Bitcoin Forum

I have always found it fascinating how people can invent something so monumental but yet be nonexistent in society.  Every move that they make has to be calculated because any false move might expose their true identities.

I strongly feel that I have discovered who Satoshi Nakamoto is or someone who is in close association with him and his invention of bitcoin.  I am taking a Taoism class in college and our professor assigned us to read Paco Ahlgren’s book, Discipline.  The concepts in Ahlgren’s book and the development of bitcoin and where our economy is heading today are absolutely parallel.  It’s almost frightening.  Through extensive research on Satoshi Nakamoto, I have only been able to discover where he is allegedly from and that he developed bitcoin.  After conducting research on Paco Ahlgren, I have found that his credentials and interests make him a prime candidate for someone with the intellectual capability to invent something as profound as bitcoin.

Has anyone else read his book?   If so, I would be curious to hear what you think about this theory!

I will certainly check out his book now.

Oh, fuck! Look at the last post in his blog http://www.pacoahlgren.com/bitcoin-cannot-fail/

LOL

Let me check and read that book as well.

Not Found, Error 404


For many time I thought that Julian Assange may be related (even being its founder).

wow, i just read that article a couple of hours ago, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand it's gone.

Article in full:


If you haven’t already come across one of the multitudinous articles flooding the Internet these days about Bitcoin [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin], I’ll enlighten you: Bitcoin is the first successful digital crypto-currency. It is the first viable threat to monopolistic, uncompetitive government-issued money. And it is proliferating.

As the United States stumbles through broken efforts to raise an already lofty debt-ceiling, the country’s obligations mount to historical highs, and its currency continues to plummet. Indeed, despite governmental claims to the contrary, commodity and energy costs have continued to soar in recent years [http://www.pacoahlgren.com/no-inflation-really-have-you-been-to-the-grocery-store-lately/] — not so much because of scarcity or demand, but simply because the world’s currencies are failing. Why? Because governments around the world have gone on an unprecedented printing spree, and the results are higher prices; in most cases, commodity prices have doubled in the last 15 to 18 months.

In 2009, an enigmatic figure known only by the (almost certain) pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto invented an algorithm that would become Bitcoin. Here are the reasons why I believe the new currency (and its offspring) will destroy government fiat currencies forever:

1. The U.S. and other governments will soon make Bitcoin illegal. This is incontrovertible: the Federal Reserve is a semi-private institution whose owners benefit every time a dollar is used. They are self-interested human beings, and there’s no way they’re simply going to let a private currency destroy their monopoly without a fight. Alas, the U.S. can criminalize Bitcoin until the end of time, but it won’t stop anyone from carrying (or sending) it offshore, and using it places where it is welcome. Which brings me to my next point:

2. Never in history has it been possible to put all of one’s wealth on a digital storage device (laptop, cell phone, thumb drive, et cetera) and walk out of the country. You want to stop me from using Bitcoin? You better destroy all forms of digital storage, because that’s the only way you can prevent me from using the currency. As long as I can find someone willing to take dollars for bitcoins in the U.S., nothing is going to stop me from leaving the U.S. with my Bitcoins. Do you think you can criminalize domestic exchange of Bitcoins? Really? Isn’t that what you tried to do with Marijuana, Heroin, Crack, Cocaine, LSD, assault rifles, Cuban cigars, and prostitutes? How’d that work out for you? You really think I can’t get Bitcoins? Or some other crypto-currency?

3. Bitcoin is just the beginning. Remember Napster? Remember how everyone freaked out about music piracy? Remember how the government shut down Napster, and all its imitators? Did that stop anyone from getting free digital music? No, it didn’t. If anything, the government — in all its wisdom — made would-be file sharers more savvy; instead of using a centralized model like Napster, these users simply changed the rules of the game — going peer-to-peer. Now, instead of having one monster to fight, the government has millions and millions it has to kill. And it’s not working.

Another example? How about online poker. The geniuses in Washington decided to criminalize the online gambling industry — which was, by the way, pumping billions of dollars into a struggling U.S. economy. So what is the response? You guessed it. Bitcoin. Gambling sites are redirecting their energies to offshore sites where U.S. citizens can play poker to their hearts’ content — converting their dollars to Bitcoins, and funneling resources out of the country. Great job, Washington. This is what happens when sycophantic, fatuous morons get elected and assume the role of “thinking.”

4. Some would argue that Bitcoin is nothing more than an unregulated, private fiat currency — backed by nothing. I would argue much differently. Fiat currencies have, to this point, always been issued by monopolistic, bureaucratic governments. Even when those currencies were backed by gold — a policy that all but the rarest governments abolished decades ago — the supplies of such currencies were still subject to the whimsical decisions of only a few. More often than not, the currencies represented mounds of debt, and destructive monetary policies that kept up the illusory trend of growing asset prices through mild inflation.

