COULD SATOSHI NAKAMOTO BE MIKE HEARN?
There are many coincidences involving a Mike Hearn and Satoshi Nakamoto connection. Some of you will automatically reject the notion because you dislike Mike Hearn. I have seen Mike Hearn on the long list of “Satoshi candidates” posted on bitcointalk but I have never seen anyone explore the idea.
Besides Mike being British and Satoshi using British English my first inclination to even consider Mike Hearn as being Satoshi Nakamoto was that Mike’s bitcointalk.org profile was created 1 day after Satoshi last logged in to the forum.
Satoshi’s profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3
Mike’s profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2700
Mike’s bitcointalk presence began 1 day 53 minutes and 13 seconds after Satoshi’s bitcointalk presence ended. Almost exactly 1 day separating their profiles seemed odd to me especially considering the impact Mike had in development later on.
First I tried to wonder why would Satoshi Nakamoto hide his real identity?
The people who created the precursors to Bitcoin were not anonymous. Satoshi even referenced multiple influences by name in his whitepaper like Wei Dai, Ralph Merkle, and Adam Back. So why did the person behind Satoshi feel the need to remain anonymous? There doesn’t seem to be any precedent in the small niche of people who attempted to make digital/electronic cash. A lot of people are constantly regurgitating the idea that Satoshi knew how big Bitcoin would become and that Governments or nefarious people would want to hunt him down for his bitcoin holdings or for simply inventing bitcoin. In reality, Satoshi didn’t even know if his invention would gain traction. Satoshi didn’t know he would be one of a handful of users running bitcoin in the first year which would allow him to mine as many blocks as he did. Satoshi didn’t know how much bitcoin would actually be worth. All the speculation about why he hid his identity is based on hindsight and Bitcoin being as successful as it is now., but Bitcoin was far from being successful when Satoshi decided to walk away from the project.
So I think the better question is why would Mike Hearn hide is identity?
Mike Hearn in mid August 2006 was hired on by Google as a Site Reliability Engineer (http://web.archive.org/web/20090514053312/http://mikehearn.wordpress.com:80/2006/08/)
Why would an employee of Google secretly develop something? Well, Google themselves sum it up pretty nicely here:
"As part of your employment agreement, Google most likely owns intellectual property (IP) you create while at the company. Because Google’s business interests are so wide and varied, this likely applies to any personal project you have. That includes new development on personal projects you created prior to employment at Google."
(https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/ )
Here Mike was indeed fully aware of Google’s policy when he released bitcoinj as a Google copyrighted project under the Apache 2 license:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4236.msg61438#msg61438
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4236.msg61658#msg61658
Then here he is emailing Satoshi (himself ;)) a few hours after the bitcointalk announcement:
Quote:
"From: Mike Hearn mike@plan99.net Date: Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 2:13 PM To: Satoshi Nakamoto satoshin@gmx.com Hi Satoshi, I hope you are doing well. I finally got all the lawyers happy enough to release BitCoinJ under the Google name using the Apache 2 license: …."
I have no idea how long it takes Google to vet an employee project and license it, but combine that with building bitcoinj and doing that all under 3 months seems fast. What do I know, maybe bitcoinj was a pretty simple project.
I wonder what Google would have done with Bitcoin had Satoshi been an employee of Google?
A silly little find was Mike claiming he supposedly “coined the term SPV”. Or, did he? Here is Peter Todd
and here is the reddit thread to go along with it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3n1ydp/peter_todd_on_twitter_mike_hearn_claiming_he/https://twitter.com/petertoddbtc/status/649413412158599168
- petertoddbtc
The term “SPV” does not appear in the whitepaper but its meaning does. Simplified Payment Verification is section 8 of the whitepaper. Did Mike slip and just inadvertently hint to him being the real Satoshi? Upon further investigation Mike had claimed months earlier that he coined the term “SPV wallet”. https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-capacity-cliff-586d1bf7715e So he could have meant to say SPV wallet when Peter Todd was calling him out or maybe he did mean to say just “SPV”. Still not the smoking gun but interesting that he would throw that around knowing full well that Simplified Payment Verification was in the Whitepaper.
