Anonymint: we are not discussing being safe against a global adversary such as the NSA, we all know that mixers + Tor is probably not enough to defeat them because of honeypots, timing attacks, deep packet inspection, etc...

We are discussing using basic security procedures in order not to be "the low hanging fruit" and thus being reasonably safe against the casual hacker/criminal doing trivial blockchain and network analysis to easily link identities to BTC balances. For that purpose running your wallet through Tor and using a decentralized and trustless mixer such as coinjoin should be enough.

I disagree, with a caveat: do not use Tor to access stuff linked with your real name, and always use end to end encryption to avoid eavesdropping.

GREAT. Now everybody RUN and deposit more money to the anonymous scammer running a ponzi scam. He will probably triple his earnings thanks to this stunt.

Fools and their money are soon parted.

It sounds like a Ponzi ("PonziCoin"), it works like a Ponzi (you get paid with the next investors money), it smells like a Ponzi (anonymous nick registered ad-hoc, website registered through anonymous proxy) - and you still complain when the guy running it disappears with the money?


It tells me "a fool and his money are soon parted".

While it is not the best solution in terms of obfuscation, coinjoin is a pretty good system that IMO everybody should use. It's not perfect, but IMO it gives enough protection against the casual "let's see how much money this guy has" situation. A prepared and determined opponent will probably end up finding up your total balance, but it will take him more resources and time, which normally is something the casual criminal wants to avoid when looking for targets.

Summing up: By using coinjoin you avoid being the low hanging fruit, which is usually enough protection against a potential dangerous situation similar to what happened with the leak of the Gox database. The criminals won't be able to easily check your current BTC balance, so you will probably be discarded as a target.

Tumblers like bitcoinfog provide better obfuscation, but the (huge) trade-off is that you should trust an unknown third party. I'd never risk more than 1% of my holdings to such services, but I think the service they provide is necessary and should be used, albeit with care and with just a very minor portion of ones funds at a time.

Sure - the word of a random nick created ad-hoc and connecting through Tor, with no previous reputation whatsoever (and thus nothing to lose) and with a website registered through an anonymous proxy means a lot. If you cannot see the red flags you must be blind (blinded by greed perhaps?)

Just FYI: ponzis ALWAYS pay up at the beginning, and their operators are ALWAYS available and responsive until they pull the plug - that's their very "business model", which is now many decades old.

With their stupidity and greed ponzi participants are just giving an incentive to scammers to keep scamming, and thus I strongly believe that no pity and no mercy is deserved to those who lose money to these type of blatantly obvious scams.

Stating the obvious: All those who lost money to this scam deserve it, they had it coming.

In fact, all those participating in ponzis (WHICH ARE ALWAYS A SCAM BY VERY NATURE) are scammers themselves, as they are leading more naive/retarded/ignorant/malicious people to lose their money to the ponzi.

This is darwinism in its purest form. You are willingly participating in a ponzi scam, which make you a bunch of scammers as you want to profit from earlier investors money, and thus you deserve to be scammed and lose everything.

At least Maddoff wasn't a random nick on the internet connecting through Tor and registering its website through a proxy. You really need to explore a new level of retardness to "invest" in this stuff.


See? This is what I'm talking about. Ponzis DO NOT WORK THAT WAY. Man up and take your losses.

After the Gox dabatase leak the names and home addresses of pretty much everybody involved in BTC are now public, at least among the criminal community.

Those singing the song that goes "I don't mix my coins because I have nothing to hide" are either:

a) totally brainwashed/incredibly naive
b) just stupid.

Even if you mined the vast majority of your coins and used an exchange just to cash out a minor part of your holdings, your total BTC balance can be discovered by trivial blockchain analysis, following the links with just one deposit/withdrawal address.

Morale of the story: Everybody should ALWAYS mix their coins and use Tor for BTC related activities. Information is power. Never give it away.

EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION:

Bitcoin is pseudoanonymous: as soon as someone links one of your addresses to you (because you made a payment to him, or because a database of a service such as Gox is leaked) then he can learn your total BTC balance - or at least the total BTC balance of the wallet to which that address belongs - with trivial blockchain analysis.

By mixing your coins you make that task much more difficult, and thus you eliminate yourself from the list of easy targets in a situation as per the Gox database leak.

Said with other words: by not mixing your coins you are revealing your whole balance to the recipient of every transaction you make... And that is an important privacy breach.

Well, including executable files in what should be a database dump is very fishy indeed. I didn't click on those, that's for sure.

I'm much more worried about the huge privacy leak. The vast majority of people involved in BTC just got doxxed, and their aprox. balances/holdings are now public (at least among the criminal community). 

I guess we will see a spike in the guns for BTC trades. And I hope this reminds everybody how important is to mix our coins, ALWAYS. No excuses. If you ever used Gox and used your real name, now your addresses are linked to your identity and criminals are analyzing that shit. The final goxxing.

Could 1933 belong to Theymos?

The plot is now thicker than Karpele's breakfast drink....

Satoshi Nakamoto is not an uncommon japanese name. The only "strong" evidence in Dorian's case is that his real name is in fact "Satoshi Nakamoto", if his real name was another one everybody would be laughing at this story. The second "strong" evidence is that Dorian "tacitdly admitted" his involvement in Bitcoin, which is clearly a bad joke and an offense to everyones intelligence. For Christ sake, Dorian is not even a cryptographer, he is a physicist, his case is just based on very circumstancial evidence and wild speculation - the fact the journalist didn't even make textual analysis based on the emails she exchanged with him is very telling.

You can bet Dorian != Bitcoin's Satoshi Nakamoto.