Because Bitcoin is strictly peer-to-peer, however (pay attention, because this is important), it is essentially “issued” by every single human being who transacts in the currency. Only 21 million Bitcoins can ever be minted, and of those, less than half have been minted. What this means is, as the demand for Bitcoins increases, it will appreciate in value — making it a more realistic and accurate deflationary currency. In other words, Bitcoin is finite, and as demand grows, so will its value. And because it is decentralized, this means every Bitcoin is worth exactly what two interested parties agree upon, at the time of the exchange. The currency is owned only by the person who possesses it — there is no bureaucratic third-party government participating in the transaction by manipulating the supply. And what that means is that every single Bitcoin is backed by the assets and/or debt of every single participant in the market. That does not sound like a fiat currency to me.

So while the U.S. (and every other country) is up to its eyeballs in debt, its currency will eventually reflect as much — especially considering that the government can simply print as much as it likes. But Bitcoin is not represented by any such entity or policy. It belongs only to its users, and that is true “full faith and credit.”

5. What happens when the U.S. criminalizes Bitcoin? Won’t the price fall? The answer is yes, probably. But it won’t go away, because it represents something we’ve never seen before. Bitcoin is a way for people to move their wealth without any detection, whatsoever. Never before could  you put $1 million dollars on a cell phone and leave the country. But you don’t even have to leave the country; as long as you can find a bank somewhere that will accept Bitcoins — and there are a lot of them — you can send your money anywhere without the transaction being recorded. For the first time in a long time — maybe for the first time ever — your money can actually be yours. Governments can no longer tell you what you can and can’t do with your cash. They can’t make the rules. And that scares the hell out of them.

You can attach any sort of deontological morality stance to this contentious issue you like. But you cannot stop people from acting in their own interests, and I doubt very seriously the government’s ability to prevent people from hiding their money any way they can. Oh they’ll try, but this time, the authoritarians are out of their league — not because of a lack of sophistication, but because of a lack of resources. Simply put, the government simply does not have the jurisdiction or manpower to find and destroy Bitcoin; it’s too easily hidden, and extremely portable.

Some people say that the advent of the Internet is the biggest achievement in human history. That may be true. But as revolutionary as it has been, nothing is going to change the game like the privatization of currencies. Without control of the money supply, governments cannot dictate anything. This may be the purest form of democracy the world has ever known, and I — for one — am thrilled to be here to watch it unfold.


www.PacoAhlgren.com [http://www.pacoahlgren.com/]

Disclosures: Paco is long gold, Bitcoins, and oil. He is short U.S. Treasuries.

The mistery thickens... Maybe he deleted because of the comment i left in the article saying someone thinks he's Satoshi and left a link to this thread  :D

Here you have it guys: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XezIfAKwc-AJ:www.pacoahlgren.com/bitcoin-cannot-fail/ in full, with comments LOL Save the HTML while it lasts ;)

satoshi nakamoto is too smart to repeat these fallacies:


pumping billions of dollars? shuffling billions of dollars. which doesn't add any real production.


it is unregulated and backed by nothing.


deflationary? the supply increases. it is not deflationary, except from the perspective of a mind steeped in excessive inflation. but he does get valuation correct in this paragraph.

Read Paco Ahlgren's book last year.  I can see the correlation but not convinced. Satoshi Nakmoto is a little smarter than that.  Hence, the guessing game continues...

he removed it again ...I think you are on to Satoshi ?

No worries, I have the full page saved in my computer. Complete!

wow, you saved it!? good job!  Satoshi is on the run!

Yeah, when he moved it from his main website to bottomviolation.com i suspected he might do it again, so i saved it ;)

Here you go
Save it for you before i get a DMCA! lol

lol'd  yes, thank you for saving it!   watch out for a DMCA!

You guys really think this guy is Satoshi?

if I had to go out on a "limb" I would say yes this guy is Satoshi - reason?  the moving of the article around + closest thing to making sense = Satoshi

I don't know. Satoshi should be a pretty smart guy and knows how to hide his identity. He should therefore also know that the worst thing to do when somebody points to an article you wrote as possible evidence, is to shift/hide it. It just screams guilty as charged. So if it was really Satoshi, I'd bet he would leave the article alone and maybe even write a followup thanking everybody for giving him the dubious honor of being equated to Satoshi ;)

It's all part of the game.  I just finished reading Paco Ahlgren's book, Discipline.  Mind blowing and busted. If he's not Satoshi, he's definitely associated with him.

Look at this comment on the cached page:


Some people think you are Satoshi Nakamoto ;)
Take a look: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=35465.0

... they're on to us!

I still think that "satoshi" is a group of people

One has to consider why would he wish to remain anonymous?

One theory is that Satoshi is a number of people, a group.

If so, why pretend to be one person? A group could still be anonymous - eg "Anonymous" "Lulzsec" etc.

Why would an individual not wish to be associated with the creation of bitcoin?

