This currently isn't "news," as the paper hasn't been published yet, and none of the disclosed findings are too damning or conclusive.
That being said, it's important for two reasons:
1.) the paper gets published tomorrow, which will lead to a round of negative press, regardless of the claims' merit.
2.) More significant: it highlights what I see as an existential threat to the Bitcoin experiment: a.) the poor distribution of early wealth and b.) the possibility that a great percentage of all Bitcoins are currently held by bad actors (criminals, anarchists, use your imagination).
A few things to consider:
1. A list of richest Bitcoin addresses is not a good representation of the concentration of wealth. A single person can have x wallets, just like this Ulbricht character.
2. Bitcoin wealth is often used to reinvest in mining equipment, which furthers one's wealth to a greater extent. Rinse/repeat.
Several of the oldest wallets have been dormant for years, which means that this is not hypothetical -- that wealth has not circulated.
edit made to be clear about "bad actors":
"Bad actors" meaning: unpredictable and possibly having malicious intent.
If Bitcoin becomes a more important part of our daily lives, handling commerce ubiquitously, etc.--a single individual with ~10+% of said Bitcoin has enormous disruptive potential. I'm not referring to what said person could purchase with that wealth, but one's ability to manipulate markets.
This has never been a big issue, as far as the growth in value of the currency. However, I think this kind of uncertainty could freak out potential institutional investors.
Altcoins like Litecoin, PPC, Namecoin, etc - do not suffer as much from this issue because their exposure was far greater than Bitcoin ca. 2009, and the mining competition was greater on the respective debut-dates by several orders of magnitude.
There's no way in hell Satoshi is anywhere connected to "DPR". Look at the OPSEC between the two. Satoshi carefully concealed his identity even in the early crypto mailing list days of Bitcoin. Ross Ulbricht failed at this completely throughout his underground career. Satoshi was a pretty good developer, Ulbricht posted to Stackexchange the most basic of php questions.
Satoshi seemed to be very aware of the power of gov agencies both in UK and US and the risks he was taking creating Bitcoin, a good example was his response to people back in 2010 who were calling for Wikileaks to accept Bitcoin donations. Ulbricht on the other hand foolishly underestimated them and would've cheered Wikileaks adoption. I don't recall Satoshi ever granting interviews and was hesitant to even reply to PMs on bitcointalk. He also didn't discuss politics, though you could infer from his hatred of central banking what his politics were he never spelled them out like Ulbricht did on a regular basis.
Since when does "person X is connected to person Y" mean "person X is person Y"? They're "obviously"[1] not the same people. That by no means shows there is no connection.
[1]: Which isn't to say "definitely" but it'd be quite a lot of misleading going on to no obvious end - better covering up "created something fascinating" than "sold drugs and hired hitmen"?
I see that it could be used that way, I guess, but I don't think it's an appropriate interpretation. If X actually is Y then there is a connection, and they deserve some credit, just less than if they'd said "X is Y". If X is not Y then they "weren't incorrect" because they weren't incorrect, so parent is incorrect to label them as such. If X is not Y and there is some other interesting connection, they were correct and deserve just as much credit as if the two wind up shown to be the same person.
Ross Ulbricht failed at this completely throughout his underground career.
That's a bit of revisionism. It turned out that he made mistakes, which in hindsight now make his identity seem 'obvious', but it took some time for his identity to become known, despite DPR & SR being very high-profile targets for many different people.
If he really had been rubbish at this, his identity would have been known so much sooner.
Mistakes which included publicly posting an email address with his full legal name on a bitcoin forum while using that same nickname to post on a drug forum, all in the same time period.
Additionally he baited and trolled the mainstream press. The US government & US prosecutors do not react well to criminals who attempt to repeatedly publicly humiliate their failure to catch them.
My honest opinion was this guy was a fucking idiot.
Idiot or not, his identity took some time to be discovered. People are oh-so-wise after the fact about DPR's dumb mistakes but can't tell the difference between their perceived brilliance and hindsight.
Successfully hiding your identity is an all-or-nothing measure; either you are outed, or you stay anonymous. So the only remaining way to gauge how well someone hid before the final reveal is to look at how long it took people to find them and how much effort likely went in to finding them.
