Guys, I'm serious about this joke.  

Honestly.  Don't even reply if you're not going to claim to be Satoshi.  I want people to get used to making the claim.  I want them to make the claim EVERY time the stupid topic comes up.  I want it to be a running gag that the entire community throws like a cream pie at any idiot who wants to know who Satoshi is.  I want people to never know who's serious and who's joking or even who *intends* to be believed.  Don't even allow anyone to claim to be Satoshi without also claiming to be Satoshi.  Hell, go first sometimes and let all the other Satoshis chime in.  Call bogus news conferences.  Post youtube accounts about how and why you invented Bitcoin. Lie like a rug and cheat with both hands.  This is what it takes to turn it into the non-topic it so richly deserves to be.  Such idiot claims will be ignored only when they're a dime a dozen and there's no way to tell whether another claim is a joke.

"I am Satoshi Nakamoto."

There are solutions to this, but... 

They are very much in Altcoin territory.  If they were implemented then the result would not be Bitcoin.  And the transition to other solutions would not be accepted by the community.

I think you need to eliminate the distinction between mining and using. 

You wanna get your tx into the block chain?  You gotta provide your share of the hashing power needed to make a block.  But that's only the start.  To make all the economic interests line up, you'd have to change so many things about how blocks get put together and accepted into the block chain and how you decide one block chain is better than another and so on....  As I say, the result would not be Bitcoin.

For me it's about privacy.

If you don't want your clients to know you're a member of the Power Exchange (infamous sex/kink club), you make payments to the Power Exchange from a different wallet than the wallet where your clients send your pay.  If you are getting a surprise gift for your wife, it won't be much of a surprise if the payment comes out of the same wallet she uses.

The issue is that a given wallet will spend *ANY* txOut that's in it when you're making a new spend, and those txOuts make it possible for anyone looking at the block chain to know that all those spent txOuts (as well as the new transaction) were all made in transactions by the same person.   So somebody can look at the block chain and track it back;  

"A car payment was made on the defendant's car in October of that year, using among other things a TxOut that someone got as change from a Starbucks in downtown Kansas City on January 12, your honor.  So we can prove that the defendant was in Kansas City at the time - and incidentally also bought a dirty magazine, some hand lotion, and tissue paper an hour later at a convenience store in Lee's summit Missouri - which places them on the road in question during that timeframe.  And after that...  "  

Dude, seriously.  It's all in the block chain.  They may not know who you are until you make a linking transaction (like buying a computer which has a unique NIC and CPUID, or a stereo with a serial number, or the only pair of alpaca socks that was sold by that vendor on that date .....) but one single identity linking transaction and they can walk back just about everything you've ever done from that wallet.

Here, I'll start. 

I am Satoshi Nakamoto.

Welcome to the club! 

I am also Satoshi Nakamoto.

So is Hal Finney.  

So is Mike Hearn.

So is Gavin Andreson.

So is Laszlo.

So is Craig Wright.

So is Nick Szabo.

So is Greenbits.

So is 7788bitcoin.

So is newbtcminer.

So is longbob72.

So in fact is everybody who runs a node, owns a coin, has a wallet, contributed to the code, or bought and sold anything for it.
.... and so is Spartacus.  

I don't think bloat ought to be a problem.  Clients need to keep track of txOuts that can be spent.  So clients don't need to keep timelocked txouts in memory until it is possible for them to be spent. 

You do your full-chain verification, and you get the "live" txOut set and don't load the already-spent txOuts; with the new feature you have the power to not load the timelocked txOuts either.  You can just save them in a file, in timelock sequence, and then every 24 hours or so you read into memory just the ones that could be spent in the next 36 hours.

Send them to 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa.

That's the address of the txOut of the Genesis block. 

If you send them there the only entity that could spend them is Satoshi Nakamoto. 

Satoshi, as far as we know, hasn't touched his coins except for <100BTC in test transactions.  And if he decides to spend it - he deserves it.

I know there are more certain ways, like the 1BitcoinEater address or an OP_RETURN with an input.  But I just plain like the idea of sending satoshis to Satoshi. 

King Kroisos of Lydia.  About 575 BCE.   High school history classes, right?  Or not anymore?  Or not in your country?

