Who was Satoshi Nakamoto? On http://www.bitcoingroup.com.au/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto/ you can read the following introduction:
“While we may not know who he was, we know what he did. He was the inventor of the Bitcoin protocol, publishing a paper via the Cryptography Mailing List in November 2008.
He then released the first version of the bitcoin software client in 2009, and participated with others on the project via mailing lists, until he finally began to fade from the community toward the end of 2010.”
No one knows what Satoshi is up to now, but one of the last emails he sent to a software developer, dated April 23 2011, said “I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”
In November 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto created the bitcointalk forum. His profile is still there on https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3. There you can read the following information:
Name: satoshi
Posts: 575
Activity: 364
Merit: 877
Position: Founder
Date Registered: November 19, 2009, 07:12:39 PM
Last Active: December 13, 2010, 04:45:41 PM
Many have tried to discover his real identity but so far nothing useful has actually been discovered. A lot of very basic questions remain: Is he Japanese as his name suggests? Is he a man or a woman? Is he a single person or a group of persons? In May 2016 the Australian computer scientist Craig Wright has formally claimed to be Satoshi (https://www.economist.com/news/briefings/21698061-craig-steven-wright-claims-be-satoshi-nakamoto-bitcoin). For the real Satoshi it would have been easy to present convincing evidence by spending some of his early mining revenues. Mr. Wright however has not been able to produce convincing evidence.
I don’t think Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto. I do think Mr Wright knew the real Satoshi Nakamoto. I think it was his friend David Kleiman. There is no direct evidence for this but there certainly is some circumstantial evidence for this.
Who was David Kleiman? In 2007 Kleiman was technical editor of the Official CHFI (Exam 312-49), a study guide for Computer Hacking Forensics Investigators. In the book Craig Wright is mentioned as a contributor. This proofs that Kleiman and Wright knew each other at the time the bitcoin whitepaper was published. Suppose that Kleiman is Satoshi. It could well be that at some stage he has discussed a bitcoin related issue with his friend Wright and he may also have introduced himself as Satoshi Nakamoto. It is even possible that Kleiman gave the private key of the miner of block 9 to Wright as a proof of his Satoshi identity and that Wright in 2016 has used this same key to proof that he himself was Satoshi.
In the above mentioned article in the Economist Mr Wright is confronted with a stylometric research comparing texts by Mr Wright with those written by Mr Nakamoto concluding that they are unlikely to be by the same person. Mr Wright has replied that “although he was the principal author of the white paper, he had extensive help from his friend Dave Kleiman, an American computer-forensics expert who died in 2013.”
I have 7 reasons why I think David Kleiman was Satoshi Nakamoto:
- In the early 2000s David Kleiman began contributing to the computer security mailing list Metzdowd. On October 31 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto published the first version of the bitcoin white paper on Metzdowd. (http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October/014810.html)
- The time Satoshi disappeared from the bitcointalk forum coincides with the time Kleiman got diagnosed with MRSA
- There was no need for Wright to involve Kleiman if Kleiman was not the real Satoshi. When confronted with a stylometric research that concluded that he probably was not the author of the white paper he introduced Kleiman as an important co-author.
- Wright could only claim to be Satoshi if he was absolutely sure that the real Satoshi was not going to contradict his claim. He knew that David Kleiman was dead.
- Kleiman did have the right profile and expertise to be Satoshi
- Wright did have some proof to support his claim. He originally did convince Gavin Andresen by presenting the private key of the block 9 miner. The real Satoshi Nakamoto must have provided this evidence and I assume that David Kleiman provided this to proof that he was Satoshi. This also explains why Wright could not provide any other more convincing evidence (like spending some of the early unspent mining revenues).
- Last week Ira Kleiman, the brother of David Kleiman, has sued Craig Wright for half of the supposed Satoshi bitcoin possessions worth 5 billion dollar. I assume that Ira Kleiman must have some evidence to support this law-suit. Funny aspect of this law-suit is that the best defence for Wright is to say that he has lied.
I am afraid that this is just a collection of assumptions. The only person who knows the truth is Craig Wright. I hope that at some time he will tell us the real story.
Sources:
https://www.economist.com/news/briefings/21698061-craig-steven-wright-claims-be-satoshi-nakamoto-bitcoin
https://gizmodo.com/the-strange-life-and-death-of-dave-kleiman-a-computer-1747092460
https://gizmodo.com/is-dave-kleiman-the-missing-link-in-craig-wrights-satos-1774519534.
https://gizmodo.com/this-australian-says-he-and-his-dead-friend-invented-bi-1746958692