DPR ran Silk Road for some time before being discovered. In that time, countless law agencies sought him, he was a massive target for online fraud, blackmail, vigilanteism or even simple crime.
Just imagine if you tracked him down; a quick break-in and some force and you could escape with a laptop worth tens/hundreds of millions of dollars, none of which would be reported to the police!
Isn't there a huge component of luck in staying anonymous? A needle can remain in a haystack for a long time without requiring any skill, either of it's own or of someone who hid or accidentally dropped it there. If time spent anonymous is "only remaining way to gauge how well someone hid", it's a pretty crummy one. I think it makes sense to take into account the kind of mistakes that brought someone out.
By the same token, we might just not have found Satoshi's stupid mistakes yet. Still, I think dobbsbob's point stands at least as weak evidence of Satoshi and DPR being different people.
Those points are the first things that come to my mind.
DPR just does not fit the Satoshi profile in anyway. Satoshi was very humble even, DPR has never shown humility and his journal showed evidence he was power obsessed.
Then phrase it another way, without the pronoun. The whole point of this discussion is that we don't know who Satoshi is/are, so don't bake assumptions into your thoughts and writing on the topic.
It's not pedantry - it's helping yourself think clearly.
> a.) the lack of even distribution of early wealth
Like an IPO? [1]
> b.) the possibility that a great percentage of Bitcoin are currently held by bad actors (criminals, anarchists, use your imagination).
I know you are probably using the term anarchist in the colloquial sense (meaning those black bloc anarchists who smash things and want revolution) conjuring images of a Mad Max like dystopia, but would you consider Noam Chomsky a bad actor? People of that ilk just consider a different structure to organizing society, or as he puts it "a kind of voluntary socialism, that is, as libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist or communist anarchist, in the tradition of, say, Bakunin and Kropotkin and others."[1]
Sometimes its tempting to paint pictures with broad strokes but as someone who can appreciate many different political viewpoints (as long as they are peaceful and productive), it doesn't seem to make your image any more accurate.
bitcoin.it has a page on some myths you should read.[3]
I know it doesn't add anything to this discussion, but I must say, your reply is very articulate and elegant. What kind of books are you reading, if you don't mind my asking?
Yeah, like every other economic system. That's life, that's nature. If you dumped 10% of your savings into BitCoin in 2010, you took a great risk and this is the reward. Had you been the angel investor dumping $100000 into Google when there was no business plan, the same applies or what about people who bought domain names for common words or phrases or < 3 letter domains in the early 90s, if that was you, you would have made a mint. The early bird catches the worm.
That's the game, and you and I didn't win this round.
More than the early adopters, I am more worried about the unfair advantage that the creators of Bitcoin enjoy. IIRC, just one individual already owns ~25% of all bitcoins that will ever be mined!
Even the creators are at the mercy of the mining collectives, though.
Once the Bitcoin generation rate falls to a level where the miners' primary incentive is transaction fees I expect we'll see an aggregation around a handful of big collectives, which will be the Bitcoin equivalent of Visa and Mastercard.
And what will they say?
Want your transaction processed? No matter if you're Satoshi himself, pay the fee.
In English a simile is a comparison using the words 'like' or 'as'. So using that as a basis it should be fairly obvious that I was definitely not saying this is an IPO but rather comparing getting in early with BitCoin to getting in early with anything with a market value that could appreciate or depreciate (like stocks traded on a stock market, or newly discovered commodities etc.). There is risk and there is reward.
If you are looking for examples of other currencies you could have made money with due to appreciation (if you got in early), then simply look at the developing countries with appreciating currencies, countries who peg their values to a currency basket that includes a rising commodity (like oil). Money is made (and lost) on speculating on forex markets everyday. The Kuwait Dinar springs to mind.
Personally I think its better to compare BitCoin to a commodity that has scarcity and solves the coincidence of wants problem and so it can be used to exchange value for goods or services, like gold, silver, perhaps oil (to a lesser extent).
I am aware of the usage of like in the simile context. Thank you for your concern however.