[After writing this up, Mike just released all his private Satoshi Emails through a user named CipherionX. Mike did show up in a reddit thread to confirm that they came from him and are indeed not fake. Bitcointalk link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2080206.0 Reddit link to Mike’s post: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6t2ci2/never_before_seen_mike_hearn_satoshi_nakamoto/dliizv6/ ]
It is very plausible that in order to remain separate from something, that someone would in fact have email conversations between himself and an alias as “proof” that they are completely different independent people. Of course this would only make sense if the emails were made public at some point. Well guess what? Mike just made them public and Mike also attempted to divulge them to Charles Hoskinson in 2013 who did not release them to the public.
If the dates can be trusted, Mike’s email leak serves as proof that he was there early on even if he was corresponding with himself Wink Besides the new email dump the only known public involvement that I could find was here on the sourceforge forum in October 2009: https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/bitcoin-list/thread/f4cd80640910240804m64ba45f1g216905fc9db16a2%40mail.gmail.com/#msg23827020 .
Why did Mike not use Sourceforge as he posted openly so frequently in other project lists or forums? Are there posts that I haven’t seen from early on?
Mike did produce an email he sent to Satoshi from April of 2009 here in this thread: https://bitcoinfoundation.org/forum/index.php?/topic/54-my-first-message-to-satoshi/ which does correspond with the new email dump. An interesting thing I noticed in the above link is that Mike stated, Quote
Fun. Here's mine,
"12th April 2009. Back then the only documentation was the white paper and hardly anyone had explored the code, so a lot of my questions were very newbie-ish. Also I capitalized Bitcoin wrong."
But Mike continued to capitalize Bitcoin as BitCoin not just in that email but until May 14, 2011. Why is that interesting? Well, every thread and post he responded to that mentioned the word bitcoin didn’t capitalize the “C” ever. It would seem like he was almost doing it on purpose to show what a noob he was to the project. Oh then he of course points out the fact that he was a newbie for capitalizing bitcoin that way. It is odd that he continued to use that spelling without regard to how everyone else was spelling it and then later direct people’s attention to the fact that he use to spell it that way early on.
Also, what is odd about Mike’s involvement early on is that it doesn’t really parallel with his natural online demeanor. He is very vocal and has an involved online presence yet he just really isn’t vocal during the early stages of Bitcoin. Even his personal blog posts came to a halt in early 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20111130084418/http://mikehearn.wordpress.com:80/ For someone who is generally very active online before Bitcoin and then after Satoshi’s disappearence, I find it peculiar that there is a dead silence period from Mike Hearn while Satoshi existed online. Mike went Facebook silent from July 23, 2007 to March 8, 2011 which also coincides with Satoshi’s existence and pre-release development of Bitcoin. https://www.facebook.com/i.am.the.real.mike?lst=662933243%3A61203304%3A1502324015
The next step in my exploration of this idea was to create a calendar of time periods where Satoshi was silent on the forums. For example, Satoshi was silent on the forum from March 24, 2010 until May 16, 2010. I am guessing this is a period when Satoshi was away from his home travelling or vacationing. I was wanting to then correspond them with known dates when Mike was on vacations or at a conference, but as I stated above MIke wasn’t very public during Satoshi’s presence. If anyone knows of any of the "potential Satoshis" that were vacationing, hospitalized (Hal?), or travelling during that March to May gap in 2010, it would be a good link to the real Satoshi.
Hal Finney was also involved at the start only to leave and eventually return. He came back a month before Satoshi departed though. Hal was the recipient of bitcoins first transaction and helped Satoshi troubleshoot early problems [Suspicious link removed]j.com/public/resources/documents/finneynakamotoemails.pdf
Their correspondence lead me to believe that Satoshi may have had either a rapport or at the least some familiarity with Hal. I decided to search Mike Hearn and Hal Finney together which turned up a nice find. Here, https://sourceforge.net/p/tboot/mailman/tboot-devel/?style=threaded&viewmonth=200807 Mike and Hal are talking about Trusted Computing back in July 2008, just months before the bitcoin whitepaper surfaced. Unfortunately I don’t quite fully understand Trusted Computing and the reason Mike Hearn was inquiring about a trusted web browser or how it would relate to Bitcoin,
"I'd like to launch Firefox in a protected domain and have it usable for surfing the web. My vague, poorly thought out plan was to let the user pick a photo from a library as proof of the trusted path, then show it in a tab at startup. Once you saw the personal photo, you'd know you were interacting with a copy of the browser that'd be safe to use even on a malware-riddled machine."