Up until that time, people traded commodities - often precious metal.  

Kroisos of Lydia was the guy who invented denominated currency and taxes.  

In mid 2008, most of the world's governments (especially the US gov't) printed an assload of money to bail out the crooks who trashed the world economy via blatantly illegal actions like credit fraud and misrepresentation of securities.  This was widely seen (and to some extent correctly) as a big ol' ripoff perpetrated against ordinary citizens by Bankers, with governments acting as bought-and-paid-for accomplices: accessories before, during, and after the fact.  If it doesn't seem that way in your country, ask anybody from Cyprus, Greece, Spain, or Argentina.  There's a not-unreasonable point of view that says Governments were abusing the power of currency issuance to facilitate a giant theft by their banking cronies.  

A few months later, in November 2008, I'm looking at some first-cut code for Bitcoin, and some guy named Satoshi Nakamoto has an idea for a currency that nobody can play that kind of game with.   A few months after that, after a lot of work mostly by Satoshi and Hal Finney, it's ready to launch.  (I was an idiot and didn't mine early when I had the chance; I figured it was doomed, like all the scores of cryptocurrency ideas before it).

Anyway the connection seemed pretty clear at the time.  It was widely understood that bankers and governments were abusing the power of money supply regulation to the detriment of ordinary people, and Bitcoin was seen as a response to that.  (At least in Hal's mind and mine; I suspect the same of Satoshi but Satoshi didn't normally talk politics in email.  He sometimes talked economics, but IMO his grasp of economics was fairly naíve).

I'd known Hal for 20 years on and off, mostly as an email correspondent via several cryptography forums, and Hal was extremely unhappy about the way he'd been treated by government people on a few occasions.  He'd been a libertarian all his life, with a profound belief in the fairness of unregulated markets if they could only be preserved from manipulation.   Hal had in fact gone all the way to Ayn Rand style libertarianism and was something of a demagogue about free markets.  Bitcoin was like catnip for him; pseudonymous hence free market, with built-in mathematical blocks against currency-supply manipulation.  Hal was also an able cryptographer of the sort who gets down into the grotty details of the code. Satoshi could not possibly have found a better or more willing hand to help bring this about.

So, yeah, I believe that the creation of Bitcoin was to some extent a political act - It could be considered as political speech in the form of a protest against abuse of economic regulatory power.

WTF?  Seriously?  How stupid do you think a pool owner would have to be to have that problem?  The problem is caused by him already having too much infrastructure, and if he's smarter than a post it's the obvious solution.

Pool owner:  Oh noes, my massive server farm is now providing 48 per cent of bitcoin hashing!  If someone else drops out for even an hour or so I risk annoying all those clowns who don't want to see one pool with 51%, and might not be able to dump bitcoins for as much money!

Pool Owner's IT guy:  No problem, let me reconfigure a bit, and you'll be two pools each with 24 percent of bitcoin hashing.  Or, y'know, we could call larry down the street who's got 20% of bitcoin hashing power and put, say, a third of our servers on his pool.  

Pool owner:  Oh, I didn't think of that because I have the IQ of a post!  Cool!  That way I can go on buying more servers!

IT guy:  You know, there's some other profitable shit you and Larry can do with 78% of the hashing power, if you're not too obvious about it....

Pool owner:  Awesome!  I didn't think of that, either!  'Cause I have the IQ of a post!  Oh, look!  Squirrel!

Actually, I worry more about what's going to happen when the Chinese economy falters.

The programs they put in place to recover from the 2008 crisis?  Still in place.  Government debt has doubled, and the rate of growth in government debt has tripled, while the Chinese economy has grown only 15% or so, over the last four years. 

Growth twice as fast as the rest of the world is entirely reasonable when a nation is rising in a single generation from ox farming and hand-picking crops, to first-world status.  But maintaining that growth rate is impossible once you've gotten close to caught up, and Chinese economic controls are still targeting (read: spending a buttload of money to prop up) a growth rate over twice the rate of the rest of the world. 

So, yeah, China is probably going to hit an economic readjustment.  If they do something, it will be painful to most Chinese and a drag on the world economy for a long time.  If not, they're headed for a debt collapse and possibly a Great Depression of their own.  I don't think it'll happen this year though; probably toward first quarter 2018?  Maybe?  Depends on what they do from now to then, but it's probably too late to avoid it entirely. 

