despite the
fact that Bitgold is extraordinarily similar to Bitcoin and later confirmed to be based upon it
4 - Nick blogs about the double spend problem in 2006
http://unenumerated.blogspot.co.uk/2006/12/law-embedded-in-world.html
in this (apparently) silly post Nick is subtly referencing the double
spending problem and how it's solved. The first car (transaction)
passes trough (get confirmed), the second malicious car (double spend
attempt) get blocked
5 -" Silly proof: SN = NS :-) "
Also, in Hungary where Nick was from, the last name was put before the
first, hence S.N.
6 - Nick went silent in the critical year when Bitcoin was released
7 - Nick never engaged in Bitcoin despite asking for help with Bit gold earlier
Nick failed to release a competitive product to Bitcoin, in spite of
the fact that Nick had put up a public post asking for help in coding
up Bit Gold just months before the Bitcoin white paper was released.
Why would Nick not view Bitcoin as a competitor and speed up the
release of his own project?Who would just sit by and let someone else take your ideas for free
and say and do nothing about it? If Nick wanted to throw in the towel
and back Bitcoin, why didn't he do that too? It is incomprehensible
that someone with such good ideas about cryptocurrency - who was
actively pursuing a coding of his ideas just months before Bitcoin was
released - would sit silent and just watch.This is the case where the absence of action is even more telling than
the presence.
8 - Nick slips out during interview, "I designed bitcoi..." Audio interview with Tim Ferriss 1:35:25 Ferriss: Nick, I know you don't want to get into the middle of the politics of it, but just from a pure computer science perspective - like if you were re-designing a Bit gold today, and you wanted to incorporate some of these learnings, where would you fall-in on? Would you go for larger blocks? Would you go for a second layer?
1:35:40 Szabo: Oh no, I'd definitely go for a second layer, I mean I designed Bitcoi... gold with two layers because... [brief pause] Interview link to play in your browser: https://dfkfj8j276wwv.cloudfront.net/episodes/30e669b9-67ac-41e7-b8b0-35ab10ead247/748ea307c0260012626068144877c3bf2fe932eea80c9bdddb10cf070b4a6b176198328f7b6db60196bacef8a6b27ec26fc755eca66d4e6650ed2c6238b923bc/The_Tim_Ferriss_Show_-_Nick_Szabo.mp3
9 - Nick altered his Bit gold article to be dated after the Bitcoin whitepaper
“The really interesting part is right after Bitcoin whitepaper was
released, Szabo changed the dates on his blog for his posts about
Bit gold from 2005 to after Bitcoin's release. you can actually see it
here http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html notice the
URL link is 2005 yet the blog post is 2008?”
10 - Satoshi referred to Nick
Satoshi Wrote in Bitcoin forums: Bitcoin is an implementation of Wei
Dai's b-money proposal http://weidai.com/bmoney.txt on Cypherpunks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunks in 1998 and Nick Szabo's
Bit gold proposal
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html
11 - Late and few references to Bitcoin
Szabo's ONLY reference to Bitcoin in all of 2009 is this post:
https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2009/05/liar-resistant-government.html
which contains the underwhelming declaration "Satoshi Nakamoto has
implemented BitCoin which very similarly uses a dense Byzantine fault
tolerant peer-to-peer network and and cryptographic hash chains to
ensure the integrity of a currency."Nick says nothing in his blog about Bitcoin in 2010. How is that even
possible when 2010 is the year when Bitcoin broke the one cent barrier
and climbed over 20 cents per Bitcoin.Nick's first real discussion of Bitcoin is later in 2011:
https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-ye-so-long.htmlAnd of course this timing is suspicious, because Satoshi abandons
participation in his own project at the end of 2010. So Satoshi
appears and Nick goes silent. Satoshi disappears and suddenly there's
Nick talking about cryptocurrency in detail again.
12 - No reference to Bit gold in original Bitcoin whitepaper
Satoshi never referred to bit gold in the original paper, which is
inconceivable because it was very clear that Bitcoin was modeled on
bit gold. Even though Satoshi did confirm it was modeled on bit gold,
in a later Bitcoin forums post.
13 - Centre for Forensic Linguistics finds similarities between Nakamoto whitepaper and Nick`s writing
The number of linguistic similarities between [Mr.] Szabo’s writing
and the Bitcoin paper is uncanny, none of the other possible authors
were anywhere near as good of a match,” Dr. Jack Grieve, the leader of
the “Project Bitcoin” study, said in the release. “We are pretty
confident that out of the primary suspects Nick Szabo is the main
author of the paper, though we can’t rule out the possibility that
others contributed.”
ENTER HAL FINNEY
1 - Involved in CypherPunks with Wei Dai & co. More about CP later in article.