It seems to me 2 likely explanations

1) they didn't wish bitcoin to be seen in the context of their previous writing. I've not read this Discipline book, but if it advocated a political line and the author of it were the creator of bitcoin, it might cast bitcoin in a political light. Eg if it predicts that a crypto currency could topple the US government, then bitcoin would be seen in light of that - ie an attempt to do that, which might turn many (but no means all) against it.

2) they intend to profit from bitcoin. Whoever invented bitcoin stands to make a lot of money as the currency appreciates (as they'd have got the first bit coins very cheaply). The very limited supply of bitcoins makes vast currency appreciation a certainty if they catch on (as appears to be happening). The creator might not wish people to see quite how well he's doing from it. Personally I don't see why the creator of something successful (eg Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Page, etc) should not make a fortune from it, but many people might use the growing wealth of the creator of the system as a criticism of it.

You guys are like detectives!  I love the internet.  This is definitely an eye opener.  I want to read that book now!

One more: 3) They fear for their physical safety if it's known that they control millions of dollars in untraceable assets.

Isn't that a bit of a contradiction?

The assets are untraceable, but you know who owns them?

'control' is not a contradiction for 'own'. please re-read joel's post.

It's even worse if he doesn't! Suppose some mobsters figured out who Satoshi Nakamoto was. They kidnap him and demand he tell them the private keys to his millions of bitcoins. If he doesn't have any such private keys, he's in even worse shape than if he does. He has no way to get them to put the rubber hose away.

OMFG!  :o

Thas was me dude!  ::)
Just look at the site in the name of the commenter and look where the mirror of the page is hosted...

If Paco Ahlgren is Satoshi Nakamoto (and personally I think he is), then I don't think he really cares if people get close to the truth. First of all, he probably wrote the article about bitcoin, and then when people started saying he was Satoshi, he probably just pulled it to be safe. I guess he didn't think people would have saved copies.

But think about it . . . if you've read Ahlgren's book, you know he's a master chess player. If he's Satoshi, then he planned out every move well in advance. Just because a couple of us geeks on a forum think we've figured out a connection probably isn't going to affect him too much. In reality, he's probably having a good laugh about it!

If there is a connection, I'm pretty sure that he's hidden his assets good enough that nobody's going to be able to find any evidence linking him directly. So he's probably just sitting back and enjoying the show.

paco nakamoto has a good ring to it.

I think I've got more of this figured out...

Did anyone check if his math and coding creds match up with this theory?  Because you have to be pretty darn good at complex math and logic to design a system like this and obviously you'd have to write the software to run it too.  I think evidence suggestions one of three things:

1. He's the theory designer of the system and got a few other people to do the original coding and math design so Satoshi is multiple people.

2. He's the original entire designer start to finish and wanted to hide that fact.

3. He's a member of some semi-political hacktivist group like anonymous or lulzsec and solo or in a group designed the system and doesn't want to be identified because of that.

I think 3 because this system really does seem like if one of those groups wanted to raise a ton of money in a way that really matches their ideals and message, this would be it.  So he probably approached them or they approached him and got it going.  The only problem is, don't bitcoins predate both those groups?

Now I'm not into the wiki world but isn't there a way to tell what IP did the original writing and majority editing on the wiki articles about Satoshi?  Because the "real Satoshi" as in whoever it really is despite the name, would be checking it a lot of cleaning up any evidence and purposely adding false info to maintain the facade all the time. If the IP is located where this guy lives, tada.

Right. Because Satoshi wouldn't hide his IP address. Why would he want to do that?

There was one thing that has been bugging me ever since I read Ahlgren's book. BTC is a completely digital currency, not backed by gold or anything. But in the book, the currency is backed by assets, and its actually a paper currency you can carry in your wallet. Also, Ahlgren doesn't talk much about encryption or anything like that.

But today I remembered a part in the book where it says that the author changed the details to protect the people involved. That gave me a shiver, so I did some more research. I already knew that Ahlgren finished the book in 2000 or 2001. But it wasn't published until 2007. But BTC wasn't created until 2009.

So here's my guess. Ahlgren started working on this before he even wrote the book -- back in the late 90s. Then he wrote the book and the description of his currency was flawed on purpose. Then after the book had been out a while, he (and whoever helped him) created the real thing.

This story gets stranger every day. I still haven't gotten a response from Ahlgren. Has anybody else tried to contact him?

Mack

For precisely the same reason that he posted a BTC related article on his own website, then deleted it but actually only moved it :P he's intelligent but not very careful or wise and potentially not as ultra-skilled as a person in his position has to be with modern computing and the internet, especially security and privacy.

My guess is that he's confident enough that he's not worried about what people are saying. I'd bet all my bitcoins that nobody's ever going to be able to prove that Alhgren is Satoshi.

Here's another thing to think about . . . he has a lot to gain if bitcoins go up. Writing that article makes alot of sense. But then when people started saying he was Satoshi, maybe he just thought better of it.