Due to your link also using an IPO as an example, I was wondering if there are any currencies which have operated in such a manner, namely rewarding first adopters. This question arose because, as you astutely point out in your second paragraph, most new currencies are pegged to either their replacement or alternatively to a basket of commodities or external currencies. I don't believe that there are any currencies, which when launched, were purely floating without any bands or a peg.
Continuing the question, are there any currencies that are pegged to a basket which includes commodities? I'm not sure if you were referencing the Kuwaiti Dinar as one of those, or if you meant that people make and lose money speculating on it but in either case, it appears to only be tied to a basket of currencies.
Very sorry if my English was not clear enough to express my question in the initial format. In the future I'll be sure to elucidate the question better rather then assuming the reader is able to follow along with the simile from the parent comment.
> I am aware of the usage of like in the simile context. Thank you for your concern however.
First off, apologies if you took that as an insult, it wasn't meant that way, I just didn't want my words to be twisted and lose the original meaning that I was making a comparison to a value increase of a given stock or commodity, using an IPO as an example.
> I don't believe that there are any currencies, which when launched, were purely floating without any bands or a peg.
I understand the point and I believe it to be correct, but only to a point (national currencies, BitCoin is not one of those). This is why I was mentioning commodity currencies. See gold isn't backed by anything, we use it because of historical significance. I understand you may say, it has value because of its conductive properties and use in chips but originally we actually used it as a currency because it a) was useless to make tools out of as it is a soft metal b) did not oxidise like other metals at the time c) was scarce.
Once we abstracted value to gold (or other precious metals), we used it to solve the coincidence of wants problem and that is what a currency does. Obviously I know you know about the gold standard that followed and how it was subsequently abandoned but it is important to note that I can still a) store value in gold b) exchange gold for goods and services.
Take South Africa (where a third of the gold ever mined comes from). They mint KrugerRands (gold) and they mint their national currency (Rands). Rands might depreciate in value due to low international demand and KrugerRands might appreciate in value due to high international demand (for gold) but both are a currency and South Africans can pay their taxes with those KrugerRands (using the spot price of the gold value converted to Rands). The same applies to Federally minted gold coins, they have value all over the world as a medium of exchange (based on the gold value) and I can pay taxes in the US with them as they are legal tender.
There is no peg for these gold coins, they are worth what the market says they are worth. Should you have gotten in on the ground floor with gold, you would have been a very rich man using something that was considered interesting but ultimately useless some time before. Obviously that wasn't really an option as this story unfolded over a very long time, but we know that is no longer the case in an ever connected world. Changes that once took centuries can happen inside of a decade now (interestingly enough, although valuable at the time, the fortune gained by Mayer Amschel Rothschild with gold in the late 18th century was not the largest fortune ever gained, once the gold standard was adopted in the 19th century, it was probably the largest fortune in the modern world, by far. Something his descendants still benefit from to this day).
> Continuing the question, are there any currencies that are pegged to a basket which includes commodities?
Yes. I think we are confusing currency with national currency though and I have beaten that dead horse already.
> I'm not sure if you were referencing the Kuwaiti Dinar as one of those.
I was referring to the Kuwaiti Dinar being a success in terms of value fluctuation. I used it as an example because I made money with it once and it is regarded as the strongest national currency (although not a major currency). It was pegged to the pound originally and the pound devalued 6 years after. The value appreciation is nothing like BitCoin but to me, BitCoin is closer to gold than a national currency, as I said.
> Very sorry if my English was not clear enough to express my question in the initial format. In the future I'll be sure to elucidate the question better rather then assuming the reader is able to follow along with the simile from the parent comment.
I think you mean "than" :p (just kidding, don't get offended).
All jokes aside, I think one thing that is missing from all these discussions is that the value of BitCoin (at least as it seems to me) isn't that you use it as a primary national currency (although I suppose it could serve that purpose in some places), but rather that it might be a contender for an international currency that mitigates inflation risks (which in recent years is what China[1][2] and Russia[3] have been pushing for, since 2009, year of BitCoin's inception) because right now the USD as a reserve currency seems a bit unfair to people outside of the US (and a few other nations). Say I want to buy barrels of oil, most of the world oil is denominated in USD. That is great for Americans because it keeps the dollar strong but if I am in say, Indonesia, it ultimately decreases demand for my currency, putting me at a disadvantage just to keep my economy running.
