Bitcoin Forum

This video was uploaded at the same time when Bitcoin was launched in Feb 2009:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNBMdDaYhZA&t=1h1m4s

Watch the next 2 minutes after the linked time. 1:02:45 is where it's at. Have we found our man?

Nah, he was speaking in very general terms about some way to send money, quickly, easily and anonymously to content creators. That's not far off from what he's been evangelizing for decades, so I see no significance in his mentioning it at any particular time in 2009.

Couldn't be. He's not Japanese.  :D

More evidence, here is another Stallman 2009 video in which he discusses possible anonymous currency systems:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ&t=1m50s

Sounds more like Flattr than Bitcoin

Im watching the video. I'm intrigued. You could be correct. He fits the profile in many ways. I wonder what he knows about cryptography.

"As the hacker culture at the MIT laboratory declined with the instatement of password restrictions, Stallman decided to quit his full time job in 1984 to pursue his side project, Project GNU. In 1985, he published the GNU Manifesto, which articulated his motivations for creating a free operating system compatible with UNIX. Soon after, he founded the Free Software Foundation and popularized the concept of copyleft. In 1989, Stallman also released the first program-independent license called the GNU General Public License. By this time, most elements of the GNU undertaking were complete. However, the project was stuck on the advancement of the operating kernel. Simultaneously, a Finnish developer, Linus Torvalds, created a kernel called Linux based off of GNU development tools. With the integration of Linux into the project, the GNU/Linux operating system was born.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/1114568"

Wiki
Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, and he is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.[5] Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against software patents, digital rights management, and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs,[6] the GNU Compiler Collection,[7] the GNU Debugger,[8] and various tools in the GNU coreutils.[9] He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989.

Stallman is the last person who'd hide behind a pseudonym.  If he believed in it, he'd gladly put his name on it, and deal with the courts if necessary.

I believe Satoshi will come back down here to save us all if things goes really bad for Bitcoins.

Actually, one of the SolidCoin people has apparently been claiming that Satoshi has dumped his bitcoins and invested in SolidCoins instead.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=42069.msg512976#msg512976 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=42069.msg512976#msg512976)

Agreed.

Not only that, but he almost certainly would have put it under the GPL license (bitcoin is under the MIT license).

Heh... That pretty much settles it.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

That's typical of the guy behind SolidCoin and just goes to show how much everyone show avoid SC like the plague. He's bad news.

Correct me if I am wrong, but Bitcoin was introduced in November 2008, not Feb 2009.

Here's Satoshi's first post, http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09959.html
Dated November first 2008.

?

Take a look at the YouTube stats of this video. Look at what link is at the top. Note the view count for that link.

Phin, step away from the conspiracy theory  ;D

It's also easily checked.  Have any of the first 10 blocks moved?  The first ten are almost certainly Satoshi's, the genesis block definitely is.

Has RMS made any public comments about Bitcoin?  In light of his past commentaries, he should have something notable to say about Bitcoin.  If his public mentions of such cryptocurrency ideas cease after Bitcoin's metoric rise around October 2010, about the same time that Satoshi disappeared, this might be a significant link.

If RMS were Satoshi, the client code would be better.

My post had nothing to do with any conspiracy theory.

YouTube stats:

Date    Event    Views
A
12/06/10    First referral from – forums.somethingawful.com    371
B
05/21/10    First referral from related video – Thorium Remix 2009 - LFTR in 16 Minutes    305
C
04/15/10    First referral from – www.stumbleupon.com    2,341
D
12/10/09    First referral from Google search – richard stallman    698
E
09/08/09    First view from a mobile device    2,592
F
07/27/09    First referral from related video – Richard Stallman Eats Something From His Foot    426
G
04/10/09    First referral from – www.google.com    735
H
02/06/09    First referral from YouTube search – richard stallman    8,509
I
02/06/09    First referral from YouTube search – stallman    1,322
J
02/06/09    First referral from – www.facebook.com    415

Don't people have a their own coding style that is hard to shake? Somebody should compare EMACS source code to Bitcoin source code.

