I don't think you can credibly call something Bitcoin which doesn't incorporate the ownership of coins resulting from the history of transactions which people ubiquitously considered to be Bitcoin transactions in the past.  Just the genesis block isn't enough.  So, "it has to logically continue the ownership structure that people previously considered bitcoin." -- so that would have at one time opened the door for varrious spinoff coins to take the mantle but after enough time that door closes, and it would exclude e.g. a fork from block 100k created today from ever being bitcoin, or a fork from block 1 (IIRC some of these have existed).

I think you're also missing some critical philosophical criteria.  Someone could make a backdoored hardfork where anyone with a key whos address begins with "12STD5BhabrNpx56pWu" can spend any coin they want ... but pretty much no one would adopt that because it would introduce trusted parties, the avoidance of which was the stated purpose of Bitcoin from day one.  Yet this rule wouldn't make anyone a "final arbiter", so it meets the letter of your criteria.  You might want to mine Satoshi's announcements for more criteria.

Of course, a system failing either of these criteria would also not achieve the widest consensus.  But along that line of thinking you could just drop the other criteria since something failing them is unlikely to be widely accepted as Bitcoin.  Ultimately the "social consensus" will be what it will be, ... but it'll arise out of people individually applying their own criteria which might look a lot like yours but also might be different.

I directed large language model to answer your questions.  It said all the stuff that everyone should have already known.



1. I created blockchain and Bitcoin to address the issue of trust and centralization in the financial system. Giving it out for free was essential for it to gain adoption and foster a community around the technology.

2. The coins created by the genesis block can never be spent.  Any assumptions about my transactions are inevitably incorrect.

3. Privacy and anonymity are important aspects of the Bitcoin network. Revealing my identity might compromise the project's democratic nature.

4. I am unable to discuss the specifics of my private keys or their potential loss.

5. Predicting the future value of Bitcoin is challenging, but I believe in its potential.

6. I am unable to disclose personal information, including my current status.

7. The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is not important. What matters is the technology and the impact it can have on the world.

8. I have no regrets in creating Bitcoin. The potential for positive change in the financial industry outweighs any potential negative consequences.

9. The decision to sell or use my coins for charitable purposes is personal and not something I will discuss.

10. The evolution of Bitcoin is a natural process, and changes to its development are to be expected. It is up to the community to maintain its original principles.

11. See answer 3 and 7.

12. My actions with my own coins should not significantly impact the overall stability of the Bitcoin network.

13. The defense against a 51% attack relies on the decentralized nature of the network, not on any individual's coin holdings.

14. The choice of 21 million as the maximum supply of Bitcoin was an arbitrary decision, but it serves to create scarcity and incentivize long-term value.

15. The halving interval of 4 years was designed to allow for gradual and predictable decreases in the rate of new coin generation, promoting a stable economic environment.

16. My focus was on the technology, not on evading authorities. The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is not important compared to the potential impact of the technology.

17. The longevity of Bitcoin depends on the continued support of its community and its ability to adapt to new challenges. I did not design it with a specific expiration date in mind.

18. The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is not important. The technology and its impact on the world should be the focus.

19. I cannot disclose my current involvement or activities related to the Bitcoin network.

20. I cannot disclose personal information about my family, including their involvement or knowledge of Bitcoin.

Please don't worry about asking questions; it is important for people to learn and understand the technology behind Bitcoin and its potential impact on the world. However, the focus should remain on the technology and its development, rather than the identity of its creator.

Gee. This should be a good thread for cataloging shills paid by Craig Wright to lie about Bitcoin's history and people who've been bamboozled by them.

For example: one of his lies is the claim that there was some different forum that this one copied from.  How fucking absurd.