Anyway I doubt he's really all that worried. I still think there's no chance we'll ever know for sure. Ahlgren's book is like a blow by blow of bitcoin. The coincidences are too much for me to ignore. It would be one thing if the book appeared after bitcoin. But it didn't.

That's my theory, and I'm sticking with it. ;D (But I still wonder why he hasn't returned my emails.)

He hasn't returned them because he probably doesn't exist either...Andy Kaufman style.  You guys are going to keep chasing your tails on this one.

deflationary? the supply increases. it is not deflationary, except from the perspective of a mind steeped in excessive inflation. but he does get valuation correct in this paragraph.
[/quote]

IMHO Bitcoin IS deflationary by design because it is a limited amount of money chasing a growing amount of goods.

By the way, Satoshi sounds like Mark Karpeles getting a call from the core team: can you post this paper while you are in Japan so the FBI does not come after US ?
This is my answer but what was the question again ?

So you're talking about the "control" he has over the entire bitcoin system - not just Satoshi's own stash (which he "owns")?

I thought the whole idea of bitcoin is that our money is safe even from the creator of the system? IE Satoshi DOESN'T control it? Its peer to peer, the system controls it. Or did I miss something?

Are you telling me that if some gangsters start sticking things up Satoshis arse that my money is at risk?

If any early adopter dumps all their coins on the market at once, the value of your bitcoins it at risk. That's about the worst they can do, unless they're evil geniuses of some kind that come up the kind of brilliant scheme that only works in movies.

An example of such a 'movie plot' attack would be to abduct the people who control the forums and the release of the client, create a fake urgent bug report using fake forum posts from many well-known forum users, and induce most of the network to upgrade to the latest version of the client. Somehow, you'd have to stop people from noticing and finding other ways to get out the word. And then use the tampered client to pay for everything you possibly could in fake coins, cleaning out all the exchanges. (In case it isn't obvious, I don't think such an attack could ever pay off enough to cover the costs of launching it.)

I hope I'm wrong but isn't it the case that there are many miners but there's only one single bitcoin client.  So unlike bittorrent, it's not a network that many apps can use with a common engine.  The client is the bitcoin network. There's a distributed and unmodifiable database called the block chain exists "outside" the clients, right?  And to cheat it, you'd have to convince every single other computer in the entire world that your fake transaction is legit.  Impossible?  HELL NO!  It's simple!  They're all running the same client!  Just rig the client to say it's a legit transaction and suddenly everyone in the world agrees. Here's why that catastrophically bad:

Let's say the developers of the bitcoin client version 0.3.25 decide that in that version, they want to make it so every time address number "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" sends a payment, it received 1000 BTC for free. You're thinking that wouldn't feed into the chain and would get rejected because the chain would tell you the money came from nowhere and it doesn't calculate correctly.  But that's the problem with people's perception.  There is no "the chain told the client _____" The client reads in the chain and makes its own determination about what's allowed and disallowed and all the rules in the network reside in the bitcoin client.  It only relies on everyone else on the network to verify any changes in BTC ownership so your client can't just make things up....but like I said, you can get everyone's computers to agree on something if everyone's using the same exact client.  If they're all coded to agree that creating 1000 BTC from nowhere and stuffing it into the block chain is legit, it's going to do it because nobody has some alternate client to say no.

You can't have every single computer in the entire bitcoin network run one piece of software to manage the chain. It's a really bad idea and I don't see any reason a modification like that to the client software by the originators of it wouldn't work.  And they have no reason not to rig it to accept rogue transactions because they could make a lot of money from it.

The attack you are suggesting is virtually impossible. What motive would people have for accepting a client that was rigged in such a way, particularly if the utility of bitcoin for them was harmed by such a choice? All that would happen if the developers did that is that their client version would quickly cease to be the official one.

And nothing stops anyone from writing their own client. So long as it follows the same network protocol, nobody need even ever know.

well then someone should make an alternate client ASAP because I only know of one and everyone trusts it 100% and that's setting it up for a very, very bad situation.  There really should only be like 3 though because if there's 50 and people keep making more, you know some fake ones will appear that just beam your wallet straight to russia once it hits a trigger :P

I don't see how it's setting anything up for a bad situation. In any event, what you're suggesting is happening anyway. People are running several different version of the client and upgrades do not happen instantaneously. There is no conceivable way such an attack could work until the majority of people were running an upgraded client, and there would be no way to induce the majority of people to upgrade to a client that destroyed the entire point of bitcoins.

The attack is just not feasible. If the Firefox team started making Firefox unusable, you wouldn't switch to Internet Explorer. You'd stick with the last unbroken version of Firefox until someone else took over the project and made a release you found better than the one you were using.

The people who control the official client only do so because they have earned trust. Any hint that that trust was betrayed and they would lose control over the official client.