All that is not to say I believe the success of BitCoin is guaranteed (far from it), or that this is the role BitCoin will take, but key players have suggested it has been China's intention all along (by buying more gold than any other country on the planet), to create (or at least push) a new supranational currency. This century is almost certain to have a supranational currency adopted as a standard (SDR's don't really satisfy that niche).
held by bad actors (criminals, anarchists, use your imagination).
Where do you get off calling anarchists "bad actors"??? Personally I find this highly offensive and insulting. Just because I believe people should be free, and not subjects of some "state", I am the "bad actor"? F@%@ that...
It highlights what I see as an existential threat to the Bitcoin experiment: a.) the poor distribution of early wealth and b.) the possibility that a great percentage of all Bitcoins are currently held by bad actors
I share your concerns, and thank you as I've never been able to sum it up as well as you.
I think he probably was alluding to destabilization of major markets, which can lead to market crashes, inflation, deflation, etc... Fairly bad things in the short term.
An uneven distribution of early wealth describes almost every organisation in society (including society itself): as long as later participants perceive they are gaining value for themselves, they will allow this to continue.
Part (b) is more interesting - the danger as I see it is that Bitcoin is entering legal-issues territory. For example, a legal crackdown on ownership of Bitcoin identified with illegal activity would likely provide an economic shock to the whole network.
i don't think you understand what he was saying. You are just being overly defensive against any liberal ideology. He was saying that if it isn't that evenly distributed then one actor, or maybe a few, could have large control over the markets. That is a different problem than distribution of wealth in the sense that the poor are disadvantaged. This argument is purely from a stability concern, not a concern of societal well being.
"I just dislike when people tie political ideology into their evaluation of new technology."
Tying political ideology to the evaluation of new technology is the MO of Bitcoin's supporters. If you wanted to focus strictly on technology, Bitcoin would never have gotten off the ground. No security definition, design documents spread across human language and source code, no attention given to the various ways distributed systems can be attacked or can fail, etc. The only reason Bitcoin became popular in the first place is that people with a particular political ideology saw a chance to realize their dreams.
I do not know about ideology but there is definately a political angle to all of this. Bitcoin is only worth anything as long as people are willing to give things or services of value in exchange of bitcoins. For now people have because bitcoin has generated a lot of excitement and there have been relatively few bitcoins available for purchase.
But if one of the early adopters busts out a billion dollars worth of bitcoins and demands massive amounts of real world wealth in exchange, people may just decide he does not deserve it and stop buying bitcoins. Then the bitcoin will be worth nothing again.
Nobody deserves a billion dollars and if someone was to become a billionaire I feel it is more likely the people holding BitCoin would be more concerned with their own value appreciation than all cooperating to devalue a single entities value. You also have to consider that wide adoption of BTC would mean a diverse set of people with a diverse set of values.
I've often read that in the US (as an example, but I'm sure it applies elsewhere) poorer people are likely to vote against their best interest because they have a belief that one day they will be rich. That sort of scenario makes more sense to me, people will just worry about themselves than burning their own value for some collective 'good'.
It's only considered voting against your own interest when a poor person does it. When a relatively well off person is campaigning for higher taxes, voting against their won interest, then it's a principled stand.
Now that I think about it, it seems like Bitcoin was designed to create this problem. The protocol produces blocks at an (on average) constant rate, but the value of finding a block decreases exponentially. This gives a significant advantage to the initial investor.
I understand that the point of this exponential decay was to that, after the currency was bootstrapped, there would be a constant supply. However, couldn't this be accomplished with a constant, or increasing, rate of production in the beginning, then let the rate decline at the end?
The Coase theorem says that the initial allocation doesn't matter if transaction costs are low enough. Transaction costs are exceptionally low in the case of bitcoin.
And Ronald Coase says the Coase theorem doesn't represent reality. Bitcoin dramatically decreases some parts of the costs of transactions, but the cost of buying a loaf of bread isn't only the credit card fee - it's also the trip to the store, time considering other things you could have bought, &c. Transaction costs are merely lower. Which does say this should help the Coase theorem better apply, but we don't really know how much better.