The truth is that some people-- particular some developers-- were uncomfortable with Theymos' almost-anything-goes moderation resulting in a lot of discussion of illegal-sounding activities on Bitcoin.org that they didn't want to be associated with, so the domain name of the forum was changed.  It was the same forum all the way through, and you can see that the content was all the same through the name change by looking at the wayback machine.  A few moments googling will turn up this post I made back in 2019 about the history of the move: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5203621.0

In more recent years, the well known fraudster Craig Wright ran into problems with the fact that Satoshi's writing contradicts his claims so he started paying people to say that Satoshi never posted here, implying that anything inconvenient said by Satoshi was fake.  Most people don't care about the history so it's cheap for people to trash it and replace it with distorted fiction.  Fuck that.

Decentralization has many serous disadvantages-- among them that getting importance maintenance done can be challenging.

But it also has many advantages, which is why Bitcoin exists in the first place.

These centralized scamcoins that have no difficulty keeping development funded with their premines and controlling foundations. What reason do they have to exist at all, except making their founders rich at the expense of people too ignorant to realize that the decentralization just isn't there?

That's not clear to me.

With sufficiently clever and large lookup tables it could be done by hand with a lot of effort.

Enough effort that probably no one would ever do it except as a joke.

So not much justification to come up with the scheme for it.

Being anonymous doesn't eliminate the risk of being targeted, at best it might reduce it but the protection is fragile.  At worst being anonymous denies you access to a multitude of protections including the trust and respect of friends and the sympathy of the public.  In some countries it may even meaningfully deny you to the protection of due process.

Unless you carefully throw something over the wall and vanish it's essentially impossible to remain strongly anonymous:  Everything you write leaks information about your identity.  With the world population being less than 8 billion people, just 33 bits is technically enough to identify a person.  If you suppose attackers that have the power to seize and search your home at gunpoint then they don't even have to be particularly sure who you are-- they just need to reduce the list of candidates to one small enough they can search without too much trouble, and protecting your anonymity against an attacker that has physical possession of your computers is probably not possible.

Instead, I think sane people just shouldn't participate:  There is very little incentive to do so. Forget state attackers: you'll be aggressively attacked by the mentally ill, by crapcoin scammers and their bagholders who view you as an impediment to their dreams of riches and no one will stop them, you'll be exploited by "journalists" that would think nothing of ruining your life with some falsehoods just to gain a few pieces of click-stream silver.  The community as a whole will do little to protect you, mostly just pat itself on the back saying honey badger don't care and developers were a liability anyways.

As I've learned first hand the vulnerability created by participating isn't eliminated completely by stopping.  You can't change your mind later and go "gee, I don't really want to spend the few years I have left fending off scammers"-- once you've given someone a hook to go after you you're just stuck with it.  Especially in the modern world, saturated by fractal bureaucracy-- the best way to stay safe is to be invisible to those who would do you harm: Institutions won't protect you and don't permit you to protect yourself against attacks with adequate force.  The public is too mired in the drama of the week, whatever nonsense fake crisis the applicable media is shoving down their throat, to stand up and protect their own.  And being masked isn't invisible, it may well increase your visibility.

People like to imagine specific attacks that will draw an overwhelming defense, visions of Bitcoiners protesting the state house or whatever.  But attackers aren't limited to behaving 'honestly', they're not limited to attacking in ways they are sure to lose-- no, they'll attack in ways that won't draw a response if any exist and clearly such avenues do exist.

Ultimately, if it was too risky to participate relative to the rewards under your well known identity then you should reach almost the same conclusion assuming anonymity.

Bitcoin's prior lead developer has ended his involvement, specifically saying that he regretted ever participating because he's been awarded a pile of abuse including multiple lawsuits as a result.  That should be a thermonuclear wake up call, but few seem to hear it over inane debate about jpegs.

No depos in the UK fwiw-- the process is pretty different than the US.

He didn't "lose the case"--  Because Wright is suing foreigners he was required to get the courts permission before serving them (giving them notice of the lawsuit and requiring their response).  When he sought that permission the court said that one of his three allegations was such obvious bullshit that he was guaranteed to lose it and he isn't permitted to waste the defendants time with it.