The lack of GPL license is a compelling argument against the theory, but RMS has used more liberal licenses in the past: when he feels it is to his advantage (such as the LGPL for libraries). If Shatoshi is really RMS, that may explain the annonymity though: he would not want to admit he found a case where the MIT license is more pragmatic.

I'm pretty sure they're two different people. If RMS wrote Bitcoin you'd have to press C-x f M-a M-e s to see your balance, and something with ten times as many keystrokes to send a coin. That, and Bitcoin doesn't allocate the entire swap partition. :)

The bitcoin client has at least three orders of magnitude too few features to have been written by RMS. ;)

Are you sure about that? They did release a UNIX that had no kernel. :)

Touché. :)

Where do you want to start?  "Richard Stallman" bitcoin     -->  http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=%22Richard+Stallman%22+bitcoin  About 132,000 results

It is not Stallman's coding style, choice of tools/libraries, or licensing style.  So highly doubtful.

We could probably argue that CoinHunter is RMS though:

* Sees someone else's work and decides he can do better, so clones it
* Can't make it compatible with the original
* Obviously doesn't like the MIT license
* Security is an afterthought
* Bug fixes take three tries to get right
* Won't shut up about how much better he is than everyone involved in what he cloned
* Adds "features" to clone that cause more problems than they solve (try a 'grep -z foo /dev/zero' on a Linux box belonging to someone you don't like)
* Arrogance infinitum
* Makes long-winded speeches about how flawed the original is and how he's fixing them all
* Can't understand why his clone doesn't immediately take over the whole industry
* Has small but insanely fanatical array of followers who believe everything he says and reject any logic

I think I'm kicking the carcass of a horse that's not only dead but was eaten by saber-toothed tigers here. :)

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/User:Genjix/Free_software

Correlation does not mean causation. A Google search for "Richard Stallman" porn returns 290,000 results, none of which stars Richard as the porn star. According to your logic, it should be about twice as likely that Richard is a porn star than that he is Satoshi.

I guess even he doesn't want to GPL his nads...

Surely, you don't think that I didn't know that. Hence the question. With so many results, where do should we start?

According to Rule 34, now RMS is a porn star.





I'm never turning off "safe search" again.  :o

A search of the term "Richard Stallman" satoshi  gives 34 000 results.

33 999 of which are the bitcoin forum blowing hot air.

 :D

SA in the house?

You already knew "Richard Stallman" porn returns 290,000 results?

P.S.

Just trolling with you. No suggestion intended.

Well todu apparently checked every one of those results for a guest appearance from RMS ;).

I thought Bruce Schneier more than Richard...he does have a section on sending money using cryptography in Applied Cryptography.

Given the general nature of the people on these forums, I'd be far more inclined to guess Satoshi is Eric S Raymond

Seriously, this should not be limited to any one in particular. I would use the pseudonym Cheese Salad, would that necessarily mean that I am a salad?

Congratulations. You just resurrected an 18 month old thread.

I met Stallman in the London conference and he was quite clueless about bitcoin as a whole.

I doubt he's such a good actor.

Remember, when you point your finger at someone, three fingers point back at you. Besides, his exposure may lead to danger and he may have a family to consider. Think of the children! And in the final analysis, isn't there a little Satoshi in all of us?  ;D

This is my conclusion too after I heard him talking about BTC.

...by misunderstanding a sarcastic post, none the less.

Hell no, Stallman is quite misguided when it comes to economics. He actually proposed that businesses should be taxed ever increasing amounts as they grow in size, to disincentivize "too big to fail." While I think he has a lot of useful things to say about copyright and patents, it is clear that he's a Statist and at odds with the Bitcoin philosophy.

...by misunderstanding a sarcastic post, none the less.

:)

lol

I actually emailed both Eric Raymond and Bruce Schneider about bitcoin.  IIRC, Eric Raymond denied being Satoshi, yet thought the concept of bitcoin was interesting.  Bruce Schneider merely responded to note that he was aware of bitcoin, but offered no opinion on the system.  This was about two years ago.

BTW, Bruce Schneier did not deny being Satoshi in his response; and as far as I know, has not really commented publicly on Bitcoin except for a couple of minor posts last year to imply that he didn't understand it, which I don't believe.