I'm worried that a lot of Chinese will feel betrayed when the economic development of the last two decades grinds to what they're going to see as a sudden halt.  They'll likely look around for scapegoats to blame.  There may be ethnic violence, or they could possibly attack Japan, which would suck the US into it.

He's not out.  He's (finally) in - cooling his heels waiting for trial.  

As best I can tell, he's been formally charged (finally) last month on security fraud, so he'll be going to trial (and given Japan's extraordinarily high conviction rate, almost certainly to jail) sometime in the future.  

Japanese law prohibits holding someone for more than 3 weeks without formal charges, so he'd been walking around loose for most of the time until charges were filed just last month.  Now that charges have been filed, and considering the high probability that he'd hightail it out of the country otherwise, they're holding him.  

Japanese investigations into many different aspects of the affair, which could result in further charges, are ongoing, and I guess France's extradition request is (and possibly others are) still standing.  

Japan figures he's in their jurisdiction because the bulk of the crimes were committed on Japanese soil.  They're right.
France figures he's in their jurisdiction because he's a French citizen.  They're also right.

Several other nations (US, Australia, and several smaller) are lined up behind them for extradition on the grounds that he committed crimes (theft and fraud mostly) against their citizens.  It is debatable whether they are also right, but most of them have a policy of giving up on extraditions if the party serves time in a different jurisdiction for the same crime so it's unlikely that it will be an issue.

Some time ago, bitcoin owners decided that allowing a centralized exchange with a completely trusted CEO to hold their money for them like a bank would be a good idea.  

Yeah, I know, it's exactly the sort of thing Bitcoin was intended to prevent, but ... reasons!

Well, predictably the banker's business model involves fractional-reserve banking.  

And as intended, Bitcoin is not compatible with fractional-reserve banking.  

So Mt Gox (you pronounce that, EMPTY-Gox) imploded and the sort of people who trust central bankers lost money.  Even though they had deluded themselves into thinking that they weren't trusting central bankers.

(cue world's smallest violin, playing a sad song).

Mark Karpeles?  Yeah, he was the central banker in this scenario.  Last I heard France and Japan were negotiating whether France could extradite the guy and prosecute him there on a different set of charges.  But that was, like, a year ago.  

It's five centuries later and people are still sometimes debating about who really wrote the shakespeare plays.

I figure Satoshi Nakamoto's going to have the same fate.

My own opinion is that Satoshi was created because the business of being the original author of Bitcoin was a very high-risk position.  Optimism about the future of Bitcoin correlates with pessimism about the safety of being its author.  Because bitcoin has been at least somewhat successful so far, and has quite predictably been used as a vehicle for money laundering by everyone from ordinary tax cheats to the crooks at Silk Road to asshat jihadis, there are a whole lot of people who want to rob, tax, prosecute, blackmail, murder, or extort money from Satoshi Nakamoto.  It's better that they don't have any good idea who s/he is. 

I suppose that its creator knew s/he was going to make a lot of enemies with it, and that mob bosses, bankers, and the governments of various nations would be among them.  I suppose that all the "silent" nodes on the Bitcoin network are there listening to see what IP address every transaction originates from, at least in some part because many of those actors want to pinpoint a location and possibly an identity for Satoshi if and when one of those addresses ever moves.  If Satoshi wanted to spend any of those coins and remain unknown, s/he'd have to invest a week of time in OpSec to pull it off. While they listen to try to sort out EVERYBODY who uses Bitcoin, they'd make a special effort and follow up with people on the ground in that case.

I think that the person who created Bitcoin had very strong opinions about the economic exploitation of ordinary citizens, both by banks and by governments, and did in fact seek to oppose those influences.  Ultimately, however, while Bitcoin does change the rules a bit, it presents new rules that don't really prevent economic exploitation so much as they change the methodology for doing it.  Those interests can continue unabated in their economic exploitation of ordinary citizens, and are in the process of adapting, not relenting.

It was not created by a Government agency.  Governments are not in the business of changing things that are working for them, and the central banking system/currency controls were working for them. 