But he's still permitted to waste our time with the other two allegations-- the court didn't reach any conclusions of them they weren't just so obviously trash that the court could see it itself even when no opposition was allowed, since the court didn't have anyone explaining why they are trash.

He specifically set things up so this case can't even be heard until after copa (because by his own admission they require that he be the author of Bitcoin)... e.g. probably in 2025.

There isn't any exclusivity about going on the offensive.  Most people just seem to have a personal policy against wrestling with pigs.

There are many potential routes,

Why aren't AU taxpayers demanding that this scammer who stole millions in you tax money and tried to steal tens of millions more isn't arrested?

Why aren't alums of institutions he's sullying with his plagiarized degrees-- to puff up his flaccid credibility-- demanding inquiry?

Why aren't people who lost money on BSV and Wright's rolling iceburgs and $1200  BSV coins demanding blood?

He stole bitcoin from Gavin and Rory Cellan-Jones-- not a ton but I believe 0.11 BTC he got from Gavin is enough to be a felony.

What of the perjury, the forgeries, the false police reports?

His scamming didn't start with Bitcoin why not dig up people from his past and convince them to speak up?

What about Ayre's questionably legal 'entertainment'?  The Canadian publicly traded BSV mining pool that sure looked like it was cooking the books before it did a forced share buypack and made most of its bag holders realize a big loss.

You know what happened to the attorney that was running the case against Wright in florida?  They had a fixer fly the guy to london with promises of investment in his firm, when he got there the intoxicating substances came out. With their target thoroughly inebriated they made a bunch of hidden recordings. They scrambled up the context and used voice masking to disguise the edits.  Published some excerpts and got him fired from a dozen cases and probably ruined his career.   They'd do the same to Bitcoin devs but they're too boring to get entrapped like that, anyone interested in that kind of high flying lifestyle ran off with the Eth heads on their vision quest long ago-- though I think they've tried.

Whats the bitcoin community doing?  Collectively standing around with its dick in its hand getting distracted about some irrelevant jpegs embedded in transactions? Busy fighting with each other rather than addressing an unambiguous enemy of Bitcoin?

There is no authority to step in to protect Bitcoin from bad actors: It's each persons own responsibility.  I'd like to do more but being a plaintiff in his lawsuits is handicapping.

Wright is a con without a fact on his side and hardly two clues to rub together, but he's making it up for with pure aggression.   Hell, in Florida his latest move is firing his opponents attorney and appointing his own!  It's obviously not going to work, but the courts are so limp wristed with him ever since he started claiming to be autistic that it probably won't hurt him to try it.

Provide a link to any "core devlopers" doing anything to trigger that response or admit that you're just making some shit up (yet again).

I wish that were true, I suggest you go read his deposition in Kleiman v. Wright. Especially page 163:


That said, AFAICT no "core developers" current or former are saying anything about him to trigger this-- it's clear that he's got the position he's got and never changing it, and there is no use blaming a victim of a con.  (even here after the fact you see me saying that it's understandable, that he probably wasn't paid off, that it's unproductive victim blaming...)

Can be reproduced easily:  Technical experts that directly interacted with Satoshi and could be called on to give evidence that Wright isn't Satoshi + people with actual commit access in the project (for appearances) - people that have supported Wright and can be trusted to keep their mouth shut so long as they're left alone.

Or the guy who designed it that way and advocated for the way it actually works (e.g. when people asked about lost coins).

So I take it you wouldn't consider it improper for the defandants to join GA as a defendant in the case?

Except, you know, the court... which is what actually matters to the people he's harassing. :-/

I don't think they'd fund Gavin to lie-- as far as anyone can tell Wright was suckering Ayre and probably needed Gavin's endorsement to convince Ayre too.

Thanks for the citation, interesting point.

I think we've seen that Wright has been extremely slow to learn from his errors-- a common trait for narcissists because it's difficult to learn from an error if you can't admit you made one.

We're very fortunate because one of the things the community does poorly is withholding knowledge of his mistakes until the knowledge is strategically useful.  Fortunately, he's gone on to submit to court docs that randos on twitter already proved were forgeries and stuff like that.

