Bitcoin Forum

First, i'm not sure if i posted this in the right topic or not.

But say Satoshi wanted to come forward one day, but everything electronic had been lost (say, he lost his computer and didn't have his private keys anymore, nor access to his email address). Would he still be able to establish who he was with everybody? Or would he just be shrugged off like people saying they're the new jesus - saying "well, that sounds daily convincing, but if you can't sign your message with the private key to one of your old wallets, tough luck"?

spend a coin from Satoshi's wallet.

Spend from one of his many wallets, that have had zero activity for ages.

http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/

Well he can't do that if he doesn't have any private keys.

He could post with his Bitcointalk account if he still remembered the password.

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3

If the Last Active date on his profile ever becomes later than December 13, 2010, 06:45:41 PM you know he has been back, even if he didn't post.

Hmm, that is if we trust the admins here...

Probably block 1 reward is option...

Sign a message with his PGP key.

Satoshi's intentions are opposite to proving he's Satoshi. He succeeding with flying colors :)

Spend coin from one of his long dormant accts

To be honest,

I think "Satoshi" is dead.

To put the question another way around, how could the person/s who posed as Satoshi be sure to never be accused or proven to be behind Satoshi?

1. Destroy access to e-mail and PGP key

2. Destroy access to Satoshi wallets that represent all the early block mining

Now, I think we can be fairly sure that #1 wouldn't be too painful, but what about #2? Even when Satoshi moved on, those wallets were worth a significant amount of money, and they've only become more valuable since then. Unless Satoshi values his/her/their anonymity more than +1 million BTC, then it's safe to say that maybe one day the coins, and their owner will become known.... although there are various ways that Satoshi coins could be spent anonymously, maybe if integrated mixing makes it into the protocol (as it's actually useful for decreasing transaction load as well as preserving privacy) then one day they may start to move.

That would at the same time be incredibly sad (from ethical and honest standpoint) and incredibly awesome (from a greedy selfish standpoint).

I'm leaning a lot more towards incredibly sad and that's saying something.

maybe he left a message in the white paper. would be easy.

Me too; he created something mind-blowingly clever.  To have died before it even began to find users is tragic.

May be he is online now at this forum and grinning at this post ...  ::)

He's loaded. I'm not expecting him to do anything meaningful for the world in the rest of his life (I wouldn't either).

He's done more than his fair share :)

I hope he is not dead that would be awful

I hope so.  Because if he's dead he's rolling in his goddamn grave that anyone would ask how someone with a known PGP address would prove their identity.

Assuming he really exists...

Why would he want to identify himself?

He can do anything he wants and no-one will bug him, try to kidnap his kids - snap him when he tries to eat out...

If he is mart enough to have invented Bitcoin, he is probably smart enough to not want the inevitable attention.

Something similar to that Stieg Larrsen guy who wrote the Millennium Triology. He died before the first book was released.

Cross posting here, as it belongs more in economis than in the Off-topic forum