That said, alternate client implementations are actually not a very good idea, IMO. Any slight incompatibility that caused a block to be accepted by one set of clients and not another could fork the public chain and lead to serious pain. (Imagine if one client said I paid you 100 bitcoins and another client said I paid someone else. However that's resolved, somebody won't be happy.) That's a pretty high risk for very little benefit. (I might be persuaded otherwise if there was some significant benefit, but I don't know of any. Obviously, it's a cost/benefit analysis and the cost is high.)

Frankly speaking, I've thought of coding an alternate client to address certain issues. But as my research moved along, I realized a lot of these are actually already catered for within the specifications, just that the official client hasn't implemented them.

Now the problem arises that if I go ahead and write an alternate client, assuming that my skills are up to it, what happens if I implement some of those "newer" features like contracts using disabled script operators? These transactions become invalid because most of the official clients user cannot validate it. So anybody using mine will get borked if they tried to use that feature.

So it ends up that whatever I do, I need to keep in step with the official client. If they implement a "new" feature, I have to keep up before it is released as public so I'd forever have to keep catching up. The end analysis of it is I would be wasting my effort duplicating the backend system. We're probably better off with a single official implementation and then hanging off GUI frontends from it to cater to preferences. But this won't address your fear that the devs can sneak in loopholes like that since the core processing is still a single implementation.

However, that's already an issue that's covered by the fact the official code is open source. I'm sure there are people outside the dev teams who look at every new release and check for potential flaws and backdoors.

Surely there is also the issue that some users are going to be using the older client, at least initially. So if they release a new client with this rather major change to the system in it, the vast majority of users would initially be rejecting those blocks that didn't follow the old rules. At this point it would become clear that there is something bad with the new client, that it was issuing bad blocks.

So one would have to ensure that it was hidden in the new client, but didn't start to create bad blocks until some point in the future when most if not all users would have upgraded. And being open source, its unlikely that such code could escape notice for long.

Occams Razor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor)) tells me that:

This Satoshi dude/dudes/dudette is a guy that hangs out of the crypto list, he/she/they
read Paco Ahlgren’s book "Discipline", got inspired and created bitcoin.

Paco then found bitcoin and thought f*cking nice, this looks like the stuff in my book,
lets write about it.


All other explanations are less likely.
/GoK

If you write a client that implements the currently-disabled script operators, your client can interoperate gracefully with existing clients.

Your client can connect to existing clients. Standard clients will not relay any non-standard transactions that they receive from your client, so you need to connect to at least one willing node. For example, luke-jr operates a node that will relay non-standard transactions.

You will want to get your non-standard transactions into a block. There are some operators who will mine blocks that include non-standard transactions. Non-standard transactions will take longer to get into the block chain (a few hours rather than about ten minutes) because not every miner will hash them.

Once your non-standard transactions are in the block chain, they don't cause problems. Clients that don't know about them will still accept the block, but will just ignore the individual transactions that they don't understand. The counterparties to the transactions that use your script operators will of course use a client that recognizes them.

And when your script operators have been demonstrated to be useful and proven to be safe, they are likely to be incorporated into the standard client.

There are already some non-standard transactions in the block chain, and the existing clients cope with them just fine.

I'm with you all the way..... until...

why did Paco Ahlgren then decide to delete his blog post about bitcoin?

1. Satoshi would not have written a blog post about Bitcoin in a non-anonymous place.

2. Paco has not just deleted his Bitcoin blog post. He seems to have deleted both of his blogs and is redirecting the domains to his "Discipline Book" site. Very odd.

Errr.....Paco Ahlgren's two sites that held his blog have now been redirected.  Sooooooo, it looks like none of his articles are available.  If you guys are looking for the simplest solution to be the best solution, my money is with the idea that Ahlgren wrote about bitcoin, created bitcoin and is now quietly fading away because we may have accidentally stumbled upon the truth.  Why else would he be rearranging his blogs?  Why would he be watching us and reacting to our speculations if there wasn't something to hide?  I can only assume that the removal of his blogs indicates just that very idea!  He's watching and reacting.  If you want my two cents, there you go!

Game theory suggests that is EXACTLY what Satoshi would do, especially if Satoshi is Ahlgren.

No, he's banking on all you guys going there searching for the bitcoin post. Very clever ;)

But there are several alternative clients available.  And the beauty of the way the network works is that it protects against malicious and broken clients.  If two clients interpret a transaction differently, one client will fit with the rest of the network and the other will be broken and its transaction (a spend from someone who erroneously thinks they got your 100 bitcoins?) won't be forwarded by honest, correctly-working nodes.

Thanks for clearing that up, quite obviously I haven't gone through all the documentation nor as thoroughly as I ought to for those parts that I did :D

Now it says Ahlgren's site is down for maintenance. So let me make sure I have this right. A published author pulls down his entire presence on the internet just to fool a bunch of geeks. I'm not buying it. Paco Ahlgren is definitely Satoshi Nakamoto. Or else he's connected to him/them/whatever.