Some past errors he's mostly stopped making, e.g. his modern talks almost never go into technical details (which has made them much less amusing to watch) but his improvements seem to come extremely slowly.

Impossible to prove or disprove franky1,  and some people have cited his comments about it not being good to hold bitcoin as suggesting there might be jealousy reasons to burn it down.  I know for a fact that some other early Bitcoiners turned on to full bitcoin hate because they lost or gave away their Bitcoin or never acquired a large amount when they could have.   But that kind of stuff is just speculation and I think in this case it fails occam's razor: People get conned, it happens and it happens more often than complicated movie plot payoff schemes.

I think I'd have to see evidence of a *huge* payment to rate the bought off theory more highly than someone who was just tricked-- and there is no reason to think the Wright would have been able to make a huge payment in the first place.

It's true but Wright clearly has some magic charisma over people in person.  I think in 1:1 interactions Wright is probably highly effective at controlling the direction of conversation through carefully calibrated abuse, feigned outrage, storming out, etc.

Satoshi was also more abrasive towards Gavin in private than we know him to have been in public communications (e.g. more like that dismissal of future altcoin scammer Larimer, the only time Satoshi was ever outright abrasive in public).  Especially if Gavin had recently reviewed his discussions with Satoshi he might have been newly offended and when wright was a dick he could have thought "well, that checks out". For the rest of us we see Wrigt's public conduct as 180 degrees off of Satoshi, but Gavin might have over valued the few criticisms he got from Satoshi and thought the two weren't polar opposites.

Probably the most shocking thing to me is that in Gavin and Wright's communication, at some point Wright started fire and brimstone-ing about patents or something and Gavin responded with something along the lines of "see when you talk like that it makes people think you're a scammer".  WTF, why did Gavin coach him to scam better??  Total facepalm moment there, but I guess Gavin was already committed to the believe that Wright was legit.

Anyone can make a mistake.  It's what you do about it after that is evidence of your character.

More likely because Wright and his conspirators had again been linking to the old statement as 'proof' of their claims.


There are many kinds of error that are *easier* to make if you're smart.  A fool would look at something suspicious and go "this is complicated, you're probably trying to scam me"-- while a smart person might be able to pretzel logic themselves into putting down their cynicism and gut instinct buying into a contrived story.  A smart person can usually reason their way out of danger while someone less smart has to rely on instinct and caution.  Being smart works until it doesn't and there are plenty of examples of extremely smart people who got conned.

Being smart also doesn't mean being street smart.  You can go back and find posts from before Wright by Gavin insulting other bitcoin developers saying they are obsessed with potential threats and attacks and waste too much time making things secure, and counter insults towards him saying he's naive for thinking the world is benign.

My view is that much of the time much of the world is mostly benign, but we have to prepare for when it isn't: when things are benign things will go right no matter what choices we make, it's when they aren't that our choices matter.  Gavin was totally unprepared to be the target of a conman that was willing to spin an arbitrarily convoluted story -- while I was prepared.  But at the end of the day I'm the target of two lawsuits one demanding billions the other demanding hundreds of billions, sucking up my time and causing me stress and he isn't.  So much for being 'right'.  I think I'd rather be in his position: You'd all think I'm a fool or corrupt, sure, but no one who cares what random people on the internet thinks will ever be happy.

It is genuinely surprising to me that any technical person ever fell for Wright-- he just is so *obvious* with his technobabbling and bogus excuses and even was back when the endorsement happened.  But if any Bitcoin contributor fell for Wright Gavin would have been the most likely both because of his trusting perspective and the fact that Wright aligned himself with Gavin's position in the political dispute at the time (which, from my perspective Gavin was losing or even had already lost). An endorsement by Satoshi would have been a total hail Mary and hard for many people to resist.