Baseless speculation. Satoshi tried hard to be anonymous from the very beginning, he never gave any personal info despite people asking from early on and always used anonymizing techniques. Furthermore, thinking that a system like Bitcoin could come out of the blue from someone who never published before any work related to cryptography/electronic cash (and not a single blog post or mailing list mail) is beyond naive.

For the record: I requested a BTC withdrawal last week and it hit my wallet aprox. 1 hour later.

Imagine shit really hist the fan and the gov. wants to go hard against Bitcoin. That was a very real worry for Satoshi, that's why he used Tor and duly ignored ALL questions about his background, interests, location... From the very first minute. Just read his appeal to Wikipedia, etc... He was scared to death of Gov. intervention.

Well, three letter agencies are not journos: there will be no "interview" - there will be harsh interrogation techniques. In an extreme scenario (which you can bet Satoshi did not rule out) all possible targets will just be eliminated. Core devs, Hal, and every Satoshi Nakamoto in the world with a plausible background (computers basically) would be a target on the list.

If you want to be anonymous linking your work to your real name is just so dumb that is beyond discussion - if Gov. comes after your creation you WILL be a target, and therefore using/linking your real name to such a secret project is plain and simply an epic OPSEC failure which would lead to almost assured failure.

And please don't say stupid things like "at the beginning he didn't think Bitcoin would have succeed, it was just an academic exercise, so he used his real name"... That's just a demonstration you didn't think about this for more than 1 minute. Satoshi went to great lengths to be anonymous FROM MINUTE 1, never ever he said ANYTHING that could have been linked to his real identity (not a single hint about his background, interests, location), he ALWAYS used Tor and, furthermore, Bitcoin is a project which is clearly the final realization of YEARS of work.

IMO the most plausible candidate for being Satoshi is Nick Szabo. Their work is too similar and the fact Satoshi never mentioned Nick (because OPSEC) is too telling.

No. Not at all.

Satoshi followed OPSEC very strictly, from the very first moment - just a) read the crypto mailing list, b) his posts on this forum and c) the private mails exchanged with him leaked by other devs - there's no chance he would have broken one of the first OPSEC rules: compartimentalization. Never mix your real identity with your anonymous activity.

The "hiding in plain sight" story is simply retarded.

Gambles have provably fair rules.

Ponzis are scams in which, by design, the author can pull the plug whenever he sees fit.

In the best interest of young people and/or newcomers who might not understand this I would add a new subforum called "HYIP/Ponzi/scams", or directly "Scams".

Fake account.

Let me tell you respectfully that your detective skills suck.

1) TheKoziTwo is from Europe (Scandinavia)
2) TheKoziTwo declared he is a male
3) The singer in his videos is Angel Lee (https://www.youtube.com/user/scmilitarywife)

The above information is easily found by a) looking at his post history and b) reading the comments on his youtube videos.

Very unlikely IMO.

1) He would have break a basic OPSEC principle: compartimentalization. Never mix your true identity with your anonymous identity. And Satoshi followed OPSEC very strictly.

2) It seems very unplausible that a focused person like Satoshi (the same argument is valid for Hal) would have spent so much time debating with himself, that would be borderline schizofrenic behaviour, and that doesn't fit neither Satoshi nor Hal.

In any case the crucial point is 1). Imagine you want to be anonymous to avoid the heat - being the recipient of the very first bitcoin transaction and one of the very first developers defeats that purpose. Imagine that shit hits the fan and the Gov goes hard against Bitcoin: Hal would be one of the first (if not the first) to receive a very uncomfortable visit, in a "let's eliminate/interrogate all the possible targets" scenario he would be on the top of the list - and that's an epic OPSEC failure that would lead to almost assured failure.

On the contrary, Nick Szabo (Nakamoto Satoshi) fits incredibly well. It is painfully obvious that Nick is one of the main (if not THE main) inspirators of Satoshi's work. Again: Nick was the inventor of the "smart contracts" concept and he developed extensive work on blockchain-like decentralized ledgers; his bit-gold is simply "bitcoin beta", but he is not even cited as a reference on the Bitcoin whitepaper - the only plausible reason for such ommission is again, OPSEC/compartimentalization. Similarly, Szabo almost never wrote about Bitcoin, despite it is clearly the system he has been writing about from 1996 to 2005. Every question to Szabo about BTC is duly ignored, he just wrote/commented about Bitcoin once after many questions, even if it clearly is the realization of years of his work. Additionally, the last paper on e-currency he wrote was published in 2005, and his very last comment on that matter (which was a central part of his work for at least 9 years) was published on his blog in 2008, shortly before the bitcoin paper was published.

Given the above and other many factors (similarity in writing style and political views, etc.) I give 75% chance that NS is SN. This obviously doesn't mean I want Nick to be "outed": privacy is a fundamental right that should never be taken away for anybody.

Well, I guess that a shitstorm is going on at Newsweek right now. Goodman just disappeared from tweeter when evidence in form of Dorian's posts written in incredibly bad english started to pile up. She did a VERY bad job and had this coming, as she has been exchanging emails with Dorian before speaking to him briefly - but obviously she couldn't use that emails as "evidence" in her piece because probably were written in that kind of english that SN would have NEVER used. Instead, she used ambiguos quotes from his family members to justify a similarity in writing styles that simply does not exist.

What an epic way to fuck up the relaunch of the printed edition of a magazine that once upon a time was believed to be an example of quality journalism. Really epic fuck up - and I'm enjoying it in a sort of twisted way.

And all in all this has been a tremedous publicity for Bitcoin. The SN myth is growing