Satoshi could've intentionally acted in a way that would look suspect to throw us off expecting we would expect him to not be so careless. If we expect him to be smart enough to not produce obvious clues pointing to his identity, the presence of obvious clues would signal it isn't him, and we would be desestimulated(sp?) to look deeper into connection to this person.


Though, he could actually have thought about the possibility of someone seeing that move, like me, and played it so that either way we're throw off (the person isn't him, it's a decoy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQNHBUqfLnM

Taking dollars from savings accounts and moving them to gambling sites might be considered to be pumping dollars into the economy. Those dollars are going from rent to circulation.

I don't think Paco's above statement is wrong.

Satoshi uses British English and inserts two spaces between sentences. Does Paco Ahlgren?

Check for yourself: http://coinbits.com/bitcoin-cannot-fail.html

But i must warn you that wordpress sometimes auto-formats text depending on users settings, so, it may not mean much if he doesn't use the 2 spaces between sentences in his blog ;)

About the british english, well... I can't pronounce myself because i learnt english watching to hollywood movies lol

I hope he doesn't get found out. It would be a travesty.

Yeah because a professional writer wouldn't know how to sound British and a professional editor wouldn't know how to add 2 spaces at the end of a sentence.  By the way, you're the only person who would notice that.

The article definitely uses American english

criminalize (criminalise would be more common in UK, though ize is perfectly correct)
cell phone (a "mobile" in UK)
decentralized (again, ise ending more common in UK)
privatization

Why wouldn't he?  I'm sure that he's aware that people are trying to connect him with Satoshi Nakamoto.  That's dangerous territory.  The guy is probably just trying to protect his ass from the rumor mill.  No matter what move he makes though, people are going to speculate now because his name is now linked to Nakamoto.  Good job guys.

The most logical, simple explanation at this point in time, given all the evidence, is that he knows who Satoshi really is because Satoshi read his book and questioned him about it.  I think the writing styles are different enough that it's likely to be 2 people.  Also, nobody would be stupid enough to write an entire book about something then create it in real life and pretend they weren't the one who did it.  But if someone reads your obscure book and wants to talk to you about it because they think it contains awesome ideas, you're going to talk to them!  That's how authors are.  And then if they say they want to implement the idea in reality, you're not going to forget that either.

I think he knows who Satoshi really is, contacted him to let him know that people found out he's related, and Satoshi said the most logical step to take at this point is to take down the blog and stuff.

If Satoshi mines a bitcoin and the network isn't around to see it, does it go in the blockchain?

Truly profound stuff  ??? ??? ???

Freaking awesome stuff - boggles the mind!
 :o

Man you are reaching now! So now they're best friends?? Hahaha! And what evidence are you basing this on?  Forget tv, this is all the entertainment that I need!

Satoshi always used tor and an anonymising email service, so it seems unlikely that he would have chosen to reveal his identity to Paco.

With certain projects and jobs and stuff I did in the past, I didn't think much of it until it became something and because of that I was sloppy with my privacy and personal details.  I'm sure if Satoshi was like "OMG someone should totally do that!  Like for real!" he probably wasn't thinking ahead to absolute security and sent it from a home IP or personal e-mail address or something.  Then when he realized financial laws and theft and governments would be after him, THEN he went all ninja :P  If he followed the suddenly secure it up path like that, obviously the first person in the chain of contacts he made would have been the guy who literally wrote the book on the topic.  I mean, you don't design the whole system then tell the author you think it's a good idea that would really work.  For all we know, he met him in person at a book signing or something.

Wrong.  I think his entire process was private and methodical. This man leaves no room for mistakes. Why the hell do you think he has us spinning in circles over this insignificant topic?  Because he was sloppy in the beginning? I think not...

I personally don think the dude exists..

This forum is a waste of space.  Who cares about Paco Ahlgren or Satoshi Nakamoto??  The real issue at hand is making sure that bitcoin becomes as important as the dollar bill and that it never disappears.  THAT is what we should be discussing--not this stupid cat and mouse chase about who did or said or saw what about who MIGHT have created bitcoin. 

Paco Ahlgren already have his sites up again and he made a new article about bitcoin where he says that he's not Satoshi Nakamoto

Read it here: http://coinbits.com/note/the-future-of-bitcoin-and-digital-currencies-paco-ahlgren/

Dont you mean Satoshi Nakamura? :p

Yep, that was clever of him.  Smooth.

Did anyone find out if it was like failing to load anything from the server or simply disabled on purpose while it was "down"?  Because I have a really good feeling that one of those famous hacker groups started bitcoins because it would be very beneficial for them and inline with their ideals.  They obviously based it on this dude's writings.  Whether they made up Satoshi or they sort of made it up as a fake name for the author of the book that obviously described the system, if it was them, what happened makes sense in that case.