2 - Hal had a similar writing style to Nakamoto`s whitepaper
"I received the results from the writing analysis from Juola &
Associates. The firm, its chief scientist John Noecker explained in a
phone call" "Hal Finney, by contrast, was the best Nakamoto
candidate whose writing the firm had ever analyzed and the first who
Noecker believed might have actually written the Bitcoin whitepaper."
3 - The real Satoshi was Hal`s neighbour
Hal had a Neighbour two blocks away "Dorian Prentice Satoshi
Nakamoto", a Japanese American man living in California, whose birth
name is Satoshi Nakamoto
4 - Satoshi disappeared when Hal got too sick to work
"Hal got diagnosed with ALS in 2009 and said "but fatigue and voice
problems forced me to retire in early 2011." Satoshi gone quiet 2010.
"I've moved on to other things" is an interesting choice of phrase for
why Satoshi dropped Bitcoin, especially if it was coming from a fellow
with ALS."
5 - Hal received the first transaction on the Bitcoin network from Satoshi himself and emailed frequently with him directly.
6 - One of the first people to run Bitcoin mining and binaries
Hal claims to have been running/mining bitcoin from block 70 and being possibly the first to download and run the binaries for mining.
7 - Hal was comfortable dying with his "Legacy"
"I'm comfortable with my legacy." Speculatively one could interpret it as a
way of saying: ‘I’m comfortable with the fact that I was the creator
of Bitcoin/ this technology, even though very few will ever know it
was me.’
8 - Hal stated how lucky he was to meet the two guys Satoshi said was prerequisites for Bitcoin
"I had long been interested in cryptographic payment schemes. Plus I
was lucky enough to meet and extensively correspond with both Wei Dai
and Nick Szabo,"
9 - Satoshi thanked Hal the day before his final post.
"Hal commented to Satoshi saying that the code looks good and that it
was a powerful tool now, basically."The day before Satoshi's final public post Satoshi replied to the
above post from Hal, saying" That means a lot coming from you, Hal. Thanks."
10 - First respondent online to Satoshi
It's also hysterical that on the day Satoshi released the first Bitcoin code, the very first respondent online is Hal Finney, > and what Hal says is both historical and extremely telling. Hal doesn't go into geek speak.
Hal elaborates in a very clear and cogent way what the potential market size is for Bitcoin and gives his personal best case calculation for the value of a Bitcoin, if it becomes a world currency. Hal uses that as an inspiration to others to start > mining.
The e-mail correspondence that Finney released to a reporter later on suggests an innocent technical conversation between himself and Satoshi. But the public post I am referencing suggests a much deeper understanding of, and commitment to, the economic ideas behind Bitcoin. And it makes clear that Finney's interest went well beyond helping a fellow programmer to test some software.
11 - Did the original proof-of-work prototypes many years before Bitcoin
Finney is the one who did the original proof of work prototypes many years before Bitcoin. Finney's Reusable Proof-of-Work (RPOW) was a prototype for digital cash based on Szabo's theory of collectibles. So these two went back together a long time, and there is no way that they would not have been in communication about such an important idea, assuming Szabo was the primary mover of Bitcoin.
12 - Nick was architecting, Hal was coding
The Bitcoin whitepaper talks about the authors as "we". Assuming that this is not the royal "we", my best guess is that Szabo could have authored the whitepaper and architected the main ideas in the system, and Hal Finney might have done significant amounts of the coding.
13 - Nick and Hal had contact on Crypto circles before Bitcoin.
ALSO POTENTIALLY INVOLVED
CypherPunks
The origins of Bitcoin can be traced to the CypherPunk movement.
The Cypher punk movement started arguably on the back of work by David Chaum.
David Chaum published a paper in 1985 discussing anonymous digital cash and pseudonymous reputation protocols – Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete.
The original group of Cypherpunks met in 1992 in San Francisco. This then grew into a global mailing list with over 700 members. The set of topics amalgamated mathematics, cryptography, politics and philosophy and computer science.
Here is a relevant extract from their manifesto created by Eric Hughes in 1993 with hints to the need for Bitcoin-type technology:
“When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk,
there is no need to know who I am. When I ask my electronic mail
provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to
whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are saying to
me; my provider only need know how to get the message there and how
much I owe them in fees …….. Therefore, privacy in an open society
requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the
primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret
transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal
their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence
of privacy.”
Wei Dai
Wei is a computer engineer and early cypherpunk.
Wei Dai published a proposal for
B-Money. His proposal included two
methods of maintaining the transaction data; a) every participant to
the network would maintain a separate database of how much money
belongs to users and, b) all records are kept by a specific group of
users. In the second option the group of users who have custody over
the records are incentivised to be honest because they have deposited
their own money into a special account and stand to lose it if they
are not. This method is known as “proof of stake” (POS) and the
specific groups of users (or master nodes) will lose all the funds
they have stakes if they attempt to process any fraudulent
transaction.
