{"id":7241,"date":"2020-01-09T12:25:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T10:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forklog.media\/?p=7241"},"modified":"2020-01-20T02:14:44","modified_gmt":"2020-01-20T00:14:44","slug":"from-a-drug-peddler-to-elon-musk-how-is-satoshi-nakamoto-still-anonymous-after-a-decade-long-search","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/from-a-drug-peddler-to-elon-musk-how-is-satoshi-nakamoto-still-anonymous-after-a-decade-long-search\/","title":{"rendered":"From Drug Peddler To Elon Musk: How Is Satoshi Nakamoto Still Anonymous After a Decade-Long Search"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin [Andresen] and everyone\u201d<\/span><\/i> \u2014 this <\/span>message<\/span><\/a> was sent by Satoshi Nakamoto to a developer Mike Hearn on April 23rd, 2011. It is considered to be the last or one of the last confirmed contacts with the creator of Bitcoin before his, her, or their disappearance.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

However, the hunt for Satoshi began a bit earlier. On December 12th, 2010, Nakamoto left their last post on bitcointalk.org forum, reading that Bitcoin is still vulnerable to DoS-attacks. That was the moment people started asking if Satoshi is a real person.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since then, the search for Bitcoin\u2019s creator keeps on going. Every year the community comes up with new versions, but nobody got closer to answers. Were they really a libertarian? Did they create Bitcoin with politics in mind? Are they, in fact, Japanese? We don\u2019t know.<\/span><\/p>\n

What we do know is that Satoshi\u2019s disappearance was decisive for Bitcoin and its history. The community was left without a leader to dictate the course of action. Meanwhile, the protocol faced an excruciating test for censorship resistance, which it passed successfully.<\/span><\/p>\n

To sum up the findings of this almost a decade-long quest, ForkLog journalists have put together all the theories about Nakamoto\u2019s person, from plausible to the most insane ones. We promise that you\u2019ll find this conundrum as fascinating as we did.<\/span><\/p>\n

Eastereggs In Plain Sight<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n

The community is confident that Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym. One of the Japanese forum users noted that it is not customary for Japanese to put the first name before the last name, as Nakamoto did. Moreover, the Bitcoin creator had never used Japanese words, which made the truth seekers believe that he\u2019s not Japanese. Yet, there were speculations that Satoshi wanted people to make this conclusion.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Japanese Satoshi<\/em> means \u201cwise\u201d or \u201cclear mind.\u201d –Naka<\/em>\u00a0can mean \u201cinside\u201d or \u201crelationships,\u201d while -moto<\/em> is \u201corigin,\u201d \u201cbase,\u201d \u201cfoundation.\u201d Together it means something along the lines of \u201cclear mind inside the foundation.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Some enthusiasts suggested a more trivial explanation: Satoshi\u2019s name can be formed by the names of four technology companies SAmsung, TOSHIba, NAKAmichi, and MOTOrola. However, this particular assumption seems far fetched.<\/span><\/p>\n

April 5th, 1975. This is the birth date from <\/span>Nakamoto\u2019s profile<\/span><\/a> on P2PFoundation. Some people found hidden meanings here as well. On April 5th, 1933, the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt <\/span>signed<\/a><\/span>\u00a0Executive Order 6102 “forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States.” It was officially in force until December 31st, 1975, just a day before 1975.<\/span><\/p>\n

A swiss programmer Stefan Thomas <\/span>discovered<\/span><\/a> that Nakamoto never posted anything between 05:00 and 11:00 GMT, even on weekends. This led Thomas to believe that Nakamoto lives in the UK. This version is backed by Nakamoto\u2019s perfect English and the usage of words such as \u201cbloody,\u201d \u201coptimise,\u201d and \u201ccolour,\u201d which are typical for the British. Satoshi has also included an excerpt from an <\/span>article<\/span><\/a> by the British outlet The Times, highlighting the possibility of the second bailout for the UK banks, into the genesis block of Bitcoin.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is possible that Satoshi left all these clues deliberately to hide his tracks. According to a linguist Adam L. Penenberg, British English was a disguise. His investigation <\/span>led<\/span><\/a> to Neal J. King, an educated and well-read man, who reviewed 46 books on Amazon, including astronomy, biology, cryptography, linguistics, literature, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Later, King refuted any involvement with Bitcoin development.<\/span><\/p>\n