They could have easily taken the sites down themselves if people were starting to figure out the fake name was him or were incorrectly focusing on him in case he knew who some of the members were personally.  Then tada, he's back up again with that silly article :P

That seems like the most logical answer at the moment.  If you really think about it, it can't be a one man show with him behind everything.  If he's satoshi, he wouldn't have published the article in the first place then hopped it to a new site then taken it down then put an "it's not me" article up.  No reasonable, smart person would think all of those were wise decisions.  It has all the markings of someone telling him what to do and scrambling in the process.

an ebook torrent would be most awesome.... anyone? do i actually have to go buy this? saddest face ever... but if he did invent the bitcoin i guess i owe it to him. even thought i hiiiiiiiighly doubt 1 twist made bitcoins. pretty sure the idea that a group of people made them is a better idea. And also the idea that this has been planned out for a very long time. Everything is coming together, in every aspect of life not just bitcoins. Im just watching, waiting, and learning along the way. I totally wish I was born about 10 years earlier....

A bookstore that takes bitcoins would be more awesome.

Maybe this guy inspired, knows, or is Satoshi and maybe not but either way it's a hell of a lot of effort to write a book and he deserves to be paid for it.

^ correct.

Interesting theory... makes me want to read that book :o

good point!

Of course all of this is pure speculation, but I think it was just two people who independently created their works, and we are after the fact trying to draw causal links between them. In other words, you'd need more to go on.

Hey guys, I'm Satoshi Nakamoto but I'm not Paco Ahlgren.

Sorry for the confusion.

The real Satoshi Nagasaki would never write the next sentence.

The fake Satoshi Nagasaki would never write the previous sentence.

rofl, yeah and I think perhaps the most logical theory is that this is all a scam to sell copies of his book :P it stinks of modern, sneaky marketing and PR lol.

It's clear that you haven't read his book yet or you wouldn't so casually throw this idea out before some serious consideration...

I noticed that too.

Satoshi gives some credit to others here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=342.msg4508#msg4508

and does not mention Paco.

I think Satoshi is one person. It's too difficult for a group to stay cohesive enough to maintain anonymity.

Is the book worth reading? I've heard mixed things, although they were generally positive. The tie in with bitcoin is really that strong that this thread isn't kooky?

I read it and thought it was fantastic. It's actually the reason I found out about bitcoin, because I was looking up the author and found some of the threads discussing his role in bitcoin.

I consider myself to be an austrian/classical economist, and that's how I found out about Ahlgren's book originally. That's also why bitcoin has piqued my interest. To answer the question though, no, the whole book isn't about the currency. One of Ahlgren''s strong suits (and the reason I think there may be credence to the theory he is involved with, or actually *is* the mysterious Satoshi) is his diverse background. In several interviews, he talks about how Discipline was his attempt at fusing different philosophies -- most notably Taoism, Karl Popper's work, and quantum physics (a la many worlds, and string theories). You can also see the influences of his life as an economist and financial manager.

One of the things Ahlgren admittedly tried to do was present the material in a way that would be interesting to everyone. I think he succeeded, because the book isn't overbearing at all on technical or philosophical points. The price he paid, though is having to lay a long (and sometimes somewhat tedious) foundation to build the story on. But once you get through that, it's totally worth it. The characters are memorable, and the twist at the end is as surprising as I was told it would be. And, also true to the word on the street, you really do want to read it twice to get the fine points you may have missed prior to getting the revelation at the end.

I only read the book recently, so I can't say much about some of the older theories about Ahlgren and his experience. But I will say that the way it unfolds bears an uncanny resemblance to what's going on in the world today, and when I found out about bitcoin, the I immediately understood the reason for all the speculation. Bitcoin is a lot different than Ahlgren's PGU, but as one other observer noted, the book says the details of the story were changed purposely to protect fact.

And that just deepens the mystery... at least for me. How much of Discipline really is based on fact, if any of it?

I haven't read Paco's book but you're better off reading these two articles and accusing Nick Szabo of being Nakamoto.

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-ye-so-long.html

He suggests that it's likely Wei Dai or Hal Finney are Nakamoto, which if you understand the implication he's saying that possibly he IS Nakamoto. Nick Szabo has clearly been thinking about bitgold/bitcoin for YEARS. He understands the value of money. He knows so few people have the knowledge or interest that he could just publish 90% of the solution in 2005 and people would not be able to take his idea to implementation. He clearly was missing a few ideas that Nakamoto eventually turned up with. But it's possible Nick had an epiphany discovered the remaining pieces of the puzzle and created his pseudonym Nakamoto. Nick also claims that he came up with bitgold in 1998 independently of Wei Dai's bmoney, at the same time on the same mailing list. He is defending his intellectual claim as the inventor of the bitgold/coin idea and Nakamoto is just the implementer. He also gives good credit to Nakamoto for what Nakamoto brought to the table (aka Byzantine distributed DB).