However, I did also find this thread from Mike Hearn which Hal Finney later resurrected about TC: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67508.0 And even more interesting, Hal Finney later wrote in his brief memoir of bitcoin, “Bitcoin and Me”, posted on the bitcointalk forum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0) that he was currently “working on something Mike Hearn suggested, using the security features of modern processors, designed to support "Trusted Computing", to harden Bitcoin wallets.” Was Mike Hearn originally researching a use for trusted computing in Bitcoin but never implemented it only to later pass it on to Hal FInney as a “suggestion”? Mike on Google+ posted a link to Hal’s TC project when he learned Hal passed away and linked to Hal’s post on BTCtalk (https://plus.google.com/+MikeHearn ; https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=154290.0 )
So,
here is Satoshi stating he started working on bitcoin in 2007 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1617#msg1617, here Satoshi said he was done writing Bitcoin by July 2008 because that is when Google protocol buffers was made public”I looked at Google protocol buffers when they were released last year, but I had already written everything by then.” https://pastebin.com/Na5FwkQ4 and then above Mike Hearn in July 2008 is seeking guidance from Hal about trusted computing and then Hal working on trusted computing application on the suggestion of Mike for bitcoin. Ok why? Well bitcoin was already done by July 2007 when Mike was inquiring about TC and Hal was working on a TC application later, meaning that TC has some application not related to the core of bitcoin but rather to a peripheral of bitcoin and Mike may have been researching that possibility.
[Super Weak] Searching for more clues about Satoshi I came across a colloquial/slang term that he used. “Hack on” was used by Satoshi in the context of “work on”. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1034.msg13206#msg13206 I found multiple instances where Mike Hearn used the same exact term in the same context: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-April/007779.html http://bitcoin-development.narkive.com/hczWIAby/bitcoin-development-cartographer https://web.archive.org/web/20170628004052/http://www.advogato.org/person/mikehearn/ https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-March/msg00031.html I do admit the “hack on” argument is lame evidence as it is somewhat common term. However, not everyone used it in that context (like Hal Finney didn’t) and it does add to the list of coincidences.
**[Warning: Extreme Reaching] **Another super weak semi-coincidence is Mike Hearns birthday. Mike’s birthday is April 17th, 1984. Satoshi’s birthday was chosen as April 5th, 1975. I don’t know about you, but a lot of times when I have to enter a birthday in a service where I don’t want them knowing the truth, I usually always use my real birth month with fake day and year. [More reaching] adding 1975’s digits equal adding 1984’s digits/ 7+5=12 and 8+4=12. I know, I know...
According to Mike Hearn, Satoshi “communicated with a few of the core developers before leaving. He told myself and Gavin that he had moved on to other things and that the project was in good hands.“ https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145850.msg1558053#msg1558053 This is also backed up by the new email release here: https://pastebin.com/syrmi3ET
Mike- “I had a few other things on my mind (as always). One is, are you planning on rejoining the community at some point (eg for code reviews), or is your plan to permanently step back from the limelight?” Satoshi- “I've moved on to other things. It's in good hands with Gavin and everyone.” The above communication is supposedly the first time anyone heard that Satoshi was leaving for good and it was none other than Mike Hearn as the recipient. Then a few days later Satoshi told Gavin the same thing.
None of these things points or alludes to Mike being Satoshi by themselves. But I do think that all these things together do paint a possible connection. Mike denied being Satoshi when I emailed him and also didn’t seem to care that I would post these things online attempting to connect him to Satoshi.