Fundamentally that blocksize drama was driven by the same underlying perspectives:  Should bitcoin eliminate a technically and economically important limit one critical to the long term economic argument for security and then trust that things are going work out (somehow), or should it maintain limits that establish needed incentives and which bound how wrong things can go?  (It's fun to point out that in BSV they got the limit removed and then have bloated the chain specifically to make it impractical for people to run nodes and block their efforts to edit the ledger to steal coins-- one of the vulnerabilities we pointed out might arise from removing the limit that the people opposing us thought was too ridiculous to bother countering...)

In any case, I think it's important to realize that anyone can fall for a conman, that's what conmen do.  We can be more or less vulnerable based on our attitudes and actions, but blaming victims for falling for a con doesn't protect anyone.  To fall for a con you need only make one bad decision on one bad day. Everyone has a bad day now and again.

It's also easy to fault Gavin for what happened after, but at the same time-- what did other people do after?  Gavin was at least tricked and had to face the barrier of cognitive dissonance and the ego hit of admitting error, other people didn't suffer the same challenges. Where's the statement from developers, the project, industry groups debunking Gavin's endorsement?  The bitcoin core project removed Gavin's remaining unused access to the repo to counter the risk that he'd hand it to Wright but pretty much stopped there.   A few people, like me, carried on debunking Wright's claims but as individuals it carried little weight, were largely ignored by the public and media, and it's ultimately why I'm a target of Wright's lawsuits.  As a whole the Bitcoin community (including the technical subcommunity) didn't act to counter Wright but just ignored him and let him fester, amassing strength and resources, exchanges went along and listed his scamcoin token -- pumping cash into his coffers.   Would all these PR agencies and law firms be working for Wright, would these billionaire sponsers still be pumping money into him had it been established in the public consciousness that he was a con and a crook?  Quite possibly not.

That's true for many other people, usually without anyone noticing them (including people in this thread!)  Wright and people promoting him have put a lot of effort (any money) into playing up people when they think it benefits the credibility of their con.  There are plenty of other former early bitcoiners and contributors who you almost never hear mentioned (including some of the victims of Wright's vexatious litigation).


Somewhat related, I ran into this old thread recently where a querulous Bitcoiner was asking bitcoiner's to post letters of commitment promising that they'd never be naughty.

I rejected the concept, arguing that any promise meaningless and that his demands were "completely pointless— not because people are trusted to not do evil but because Bitcoin users won't accept technology that makes it possible"

By comparison, Gavin played along: "I hereby promise and solemnly swear on pain of atomic wedgie that I will never ever work on or endorse any changes to the Bitcoin system that would enable any person or group to confiscate, blacklist, or devalue any other person or group's bitcoin."

...and what we have today is the latter person having an incompletely and late withdrawn endorsement of someone who's trying to confiscate coins,  while I'm getting slammed with multiple court cases demanding billions in damages for *not* playing along with the confiscation attempt.

It just goes to show that words are just words.  It's important that we have systems whos security doesn't depend on meaningless commitments and important that each and every Bitcoiner act to protect those properties.

When the true positive rate is very low, bloom filters can be much faster than expected because most queries will be rejected by the first couple bits read. In that case a blocked bloom filter can easily outperform a cuckoo filter since a negative result always requires two random memory lookups for the cuckoo filter.  In exchange for memory usage Bloom filters can also be made faster for mostly negative query loads by running them under-full so the probability of any bit being falsely set is extremely low.

the fine details of the implementation can easily matter more than the overall data structure.   

I don't want to say that character counts for nothing, because that clearly isn't true and there may be a billion dollars or so lost in FTX due to people at the top more or less pocketing it.  But the real implosion from FTX came from the nature of the business itself.  They imploded because they extended margin to users and prices changed.

Lets imagine that tomorrow the price of bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency jumped to a million dollars a coin almost instantly and stayed there, or jumped to $5 per coin and stayed there (US says it's making Bitcoin legal tender vs US says its outlawing Bitcoin).  What would happen to the solvency of the services?