Yes, good points. I was thinking of Bitcoin as an asset and not the numéraire, which to my mind changes the situation a bit - the problem suggested is that some 'undesirable' people will end up with too many Bitcoins and use them to manipulate the market. The Coase theorem points to this being as unlikely as it is for any other asset class. The bad actors will eventually get bought out if the putative damage they're doing is great enough - and, compared to the size of transaction implied, the costs will be small.
I think a part of what you're missing is that (says my understanding, which could certainly be flawed...) transaction costs in Coase's model include the costs of enforcing whatever contract is used to prevent whatever badness.
Spend a $1 billion of your early bitcoins disrupting Bitcoin or spend $1 billion to buy bitcoins today and disrupt it. Either way costs the same doesn't it?
I agree with you completely. But in the meantime, mainstream media have started picking the story (omg shocking), which will surely have an effect on the price of Bitcoins. I wonder if the authors are planning to take advantage of this.
I doubt that the link here amounts to DPR knowing SN personally, or even worse, DPR being SN.
Obviously I don't know DPR or SN, but I really doubt that DPR is SN or even communicated with him. The reasons are entirely circumstantial but from what I've read of both of them:
- DPR is arrogant.
- DPR makes stupid mistakes.
- SN is fairly humble.
- SN is smarter than DPR.
- SN doesn't make mistakes.
Is it possible that DPR himself was an early adopter of BitCoins, and mined those early coins himself - giving him the occasion to later transfer them to himself? He might have had to become acquainted with the BitCoin crypto-currrency scheme for some time before he was confident enough in it to use it to protect his own identity, which means he may have been in the first couple of groups of people to download and use the software.
You are talking about some one or group who took great care (including in all their dealings with other early bitcoin users) to maintain their anonymity - which is really hard to do, in the face of the sort of scrutiny that SN has had.
Its at least plausible that, along with the name, other aspects of the SN persona were explicitly constructed.
There's all this myth around who SN is. A lot of people seem to believe SN is a benevolent crypto researcher working in their bedroom, for the benefit of humanity, with no profit motive in sight. I mean, sure, I hope that's the case too, but we should remember that we don't actually know very much at all.
A braggart might construct a humble persona, but would a true braggart maintain such a persona for long? If they could, is there really any basis for calling them a braggart in the first place?
Being a braggart seems fundamentally incompatible with "not bragging", for years on end, about your greatest accomplishment (and barring the possibility that SN is somebody very famous, say, Putin, it is almost certain that bitcoin is the most famous thing that SN has done). Not in a "Scottish, but doesn't wear a kilt" way, but in a "Scottish, but does not live and was not born in Scotland" kind of way.
Sure he might not be humble, however if you read everything Satoshi wrote he came across as a very humble person.
Regarding his immense Bitcoin wealth, he has anonymised himself but not his Bitcoins. 99.9% of the Bitcoins he mined lay exactly where they were mined and he has made no attempt to move them or anonymise those coins. He might in the future but who knows.
In addition he made the first block unspendable so that the only block he had to mine himself to start the network would never contribute to his wealth.
It is possible that aspects of the SN persona were highly constructed but what is a simpler explanation - that everything about SN was fake or just his identity? It would have taken an enormous cognitive effort to be able to consistently demonstrate the same personality traits in post after post unless it came naturally. It seems like he was more concerned about technical discussion than hiding information about himself beyond his identity.
But of course you are right - until we know who SN is, we can only speculate.
When I hear an argument about a simpler explanation, I tend to assume there's an appeal to Occam's razor; but I'm not sure that's useful here:
What's the chances that they took so much care to obscure their identity in every other way, but decided to use their genuine personality? Doesn't that seem improbable, too?
I accept the argument about it being hard to maintain two personas - but what is enormous cognitive effort for you and me might be basic operational security for someone else.
Bitcoin is very interesting, but I'd like if there was more caution about SN, given it has has potentially endowed them with vast resources.
I agree with you that there's no way DPR is Satoshi. DPR seemed to be learning to code when launching Silk Road. While Bitcoin had bugs (lots of them) to start with, it is not amateur level computer science. It's not even reasonable to assume that a dude who needed help getting curl to talk to a proxy would be competent enough to work with very advanced crypto concepts, and even invent a few things of their own (using standard crypto algorithms, but still, Bitcoin was not tested waters...).