Penenberg also claims that programmers Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bray were competent enough to create such a system, but both dismissed the claims.<\/span><\/p>\n

Laszlo Hanyecz, the programmer who bought pizza for 10 000 BTC in 2010, once said that Bitcoin source code is too good to be made by one person. Laszlo believes that Satoshi is unlikely to be real.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bruce Kleinman, the author of \u201cThe Bitcoin Tutorial,\u201d agrees with this version. He is confident that it is impossible to find somebody who would know cryptography, network architecture, software architecture, and cybersecurity simultaneously.<\/span><\/p>\n

Notably, one of the most extraordinary members of the crypto community John McAfee stated that Bitcoin was developed by <\/span>an Indian team<\/span><\/a>. Considering McAfee\u2019s reputation this claim doesn\u2019t appear credible.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the people who disagree with the concept of Satoshi being a group of people is Adam Back, the creator of Hashcash and CEO of Blockstream. He <\/span>highlighted<\/span><\/a> the consistency of coding and Satoshi\u2019s writing style in letters and documents. In fact, for a while Back was considered to be the real Satoshi. He <\/span>created<\/span><\/a> Proof-Of-Work prototype back in the 1990s and was cited in Bitcoin white paper. Back himself disagreed with the claims and urged the community to stop the hunt.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2011, a famous whitehat hacker Dan Kaminsky decided to break Bitcoin. Being the one who discovered a critical vulnerability in DNS protocol, Kaminsky was confident of his skills. He designed nine approaches to attacking the protocol, but each of them failed.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe way the whole thing was formatted was insane. Only the most paranoid, painstaking coder in the world could avoid making mistakes,\u201d<\/strong> he said.<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dan Kaminsky noted that Satoshi is \u201ca world-class programmer, with a deep understanding of the C++ programming language,\u201d who understands economics, cryptography, and peer-to-peer networking. He concluded that Satoshi is either a team of people or a genius.<\/span><\/p>\n

The same year, The New Yorker journalist Joshua Davis started looking for Satoshi among the visitors of the Crypto 2011 conference. He <\/span>found<\/span><\/a> nine people from Britain and Ireland. Six of them, a group from Bristol University, didn\u2019t have experience with P2P networks. The other two had no history with large software projects. The last candidate caught the journalist\u2019s attention. It was Michael Clear, a graduate student in cryptography at Trinity College in Dublin.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The best student of 2008, Micheal developed software for Allied British Banks, authored a detailed academic document about P2P technologies, and was well-versed in C++. When asked about the financial crisis, he said that it could\u2019ve been avoided.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the end, Clear denied any connection to Bitcoin development. However, he told Davis that a Finnish researcher Vili Lehdonvirta could be Nakamoto. When contacted by the journalist, Lehdonvirta laughed and said that he\u2019s not.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cI would love to say that I\u2019m Satoshi, because bitcoin is very clever, but it\u2019s not me,\u201d<\/strong> the researcher said.\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lehdonvirta added that he has no experience in cryptography whatsoever and his knowledge of C++ is very limited.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even Elon Musk was once suspected to be Satoshi because of his C++ skills. The entrepreneur <\/span>denied<\/span><\/a> all claims. In his later statements Musk <\/span>acknowledged<\/span><\/a> the advantages of Bitcoin over paper money.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to another popular conspiracy theory, Bitcoin was created by a group of developers from the National Security Agency (NSA). An <\/span>article<\/span><\/a> from 1996 called \u201cHow To Make A Mint: The Cryptography Of Anonymous Electronic Cash\u201d by the Agency researchers allegedly supports this version. The community finds this theory implausible, as the NSA\u2019s description has more similarities to the <\/span>eCash system<\/span><\/a> designed by David Chaum.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

How to spot a crypto-charlatan: <\/p>\n

somebody posting this 1996 paper as evidence that somebody at NSA was thoroughly describing Bitcoin 12 years earlier (when indeed they were just superficially describing Chaum's bank-based Ecash 6 years later)https:\/\/t.co\/hJ5ISK5YFA<\/a><\/p>\n

— Giacomo Cringe-Lord Zucco\u26a1\ufe0f\ud83c\udf0b\ud83e\uddc0 (@giacomozucco) August 17, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n