Any bitcoin oldheads know it's not Peter Todd based on tons of behavioral, timestamped, and logistical evidence. The actual leading candidate is Len Sassaman if you look objectively at the evidence.

I just can't imagine the real Satoshi saying something this stupid.

Indeed.

Cullen should know better: his previous project was a documentary on the QAnon conspiracies, which have managed to get people hurt due to crazies looking for these conspiracies. Cullen's evidence is hopelessly coincidence based... exactly the kind of shoddy evidence that fuels conspiracies like QAnon.

Personally I suspect he made the accusation against me simply to create media interest. In particular, by making an accusation against someone who wasn't a leading contender, myself. I haven't seen the film yet myself. But friends of mine have, and said that other than the Satoshi nonsense it was a reasonable documentary about Bitcoin. Problem is, it's hard to build interest in that.

Anyway, hopefully this just blows over. But we'll see. I already took some precautions re: security just in case...

Stop looking to them for credible analysis.

As Bitcoin gains market value the issue of Satoshi’s coins is becoming more and more serious.

It’s not wildly understood yet but Bitcoin will go fully dark in the future, how to do this, especially with help of L2 systems, is well known in the deep technical circles.

I think all libertarian capitalists believe money should be private. However Satoshi will eventually be the wealthiest human to ever exist and if that wealth is 100% dark it raises some tricky issues.

Not a good reason. The person who developed bitcoin is responsible for billions (maybe trillions) of dollars of fraud and crime. They are responsible for a ludicrous amount of waste and carbon output. They should be held to account by the public.

The fact that the inputs, outputs, and fee of a transaction must add up isn't exactly "detailed knowledge" :) I don't think it took me all that long to figure that out when I first tried understanding how Bitcoin worked.

And frankly, the core of Bitcoin really isn't all that complex! You can have a very good understanding of all the parts after just a few days carefully studying it. Which is exactly what I did: I sat down with the Bitcoin Core codebase and figured out what all the code did. Especially at the time, it really wasn't that big of a codebase.

> After watching the doc it does seem like Adam and Peter know a good deal more than they are letting on, even if it wasn't them specifically, it seems likely that they have some idea who it was.

I can't speak for Adam. But I have no idea who Satoshi is. If anything, I think it could be literally hundreds or even thousands of potential people. Bitcoin is something so simple that you didn't need to be a super-genius to come up with it. You just needed to understand some relatively high-level, basic, cryptography and have a brilliant flash of inspiration. Satoshi was a very competent C++ programmer (it's a myth that his code was bad). But there's lots and lots of very competent C++ programmers out there.

At least it's a good tax write-off. (Well… $3000 a year for life in the US iirc.)

Do you think the world really has $70B in cash to blow on bitcoin right now? Big players mine the stuff, they don't buy it.

My guess is that it's someone who was not particularly well-known prior to Bitcoin.

[0] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=225463.0

CO2 emissions, fraud, attacking democracy is on the negative side. What’s on the positive? Why is it still legal?

It feels like Crypto at the systemic level is an open vulnerability not an asset. It’d be nice to have this vulnerability to get fixed.

>CNN sat down with Hoback, prior to Todd’s denial, to discuss why the director is so confident in his theory, whether he’s worried about being sued, and that big dramatic confrontation at the end of the film.

https://www.wired.com/story/crypto-home-invasion-crime-ring/

But for someone involuntarily accused that's another matter. A security detail is eye wateringly expensive -- particularly one comprehensive enough to stop kidnappers in general.

They don’t seem to occur in a speculative fashion where “maybe this person can pay…”.

Anyone who knows, knows the coins haven’t been touched in a suspiciously long time, and moving Bitcoin is not always anonymous…

1. Satoshi emailed me at the same time Hal was taking part in a marathon. Yes, technically emails can be delayed, but ... why? There was no urgency in those discussions.

2. Hal preferred to write C and was still writing C up until the moment he sadly passed away. Satoshi wrote in modern(ish) C++. Note that the same problem applies for Len Sassaman and basically everyone who has been fingered as a possible Satoshi. The combination of C++, Win32 and cryptography is not very common in the cypherpunk space.

3. Hal was a professional cryptographer who worked on an encrypted messaging product (PGP). Satoshi had some fairly basic misunderstandings about cryptography, like believing that you can't use elliptic curve keys to encrypt messages, and referenced having to do research to understand the cryptography he needed. Why would Hal pretend to be a newbie at cryptography, up to and including not having features Satoshi said he wanted?

4. Hal did try to create digital cash already, but tried to build it on trusted computing hardware. He had a long term interest in that approach, as did I, and his last project before his death was one I suggested related to this tech. In fact there are emails between me and Hal in list archives pre-Bitcoin where we swap notes on Intel LaGrande. If Hal had been Satoshi it seems likely that Satoshi would have at least commented on the ways TC could be used at some point, but Satoshi never showed any awareness the tech exists.

6. If you're trying to be anonymous, why would you immediately and pointlessly reveal your identity by messaging yourself?

7. He denied that he was Satoshi.

This paper makes a pretty good case that the late Len Sassaman was Satoshi. Its a pretty thorough examination regardless if you think it was Len or not and doesn't come to a definitive conclusion.

He was interviewed when he could no longer speak. He was asked if he was Satoshi. He just smiled.

It's just the kind of joke Hal would play.