What says to me that something is wrong isn't that the mining is being done in China.  After all, in China you get taxpayer money for converting electricity to Bitcoin so that was just going to happen. 

What says to me that something is wrong, is that >90% of the Chinese mining, while technically distributed through three pools, is all happening in the same data center, on machines owned by the same business interest.

What you mean is they're stealing a shitload of money. 

Taxpayer money converted into electricity by government-owned power utility.

Electricity converted into bitcoin and bitcoin into privatized money by miners.

In China bitcoin mining is essentially just a channel to steal tax money.  The fact that it hasn't been forced to shut down or use non-subsidized electricity by now is probably evidence that someone is taking bribes.  (What a surprise!  That NEVER happens in China!   )

Yes, it was. 

There are some languages (cough Javascript cough) where floats are the only kind of numbers available.  Hal and Satoshi discussed how divisible a Bitcoin ought to be, figured there would be people who wanted to script stuff in browsers using Javascript and that was one of the limits. 

Like you, Hal said that would be a terrible idea. He still acknolwedged that there would be people who wanted to do it.

It was decided "enough" because even if the entire M1 Money supply were replaced with Bitcoin, eight points of divisibility made the smallest unit (they weren't called Satoshis yet) still less than one $US penny.

How about http://silliconangle.com/blog/2016/05/03/Craig-Wright-faces-criminal-charges/index.html

Doesn't matter to you, unless it's your money. 

After eight years of sitting on those coins, you imagine Satoshi is going to spend them in a way that destroys the entire Bitcoin economy?  I'll say you don't have much to worry about, and if you weren't fetishizing sheer wealth, so would you. 

buy a goddamn clue already, people.

Who Satoshi is doesn't matter.

Who claims to be Satoshi doesn't matter.

Who can and can't sign something with one of Satoshi's keys doesn't matter (much).

Bitcoin matters.  It stands or it falls.  

There is NO reason for Satoshi to reveal himself/herself/themselves.  NONE.   (See PS. below)  And -- THINK ABOUT THIS -- No reason for any of you to care who Satoshi was.  

Whether Bitcoin stands or falls is not determined by who Satoshi was.  Has nothing to do with it, in fact.  That is nothing but a distraction and you're behaving like hysterical children over it.  Hysterical children, I might add, that nobody wants to do business with.

Bitcoin stands or fails depending on its community.  The technical soundness is "good enough" at this point, but even if it's perfect that is necessary but not sufficient for its success.  It stands or fails on depending on its community.  That's right, on you guys.  You guys who are fighting and bickering and backbiting and getting into fights over "proof" of something that doesn't matter.  You guys who are demonstrating a complete lack of the kind of calm rational judgment required to use this system in a way which allows  commerce and business to be built.  You guys who are treating each other the way sociopaths whom nobody wants to do business with treat each other.  You guys who are hoarding the currency rather than building businesses on it or supporting businesses that use it, you guys who are talking revolution and subversive activities and and seeking to undermine government financial planning (Yes, some of it is stupid and works against its people but that's the exception not the rule).  You guys, in some cases, who are treating out-and-out murdering  crooks as culture heroes.  You guys who fell for Karpeles' confidence game and then never had a reflective moment about the role your own stupid greed played in that.  

You are the reason Bitcoin isn't getting any traction.  The way you treat each other, your conspiracy theory bullshit, the way you respond to people claiming to have been Satoshi, and your blindly stupid conviction that it matters.  Buy a goddamn clue and act like businesspeople, and this whole thing might succeed.  Keep up this infighting and bickering and radicalism and criminal activity and this getting distracted by such goddamn trivia as who Satoshi was, and you'll destroy what Satoshi (and Hal, and Gavin, and Hearn, and EVERYBODY ELSE) spent their time and energy trying to bring and build.



PS.  In fact right now several governments (starting with the UK, but with Australia not far behind) are quite prepared to file terrorism charges against anyone who makes a credible claim on having been the user of that pseudonym during the time of Bitcoin's development.  It's all about whether it was created in order to facilitate money laundering by "terrorist organizations."  If you've got the "Satoshi" keys, would you really want to come forward and step into that line of fire?  

All you can conclude about anybody who claims to have been Satoshi - whether the claim is truthful or not - is that they have poor judgment.