So, yes, SN is smarter than DPR, and vastly more capable as a software engineer.
And, Satoshi wouldn't need Silk Road to be fantastically rich in Bitcoins. As far as we know, he's got a vast swath of the first mined Bitcoins, even if he gave away most of it. (Which is possibly how Satoshi's identity will be revealed...if suddenly there's a new trillionaire in the world in five years...well, might be Satoshi.)
> And, Satoshi wouldn't need Silk Road to be fantastically rich in Bitcoins. As far as we know, he's got a vast swath of the first mined Bitcoins, even if he gave away most of it. (Which is possibly how Satoshi's identity will be revealed...if suddenly there's a new trillionaire in the world in five years...well, might be Satoshi.)
Out of interest, aren't Satoshi's coins all held in a small number of wallets, so people will immediately see if anyone tries to use them? Presumably, this would provoke a crash in bitcoin prices.
From what I've heard, Satoshi's coins are spread around a lot of 50 btc wallets, and they're not so much known to be Satoshi's as suspected to be hers because there seems to have only been one person mining the blockchain at the start [1].
As other people started running the clients, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell Satoshi from any other miner.
So though Satoshi may never have spent the bitcoins mined when she was the only miner, she could still have mined and spent many coins once there were a few hundred other miners.
The coins that are known to be Satoshi's (because they were mined when Satoshi was the only one mining) can't be spent without people knowing about it. But the coins that were probably mined later, where we don't know who mined them? Those can be spent easily.
It's pretty likely a fair number of coins belong to Satoshi, as mining must have been pretty easy in the days when people paid 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas.
Since Satoshi's identity is unknown, it could be a female. Mike Hearn refers to Satoshi as a "he", and he would be most likely to know...but I don't know that Mike ever spoke to Satoshi in any form other than online, so he may not know Satoshi's preferred gender pronoun, either.
This is extremely likely. The SilkRoad admins all have access to the old (and the new) DPR forum account. One of them was using it even after Ross was arrested, leading someone to ask why DPR was showing up on the active members list of the SR forum even after be was arrested.
The link to Ulbricht's identity as DPR seems to go back to the beginning of the site. It seems more plausible he did that interview and made up the multiple DPR story to:
A: Advertise his willingness to sell out.
B: Perhaps toss a bit of confusion onto anyone following him.
Not just possible but likely. Then DPR created Silk Road to earn more BTC in a more traditional way than mining, and then DPR passed the business to one Ross Ulbricht. Or there may even have been more than one DPR before Ulbricht.
2 possible situations I can think of, based strictly on 'Among their discoveries was a particular transfer to an account controlled by Mr. Ulbricht from another that had been created in January 2009, during the very earliest days of the bitcoin network, which was set up the previous year.':
- the bitcoin wallet, although said to be associated with SN, has changed ownership since its creation in 2009
- SN purchased something from DPR, perhaps something DPR himself was selling on SR, either a legitimate buy or for some other purposes; SN was just a regular customer in this case
In the meantime, I'm eagerly awaiting their paper. Ron and Shamir have previously co-authored another bitcoin related paper titled 'Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph'. There's a very interested overview of it in this Gist: https://gist.github.com/jgarzik/3901921 It appears to have some flaws.
I don't know how accurate this statistic is, but the last Gist comment mentions that 22% of bitcoins are held in reused addresses.
Not all the early mined coins were controlled by Satoshi, Hal Finney and other's on the crypto mailing list have many, many coins. Maybe Hal bought some weed
According to Bitcoin developers Satoshi hasn't moved any of the coins they know he is/was in control of. Amateur sleuths trying to unmask Satoshi have gone through every piece of public writing and paper he's done, picked out unique phrases and words and tried to match them up to existing mailing list posts, forum posts and white papers with no success. Satoshi slipped in and out of British slang as well, either on purpose for distraction from his real identity or they were 2 people using the same account. He also referenced the Times when mining the first block as proof he had not premined a bunch of coins to run a ponzi/scam further indicating he may of been from the UK.