If Satoshi is any one person, and is already even moderately famous for his existing skillset (and a man, which is also quite an assumption) then Bruce Schneier is still high on my list.

This.

Jesus Christ, how have you guys not realized that Satoshi is Gavin Andresen. And Satoshi Nakamoto is just his edgy sounding nickname.

What if he didn't act anonymously to protect himself, but because he came to the conclusion that Bitcoin could not succeed any other way?

Satoshi Nakamoto is not Richard Stallman and this is why:

Bold my emphasis.  from http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10142.html (http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10142.html)

Satoshi develop on window?  :o

Gavin is not Satoshi.

Japanese Stallman still would've called it "GnuCoin"
http://s18.postimage.org/6kg44huqh/staddfd.png

Just look up Bitcoin 2012 London: Richard Stallman. Maybe it was just I who resurrected you.

If you cared on the subject you would already had watched Stallman here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN6Q--zqroM
I guessed you just wanted to tell somebody 'hey resurrection' without actually doing any research beforehand.

Yeah, he must be pretty damn clueless. Watching that Bitcoin 2012 London: Richard Stallman, he only made a few comments about Bitcoin on a 43 minute speech:
0:10 Bitcoin mentioned 13:00 Wikileaks btc donation. 33:50 Bitcoin licensing copyleft non-copyleft 42:35 Bitcoin mentioned. The talk had little or nothing to do with Bitcoin.
He talked about how Bitcoin is licensed, and said that some projects he doesn't have a problem if they aren't copyleft. Did we learn anything new now?

Could be you look at it from the wrong perspective.
Maybe you should better ask: Is Richard Stallman actually Satoshi?  :P

This might be off topic. My apologies.

We know the time of Satoshi's posts, right? With different sets of assumptions, this time distribution could be used to generate a set of activity profiles...ie, if we assume he posts during evening hours most often, and didn't move frequently, his post time stamps suggest his time zone was...

This was done years ago.  The most likely time zone is Eastern US.

Not impossible.

I find it extremely unlikely Satoshi to be RMS, since rms has long ago abandoned programming but instead try to tell people about Free Software, meaning he should have not gotten enough time to focus on Bitcoin, even less programming. Also in what language did Satoshi write the code? Was it not c++? Also look for any references of rms to that language.

Source: http://ftp.fukt.bsnet.se/pub/movies/stallman/stallman2c.sub

Also note that Bitcoin is not branded with a GNU. It is neither called GNUcoin, though it sounds catchy doesn't it? "New Coin".

Stallman eats his own Toe Jam (not kidding, he does it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ ) so I wouldn't want to be associated with that guy, and I wouldn't want bitcoin to be associated with him. People would call it Toebitcoin or something, Really Gross!

In fact, I would not be surprised. Imagine how easy it would be to send funds to agents behind enemy lines when there's enough local traders. :)

I would appear so and he also used the term "open source" both of which would eliminate RMS as Satoshi.

RMS actually dislikes C++ and I think stuff like that matters to him.
That, to me, is proof that he didn't code it.

Exactly right.

Among other reasons why it can't be Stallman, you merely have to read some of Stallman's code to see it could not be him. RMS has a VERY distinctive code style that is unmistakable.

I still think the triumvirate of Neal King, Vladimir Oksman, and Charles Bry is the most likely hypothesis to date, though Michael clear might be an outside possibility. All of these appear more likely candidates than Stallman.

Maybe Bill Gates is Satoshi???    :o

First, and most important, the original Bitcoin client is MIT-licensed, which makes it very unlikely to be Stallman.  Next, the client is written in C+, which is not a favored language of old school hackers of the Richard Stallman school (C is).  On a related note, C++ is very much the language of academic and researcher types, which makes me think that Satoshi is probably a professor or some other academic or researcher.

A far better candidate that RMS for the following reasons:
1) He would develop on Windows
2) He would refer to FLOSS as "Open Source"
3) He would not use a copyleft license such as the GPL, but has no problem at all using an open source license such as the MIT license

And it would be written in Emacs LISP.  XD