Bitcoin Forum

Satoshi wants to keep his identity secret.

There would be many huge consequences if his true identity was ever revealed. The more bitcoin grows, the greater the potential impact.

Right now, Satoshi's early mined bitcoins are worth over $400m.

It only takes one individual or group with a sinister agenda to find out Satoshi's true identity and surely he is vulnerable to a very serious extortion.

What lengths would somebody go to in order to get their hands on $400 (and growing)?

No matter what security you employ to to protect your private keys, if somebody is holding a gun to your head, that security is going to crumble.

Last year Satoshi's email was hacked. Is there any potentially personally identifiable information that was obtained by hackers and could work its way into hands with the power to carry out such an attack?

Not only could the real Satoshi be at risk, anyone mis-identified as him could be at risk.

Even worse, if such shady individuals were ever successful, it would be in their interests to take out the unknown Satoshi, and nobody would ever know such a heist had taken place. To everyone else it would just look like he had started spending.

Does anybody else think this is something we need to consider?

Naturally this is a risk for anyone with any assets.

• Do what you can to keep yourself safe
• Make the effort to get trained in self-defense
• Under duress, readily give up a prepared amount
• Under further duress, reluctantly give up another prepared amount
• Under ultimate duress, understand that you are probably going to die even if you give up everything
• Understand that you are eventually going to die and then none of this worldly junk will matter anymore

I propose a distress feature.  When forced to give up access to my private keys then I actually give up a variant.  The variant, when used, triggers a silent alarm indicating I am under duress.

Extortion is a risk for anyone with assets, sure.

However with an asset that is pseudo anonymous, with no knowledge of who posesses the asset (private key), Bitcoin creates a totally unprescedented opportunity for extortion.

I cannot envisage any other situation where you could steal $400m from one individual and nobody raise an eyebrow or even know it ever occured, can you?

It's 'pseudonymous' not 'pseudo anonymous'.

Kidnaping or extorting in any other way is illegal, so claiming you could just extort Satoshi with zero consequences is like claiming you could extort physical cash from someone and get away with it. Sure, it's possible, but to pull that off, you would still need to make sure you leave no witnesses/evidence + good luck explaining to authorities how the hell have you become multimillionaire overnight (when you decide to sell those BTC).

It's probably easier for extortionist to target any other, wealthy person and demand more 'reasonable' amount of BTC as ransom.

As long as nobody knows who Satoshi is, and that still seems to be the case, there's nothing worry aabout for him.
My personal opinion is that Satoshi in reality is a small group of really intelligent guys who still might be surround us in the crypto space.

if he is a group those 1M coins are more in danger than many think, because with that amount of money it's easy that some dissent will destroy the group because one of them want everything

it's entirely possible that they made it(bitcoin= because they were poor(and they were looking at a way to have money with a revolutionary thing) and they have now a fortune in their hands

maybe they started with common sense, but i know that money drive you crazy, when there is an amount like that in play

I am not sure he did it for the fame or money. He just wanted to create something for the people by the people.
Being in the dark makes lives just so much more easy, and yes being a public figure not. Extortion, kidnappning, you name it and criminals have already planned it.

First off, anyone who thinks that that was the email of Satoshi, they are sadly mistaken.  If they say it is, I want proof, hard proof.  They will not be able to provide it because there is none.  Do you think that someone who created a complex system such as BTC, will be someone you can identify by normal means?  He is probably working some small executive job somewhere where no one will pay him any mind.