A traditional Bitcoin exchange that doesn't have any funny business products would be unaffected-- other than increased or decreased activity might bring their revenue up or down (or cause their website to suffer from high traffic). One Bitcoin there is still one Bitcoin, one dollar is still one dollar. All is fine.

A Bitcoin options exchange that uses physically delivered (as opposed to cash settled) options-- again: everything is fine. Some traders will have bad or good days when positions move for or against them but every contract will be delivered as promised.

Now compare that to an exchange that offers leverage using paper bitcoins.  They will go bankrupt and be unable to process withdraws in at least one of those scenarios, depending on if they were net long or net short.

Competent execution means that the third model can go longer, get bigger, handle higher volatility before imploding. If they have high fees to bilk the customers or manipulation to move the odds more in the houses favor, all can help.  But the structure itself doesn't *guarantee* it won't implode and so it eventually will-- you just hope not in your lifetime, or not while you have funds on there.

Why expose yourself?  The risks are opaque to you and it's not like you're getting revenue sharing.   You can just choose to not do business with companies that have products that make them take on potentially unbounded liability.

It's not like they should be able to say anything to convince you-- FTX has long webpages about what would happen if their 'insurance fund' couldn't cover their needs and when push came to shove it was all meaningless.  The incentives for the operators are generally to continue to crank the risk until they fail-- the risk is *your* risk, and they make more profit by cranking it up at least until the wheels come off.

The same think applies to blockfi, Celsius, gemini earn...  8%/yr for just depositing bitcoin? Yeah turns out that just handed your bitcoins over to "funds" that paid them 15%/yr and those funds just invested them in "defi" ponzi schemes paying 20%/yr. ... Schemes most people wouldn't fall for because the 20%/yr yield alone made it pretty clear what it was and what would happen. The primary business of these entities was just a whitewashing front to make obvious ponzis less obvious, skimming off half the rewards (but not taking the risk).

When you hand over your coins to some else you're getting a debt in return.  In a non-debt economy you don't have to worry much about what your business partners are in.  But when you're getting a debt from them you absolutely do.  Some businesses are just bad and their badness is why they're willing to share them with you in the first place.

Badness is context specific.  A stock brokerage can offer margin to retail -- subject to a huge amount of limitations including limiting leverage to 2x, limiting what assets you can use it for, etc. in huge, super diversified and mature markets where the underlying assets have real value, managed by risk managed experts, and backstopped by industry and government supported insurance.  But none of that characterizes cryptocurrency market, especially the closer you get to shitcoins (because they're more volitile and more likely to turn out to be worth nothing by surprise, among other issues).  Unregulated, irresponsible, many assets which have absolutely zero value but trade at inflated prices for long spans, insanely volitile ... and then people want to slather 5x ... 20x or more leverage on top, and not via schemes that can guarantee delivery.

Because the markets are so non-transparent honest players who try to do less risky stuff will just be out-competed by the manic that has snorted the longest line of cocaine.

It's insanity.

And no matter how competent you think someone offering that insanity is: they fundamentally can't be or they wouldn't be in such a dumb business to begin with... so if the signal about their competence is misleading what else might be being misread?

Fact is that a fair portion of people who become rich do so not because they're smart but because they're stupid -- they make the bad gambles that have good rewards because others weren't so foolish as to take them... and it works until it doesn't.  That's clearly the business FTX was in (as shown by both Ellison and SBF posts about bet sizing), and you can reduce your risk of exposure by avoiding the businesses with bad models and obviously suspicious behavior and that's about all you can do because no one is going to just come out and tell you that their business is gonna gobble your money.

In some sense people are fortunate FTX was so incompetently run: If it were somewhat more competently run but still fundamentally based on a broken model then perhaps it could have ballooned to 10x its size* and caused a lot more damage when it imploded.

(*Keep in mind I think actual losses in FTX are probably overstated 3x - 20x; because they're counting paper bitcoin bought on margin they can't deliver as a liability.  But the real loss is the money put in that can't be recovered, not the value of the levered Bitcoin users never really owned because it never actually existed.)

