Bitcoin Forum

Slashdot noticed a blog today announcing text analysis on the Satoishi Nakamoto paper suggesting the author to be economics professor Nick Szabo. (see http://slashdot.org/story/13/12/03/159254/is-gwu-econ-prof-nick-szabo-satoshi-nakamoto (http://slashdot.org/story/13/12/03/159254/is-gwu-econ-prof-nick-szabo-satoshi-nakamoto))

This is interesting because I had, last year, fingered Robert Hettinga as writing the early "Satoishi" posts to this forum, based on a similar kind of analysis.

Apparently Hettinga and Szabo are longtime friends and collaborators. Note that (as I pointed out in my earlier post) Hettinga knows Gavin Andresen well because they worked together at the "Digital Commerce Society of Boston".

This leaves the final problem of who wrote the code? Since David Chaum happens to be a friend of both Hettinga and Szabo, and one of the few people on the planet capable of writing the code at the time it was written, that would seem to be obvious personage.

Therefore, we have the possibility that "Satoishi Nakamoto" is not a single person, but an avatar for three people acting in concert: Robert Hettinga, Nick Szabo and David Chaum.

Re: Yossi Nagy Moti - Cryptovirology and Bitcoin

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=206630.msg3647012#msg3647012

Here is Nick Szabo's 'unenumerated' blog post on Bit gold circa 2008: http://unenumerated.blogspot.co.uk/2005/12/bit-gold.html

Where we can see Daniel A. Nagy as a commenter. Of course all similar individuals with similar interests.

All of the usual suspects.

This is one of my personal favorites: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=191362.0 - Tor - Incentive Mechanisms !?! HAR 2009

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJD1hDKDqlo - Pay attention from 4.57 "Incentive Mechanisms"... micro payment approaches... with a reference to Tor bittorrent users directly before talking about a similar system to 'Bitgold'.

The real irony is that Satoshi is probably just some random guy who knows some or none of these individuals and/or closely followed their work and rightly deserves to remain 'anonymous'.

I've just found something that jogged my memory from early 2010.

I remember reading a forum board about something very similar to bitcoin / bitgold that I think I found via a search engine. I had registered on bitcointalk and was searching for bitcoin history at that time. So, the date of the board was probably 2007-2009.

The board had very few contributors - I got the impression that one of the 3 main contributors was a university professor / lecturer type and had an advisory role over the others. I also got the impression (and this is from memory) that the other main contributors were 1 male and 1 female - perhaps students.

The 'coat of arms' that I think I remember on the board was that of the George Washington University.

https://www.gwu.edu/seal-mace-coat-arms

I've searched many Universities and College websites for this 'shield' and this one is the closest match to my memory of it.

I don't want to find 'Satoshi', but I would like to find and read that board - I've looked for it and I can't find it. Obviously it was freely available on the internet, but maybe it got archived or deleted ?

Perhaps Phinnaeus Gage or someone else could help to find this ?

Have you tried the Wayback Machine?

http://archive.org/web/

If there was a university seal on it it was probably some sort of university provided forum; asking alumni of GWU might help.

I'll give it a shot, starting here, but still seeking the forum you described: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html

Virtual Currency has been about for a long time, there is a giant amount of people that most likely hypothesized about creating something out of nothing, such as Bitcoin, and creating a value for that monetary item, like the proof of work within bitcoin, theres the proof of work within virtual currencies for video games and so forth, but definitely a nice theory!

Dont you think Satoshi is a group of people under one pseudonym ?! Possibly ?

Maybe baby.

From 2008:
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html

Out of curiosity, I recently read all of Satoshi's posts on this forum. He's basically all business. There are very few outbursts of opinion or noticeable instances of idiosyncratic language. He makes a few brief comments regarding economics, but they don't yield any great insight into who he is. He probably has an above average understanding of economics, but doesn't come across as an academic.

His writing style is very direct, brief, to the point, humble, businesslike. He's not overly emotional. There were one or two exclamation points in like a "Thanks guys!" phrase or a "Hurray!" when a bug was fixed. That's about it for outbursts of emotion in all those posts. He didn't offer any tomes of opinion in opinion threads, which to me is a bit odd. He's just not that kind of person that feels the need to express himself at length or argue. Of course he was much too busy to indulge in any of that anyway, but most people would probably leave a trail of venting strong opinions here and there anyway. So he comes off as very focused on the work.

I got the sense he was not too young and not too old. He seemed rather conservative with respect to getting publicity for Bitcoin or making claims for it. He wanted things to go slower so that the software would mature properly. He stressed that the software was experimental and so was the idea. I think I read one comment where he said the idea had not been peer reviewed or something, so that shows a general respect for academia and science and institutions.