Either way he certainly is content with avoiding the spotlight while Ulbricht loved the fame that came with being DPR.
I don't believe that at all. DPR got busted for posting total newbie questions on Stack Overflow, after all - and SN displayed a deep knowledge of secure coding and cryptography!
A form of cover that doesn't get you busted by the feds and thrown in jail?
Let's say I'm an expert killer who has assassinated dozens of people without being caught. Do I camouflage myself by doing a shitty job and getting sent to jail? Of course not, I keep doing an expert job because I'd rather not be in jail.
There is nothing inherently illegal about creating BitCoin but there is something very illegal about facilitating drug trafficking. If they were the same person, wouldn't you practise good OPSEC to keep you out of prison? What is the value of keeping your identity as BitCoin creator a secret when you are in prison?
If they were one and the same, it seems to me, you would just practise good OPSEC across the board or, if need be, make "mistakes" that reveal you as BitCoin creator (and take the credit) and keep your identity as SilkRoad founder a secret.
Here's a quick litmus test when someone proposes a Satoshi candidate X: "how did $X pay for DigiRock hosting of bitcoin.org in August 2008 when DigiRock accepts only yen and has no English language support?"
Well, of course you can excuse it away (at the cost of adding complicating details and raising the question of why, if they used one of your suggestions, they later switched to the 21x more expensive Anonymousspeech hosting).
The point of the test is to quickly asses whether the person trying to dox Satoshi has done even their basic homework and realized that it's an issue for their theory? If they haven't even looked at the Bitcoin.org WHOIS history, that says something important about the depth of their research into the question.
Presumably the same reason they chose a Japanese name--that at least one of them speaks Japanese. I'm not really sure where you're going with this, but if you read the analysis in the article I linked to, as well as King's response to the author's email, I think you'll agree that they're a likely candidate.
How do you have access to his profile? Could you be mistaking him for the Neal King of Sofia University or the Neal King who was a marijuana grower who recently disappeared?
As hard as it is to remain anonymous, how did Satoshi Nakamoto do it? No misstatements that betrayed his identity? No IP addresses that point to him or his location?
Serious question, then, why the need to provide a negative comment when you didn't even examine the material presented?
EDIT: Won't out the author's identity, but parent post explained that he had only skimmed the article. The original post was asking who the computer scientists were and why this wasn't just link bait.
I did, but not in detail. I just see too many unsubstantiated negative articles about bitcoin that it gets tiresome sometimes. I'm glad to know I was wrong this time.
Re edit: No, I never asked who the authors were and frankly it's not relevant. Anyway, it's sunday, and I'm waiting for the publication. It was also pretty obvious from my other replies that I started this thread..
That being said, it's important for two reasons:
1.) the paper gets published tomorrow, which will lead to a round of negative press, regardless of the claims' merit.
2.) More significant: it highlights what I see as an existential threat to the Bitcoin experiment: a.) the poor distribution of early wealth and b.) the possibility that a great percentage of all Bitcoins are currently held by bad actors (criminals, anarchists, use your imagination).
A few things to consider: 1. A list of richest Bitcoin addresses is not a good representation of the concentration of wealth. A single person can have x wallets, just like this Ulbricht character. 2. Bitcoin wealth is often used to reinvest in mining equipment, which furthers one's wealth to a greater extent. Rinse/repeat.
Several of the oldest wallets have been dormant for years, which means that this is not hypothetical -- that wealth has not circulated.
edit made to be clear about "bad actors":
"Bad actors" meaning: unpredictable and possibly having malicious intent.
If Bitcoin becomes a more important part of our daily lives, handling commerce ubiquitously, etc.--a single individual with ~10+% of said Bitcoin has enormous disruptive potential. I'm not referring to what said person could purchase with that wealth, but one's ability to manipulate markets.
This has never been a big issue, as far as the growth in value of the currency. However, I think this kind of uncertainty could freak out potential institutional investors.
Altcoins like Litecoin, PPC, Namecoin, etc - do not suffer as much from this issue because their exposure was far greater than Bitcoin ca. 2009, and the mining competition was greater on the respective debut-dates by several orders of magnitude.