Adam Back
The first attempt at such an anonymous transacting system was made by
Dr. Adam Back in 1997 when he created Hashcash. At its essence, this was an anti-spam mechanism which would add a time and
computational power cost to sending email, therefore making the
sending of spam uneconomical. A sender would have to prove that they
had expended computational power to create a stamp in the header of an
email (similar to the proof of work (POW) use in Bitcoin) before they
were able to send it.
DID YOU KNOW?
As soon as another key Bitcoin developer casually mentioned he would
be giving a talk to the CIA in 2011, Satoshi disappeared and never
wrote another email to the Bitcoin development team.
ENTER THE REAL WORLD SATOSHI NAKAMOTO AND STRANGE THINGS...
Everything below is info about the real, namely born, Satoshi (Dorian) Nakamoto. The one you all know from meme`s a.k.a. the “wrong satoshi”.
It has already been established that Dorian Nakamoto (born Satoshi Nakamoto) worked on classified government projects.
It seemed Nakamoto was pretending and or claiming not to be good at English, but there are a video online with him talking pretty decent English in a Temple city council video, where he addresses traffic safety in his neighborhood.
His wife Mitchell said:
Mitchell says her husband “did not talk much about his work” and
sometimes took on military projects independent of RCA. In 1987, the
couple moved back to California, where Nakamoto worked as a computer
engineer for communications and technologies companies in the Los
Angeles area, including financial information service Quotron Systems
Inc., sold in 1994 to Reuters, and Nortel Networks.Dorian(Satoshi) Nakamoto, who was laid off twice in the 1990s,
according to Mitchell, fell behind on mortgage payments and taxes and
their home was foreclosed. That experience, says Nakamoto’s oldest
daughter, Ilene Mitchell, 26, may have informed her father’s attitude
toward banks and the government.[Dorian’s wife] has been unable to get Nakamoto to speak with her
about whether he was the founder of Bitcoin. Eric Nakamoto says his
father has denied it. Tokuo and Arthur Nakamoto believe their brother
will leave the truth unconfirmed. “Dorian can just be paranoid,” says
Tokuo. “I cannot get through to him. I don’t think he will answer any
of these questions to his family truthfully.”
Dorian (Satoshi) Nakamoto`s brother said:
“My brother is an asshole. What you don’t know about him is that he’s
worked on classified stuff. His life was a complete blank for a while.
You’re not going to be able to get to him. He’ll deny everything.
He’ll never admit to starting Bitcoin.”
First interviewer of Dorian (Satoshi) Nakamoto says:
“I was prepared up until the day I spoke to him for him to laugh and
say it was a ridiculous coincidence. But he didn’t; he acknowledged
it,” says Goodman. “I told him, ‘You’re acknowledging Bitcoin and if
you weren’t involved you need to tell me now.’ He said, ‘I cannot do
that.’”
A part of this interview is also questioned by others but leaves curious clues:
Now face to face, with two police officers as witnesses, Nakamoto’s
responses to my questions about Bitcoin were careful but revealing.
Tacitly acknowledging his role in the Bitcoin project, he looks down,
staring at the pavement and categorically refuses to answer questions.
“I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it,” he says,
dismissing all further queries with a swat of his left hand. “It’s
been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no
longer have any connection.”
Developer community said:
“He didn’t seem like a young person and he seemed to be influenced by
a lot of people in Silicon Valley,” says Nakamoto’s Finnish protégé,
Martti Malmi. Andresen concurs: “Satoshi’s style of writing code was
old-school. He used things like reverse Polish notation.”“Everyone who looked at his [Satoshi`s] code has pretty much concluded
it was a single person,”
Will we ever know the truth?
Leave your comments below and let me know what you think.
FYI, DISCLAIMER: I didn’t store all the above references and by far they are taken out of context, and in many cases challenged by others online, but Im happy to dig down my browser history if any of you want some more references.
A quick google search with quotes “ “ around the text from my post, should get you far. The goal with this article was to structure some of the arguments and also some of the mystique around the Satoshi concept. Thanks to all redditors, forums and/or article sources that was the source of the above texts.
Some sources:
https://medium.com/@jaycaspiankang/dorian-satoshi-nakamoto-what-do-we-really-know-ec57f44b6a01
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/71memx/why_i_think_nick_szabo_is_satoshi_nakamoto/
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@newsereum/hal-finney-was-satoshi-nakamoto
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7pgkyz/9_years_ago_today_hal_finney_tweeted_running/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7jsp0s/one_of_the_last_posts_made_by_hal_finney_on/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/03/25/satoshi-nakamotos-neighbor-the-bitcoin-ghostwriter-who-wasnt/#5e86df024a37
https://medium.com/swlh/the-untold-history-of-bitcoin-enter-the-cypherpunks-f764dee962a1