The only stand-out clue I found was that he uses British English spellings rather than American. You know, he'll use o-u-r in words that Americans would use o-r, and i-s-e in words that Americans would use i-z-e. He does mess up once in a while and use an American spelling though. He comes across as a native speaker of English. He did use one "bloody" and one reference to a "mobile" for a cellphone, so that sounds bloody British, doesn't it? : )

He uses the dash appropriately (as far as I understand English grammar) for combining two words together to be used as an adjective. A lot of people will fail to do this in their writing. As an example, one would not normally combine "free" and "market" unless these terms were being used together as an adjective. Compare "the free market is showing a trend," to "this free-market trend." He was pretty consistent with this kind of usage in his posts, but I did not notice it in the paper. Perhaps he was self-conscious in the paper and wanted to make it as dry and academic as possible. The paper seems perfectly consistent with the forum posts otherwise.

He did mention that the design of the system was much harder work than the coding. He said he began in 2007, so it looks like he was basically alone for two years. He definitely takes sole credit for creating Bitcoin. There are no hints of others being involved, but he does acknowledge the influence of others. He refers to "b-money" and "bitgold" as inspiration.

In the end, he seems to have been spooked by an article linking Bitcoin to the Wikileaks "scandal." He was upset by that for some reason, not wanting that kind of attention for Bitcoin or himself. That, and reaching the end of 2010 probably signaled to him that this was the right time to disappear into the shadows.

That is the sum of my amateur sleuthing on the subject. He does not sound like Nick Szabo, and I haven't read the other suggested persons, nor do I know who is British among them and who isn't. Of course, he very well could be someone who was educated in British English but not necessarily a Brit by birth or heritage. All indications are that he covered his tracks pretty well, so he most likely planned to always remain anonymous.

Impressive analysis.

I still consider some peeps at Trinity College, Dublin as contenders.

Primarily Professor Donal O'Mahony.
https://www.cs.tcd.ie/Donal.OMahony/

Speaking as someone who reviewed some of his code in late 2008, I think I can express a pretty strong opinion that it was probably written by one person.

Every coder has his or her "fist" -- a set of quirks of indentation, delimiter placement, commenting style and placement, use of/familiarity with libraries, thinking style, and etc...  A lot of companies try to enforce a "standard style" but they never completely eradicate all bits'n'pieces of individual style.  

The early bitcoin sources had no identifiable influences of any "company style."  

The author clearly did not trust himself to manage c++'s notoriously finicky memory issues and completely defend against buffer attacks, so he made heavy use of STL and Boost to do that - at times going through contortions specifically to avoid having raw buffers anywhere.  He was very clearly a C programmer before he was a C++ programmer, judging by his iteration style.  And his placement of opening and closing braces around blocks of code and indentation relative to those braces was kind of a minority choice -- not strange enough to be peculiar, but unusual enough that it would be surprising if a project written by multiple people used it completely consistently.   The earliest code also uses no 'tab' characters, which tends to indicate that the files were written in the same editor or with the same editor macros - again not peculiar in itself, but it would be unusual for it to be completely consistent in a project by more than one person.  

As for comments, he rarely used one word where none would do.  :-\  His comments were mostly limited to notes to himself to do stuff later or resolve design issues, not explanations. In itself, not unusual, but again, you wouldn't find it completely consistent across a project by multiple people.

I should clarify this last.  What I mean is that people who are coding as part of a team usually use comments to explain the code they're writing to the other members of the team.  So-called "lone wolf" programmers making something all by themselves usually are in the habit of not needing to explain anything to anyone so they don't.

Dude, if you can't even spell "Satoshi" correctly, just GTFO.

Did an anonymous commenter show the first use of bitcoins being displayed with eight decimal places: http://unenumerated.blogspot.co.uk/2005/12/bit-gold.html

:D

SCAM-Alert! Software on this page contains a Trojan according to Virustotal. Beware! Tried to report this, but the forum always gives me stupid error messages. Links to this site are also sent as Spam-E-Mail to addresses of users here which have not set their e-mail address invisible (forgot to hide my e-mail, got two messages, have now changed address and blocked the old one)

http://youtu.be/i7tQ1VtLMyk?t=6m30s - Anonymous- The Story of the Hacktivists (Full Documentary)

http://youtu.be/OG0wKUipab0?t=4m42s - We are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists 2012 full movie ... (as above)

http://youtu.be/STVdCJaG0bY?t=3m - The Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT

http://youtu.be/hXsl6AXhIdM - Dorian Nakamoto, Disputed Bitcoin Inventor, is Traffic Safety Advocate

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=507936.0

Which is all circumstantial ofc.

~ Still unable to find the message board I posted about above. Anyone ?

We can realize that all of the Cypherpunk's (and many 'anonymous' others) probably contributed to parts of the Bitcoin code, both historically and in practice. Here is some Cypherpunk history from: Defcon 18 Changing threats to privacy - a talk by Moxie M.

http://youtu.be/eG0KrT6pBPk?t=2m56s

Who would actually want to be Satoshi ? These people didn't want fame, they wanted to make the world a better and safer place. They saw the future.