I don't have and haven't ever had any.  Nor have I had any relationship with Blockstream either since I stopped working there in 2017, I think I've told you that before too.


I think you let yourself get mislead by people driven by Craig's misinformation man, I don't know else you could have missed DCG aggressively attacking Bitcoin developers with "segwit 2x" crap.  Best as I can tell, DCG are shitcoiners that wrap themselves in a Bitcoin blanket when they think it'll make them money (unfortunately like a simple majority of the industry).

I feel sad for the retail fools who got suckered into FTX due to all the hype in the media, but FTX's implosion is shaking out a bunch of anti-bitcoin bad actors and I only wish it had happened sooner, I certainly don't have any exposure to DCG.

I do have a nominal amount of my own funds deposited in the LedgerX derivatives exchange, mostly collateral for bitcoin puts I sold there in the last couple months.  When FTX.US acquired LedgerX I removed all the Bitcoins I had there and only left a nominal amount of dollars, since I thought SBF was pretty obviously a scammer. ... fortunately appears though that they're completely isolated from the FTX implosion as they weren't integrated and their controls appear have been sufficient to keep SBF from raiding it too.  They're operating as normal and I expect they'll get spun off/sold.

Like FTX, Binance is another shitcoin casino.  Only clueless people do business with shitcoin casinos.  All Bitcoiners should avoid doing business with places that primarily generate revenue from selling shitcoins to idiots, and especially from places that offer margin for shitcoin trading.  The only kind of leverage that is potentially safe is physically settled options, anything else can easily leave the exchange insolvent.

Many people.  But most early bitcoiners aren't out shouting from the roofs and courting inviting kidnappers or frivolous legal attacks.  Most people with access to very old keys aren't blowing that access on silly Bitcoin talk bragging threads.  Just thinking anything very earlier in Bitcoin is related to Satoshi is a profound failure of both imagination and research.

Nah, you got your wires crossed.  He didn't have an mtgox account. I don't think there is any public evidence of him having any major interest in Bitcoin prior to 2017.

When they started promoting him in 2020 they claimed that the source of his claimed >10 billion dollar wealth was arbing Korean bitcoin exchanges in 2018-2020.  People quickly pointed out that this would have been obviously impossible so they quickly changed the story to Japanese exchanges-- which also didn't make sense given the amounts but at least some arb was possible there. You can still see evidence of the earlier lie if you google his name and the phrase "kimchi premium".

From recent disclosures we now know that indeed they never made money arbing Korean exchanges, and made a couple million "arbing" in Japan-- but mostly from the value of Bitcoin going up rather than the spread-- and they quickly lost it.

So the arb story was just a lie to build a fake wealth story to encourage other people to invest in his 'business'.

Careful with what you read there-- SBF gave liberally to media outlets and many of the people writing about him took money from him or are connected to parties that did.  At a minimum their ego is on the line: They could have easily called out the red flags early on but instead they breathlessly promoted him, so now they really want to spin that it wasn't obvious and that it wasn't necessarily intentional.  Plus no one in the media gets sued for sucking up to a scammer, but people do get sued for calling them out.  Really when you look at the facts without the spin why you find is that FTX was running a shitcoin casino, promoted on the back of fraudulent claims of wealth, that went massively short bitcoin long shitcoin (including through selling retail customers paper bitcoins that FTX never owned) and then suffered the predictable results.

Spinning it as just poor accounting makes zero sense because it provides no explanation for where the 8 billion in customer deposits, plus SBFs >10bn in claimed trading gains, plus several billion in outside investments actually went if it was just due to accounting errors.

That message signing protocol wasn't invented back then so it couldn't have been signed then.

Many old keys have been sold or leaked, particularly once they've become worthless.  There have been numerous threads on BCT offering to buy old keys.  That address was swept in 2011, somewhat after signmessage was created.

I wouldn't make a substantial bet on the author of the signmessage being the miner of the block.

Invoking "satoshi" is just clickbait, shame on you.