For the strange conspiracy twist.... Nick updates his 2005 bitgold blog post on Dec 27th 2008.... 4 days before bitcoins initial launch on Jan 1 2009. And he accidentally updated the blog date instead of leaving it as the original 2005 date. AND on that same day he posts this blog entry to describe Transactions, Script, Funging Bitgold, Bitgold Address Title Registry (aka bitcoins in the block chain). He talks about computing an adjustable puzzle difficulty factor. AND OMFSM he talks about the readjustment period in weeks (coincidence factor...).
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.html

If we pause for a minute to think about the human ego... if Nick is Satoshi then his ego is soaking in the praise for being the intellectual muscle behind bitcoin (backed up by Satoshi's own acknowledgement). Plus Nick would be using a great technique of hiding in plain sight. Also, why didn't Nick comment on the bitcoin proposal on the cryptography mailing list...

Maybe a more senior forum member knows why people aren't pointing the finger at Nick. He had all the intellectual muscle to pull it off.... does he know how to code ?

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bit_Gold_proposal

Paco's book is totally worth reading. In fact, I think it's one of the best books I've ever read. I've noticed that it got some bad press here and there (although most of it is really good). But I've also noticed that bitcoin has gotten a lot of bad press. So has Ayn Rand (and look how many books she's sold). People seem to hate good ideas, and they seem to be passionate about it. I think it's because most people  are afraid of change and ditching the status quo.

In my life, I've noticed that usually the best, most radical ideas are the ones that get blistered by the general population before they get accepted by the main stream. Newton was laughed at by his colleagues, as was Einstein. I'm not saying Paco Ahlgren is the best writer ever, but the way he brings together so many ideas is new and exciting.

For my money, I think if he's not Nakamoto, then he's in with him. Most likely, I think Paco and some other people probably did this together, and that they all planned this from the beginning. I hadn't read about Nick Szabo before, and that really makes things more interesting. What would help this whole discussion a lot is if Paco and/or Nick showed up here and clarified things a bit! :-) But I guess their probably not going to do that! But I'd bet my bottom bitcoin the two of them know each other, and probably quite well.

Everybody has an opinion, but I have the TRUTH:

No, it was pumping billions of dollars in. Gamblers outside the US were using US companies to gamble online, thus pumping money in to the US economy.

Thank you and the other posters who took the time to answer me. You've convinced me to check it out.

The only actual criticism I heard about the book involved readers not getting into the writing/empathizing with characters. Considering how outnumbered they were and how they weren't critical of the ideas in the book, I'm thinking I can ignore them for now :)

That this particular endorsement comes from an Austrian schooler makes it all the more credible to me. Cheers. Perhaps I'll let you know what I think at some point here.

His BitCoins exist,
Satoshi Nakamoto,
Please send some to me.

A Haiku.

1CRfw8JjgpgX4m5LcstGcgWqYZt6vGRe4G

Does anybody have a link to Satoshi's bitcointalk profile?

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

Any idea if he is using some alter ego profile after the last login?

It is surprising how many 2010 articles are much more well done than today ones  ::)

Read his Wikipedia article. It probably was written by himself, or by PR specialists he hired.

If he were Satoshi Nakamoto then Satoshi Nakamoto will eventually be known as him, at least when Bitcoin succeeds. i.e. I think he's the kind of person that would want to claim the glory to be someone who invented Bitcoin.

From the reviews of his book and his profile, he probably knows a lot about money, a number of things about computers, but his treatment of quantum physics sounds very unprofessional - worse than a Sci-fi writer, and he brought up those names just to sound cool.

lolwut

There is no wikipedia page for Satoshi...

 8)

Does it matter? Honestly, it's open source software. Though yes, he/they are important due to writing the original code, but what we do with it, is what ultimately matters.
Just because it's created, doesn't mean it'll be used the way the creator intended. Much like I have a hard time going over someone's else code if they wrote it too awkwardly, or not like me. Because I have my own vision. If I can do it without rewriting the entire system, I have to `tack` it on. Once you tack something on, you're exceeding the original programming. Are you following still?

Our mother's gave birth to us, not always do we end up following their desires and wishes. We become our own people. Bitcoin will become something more, more than Satoshi.
I believe that to be the purpose of this, giving birth, then orphaning your child, to see what happens.

Bitcoin has also given birth to more coins, coins might mate in the future, have their own babies, we'll never know what the result will be, because it's a new form of life. I believe they/he wanted to see what it would be like to be god/a true creator, having done it the way he/they did. The dark and mysterious, and undeniable truth is in the result, not the creator.

I think you all think too much about conspiracy, and not enough about creating.

Obviously I meant this Ahlgren guy.

It seems to me his non-existence keeps him from being the focal point like wikileaks founder is. It makes it harder to demonize bitcoin.

I think he means the bitcoin wiki:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto

I wouldn't use the word obviously, but thanks for clearing that up.