How satoshi could be anonymous when he was the only full-node ?

[Emilstud]

Hi, how satoshi could be anonymous when he was the first and only  node (9th of January 2009)? You cannot run a server over tor aren‘t ? Did he rent an anonymous server ? Has anybody informations about that ?

[1714917056]

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[1714917056]

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[aleksej996]

You can't get incoming connections over Tor without other peers also using Tor, that is correct.
I doubt he would've used it anyway.

Perhaps he took great care and never ran Bitcoin from home in the begging, but I doubt it.
Now that IP address he used is lost in time, but I am sure government recorded it and still have it.
It was always reasonable to assume that government knew who Satoshi is, in my opinion, once they were interested enough to find out.

I assume they started bothering him once Wikileaks started using Bitcoin to get around the banking blockade.
As far as I know, he announced he was leaving the project soon after that. Bitcoin just became too high profile.

[wyplashdea]

I was wondering the same thing some days ago. There must be some kind of traceable connection that will give information about that, the first steps...

Goverments know enough to at leats reduce the list of candidates but the fact that he is still unknown makes BTC even more interesting. 

[Emilstud]

In the bitcoin source code is a hardcoded peer list aren‘t it ? The hardcoded list should exist in v0.1 otherwise I couldn‘t imagine how the peers found each other abd the installation guide by satoshi said that you just need to extract the zip file and run BITCOIN.EXE.

[achow101]

In the bitcoin source code is a hardcoded peer list aren‘t it ? The hardcoded list should exist in v0.1 otherwise I couldn‘t imagine how the peers found each other abd the installation guide by satoshi said that you just need to extract the zip file and run BITCOIN.EXE.

In the very first version of Bitcoin (0.1.0), there were no hard coded nodes at all. Rather Bitcoin used an IRC channel to announce your node's IP address and allow other nodes to discover other nodes to connect to. Originally there was no way to specify which nodes to connect to.


One of the anonymous email providers that Satoshi used also provides anonymous VPSes. Presumably Satoshi used a VPS to host his node so as to hide his true IP address.

He also probably had multiple nodes. It is trivial to prevent a node from announcing itself to the public IRC channel and to prevent incoming connections so an outgoing connection only node is still fairly anonymous.

[wyplashdea]

So we must understand the Satoshi was quite aware of what would happen so he decide to hide himself from the beginning? Isn't it a little suspicious?

[anullcoin]

So we must understand the Satoshi was quite aware of what would happen so he decide to hide himself from the beginning? Isn't it a little suspicious?

not for a cryptoanarchist.

[samtasse1488]

He had a possible team of his friends or acquaintances. Then they simply monitored the network anonymity. Perhaps they had a large security network at that time and it was completely anonymous.

[andrew1carlssin]

Hi, how satoshi could be anonymous when he was the first and only  node (9th of January 2009)? You cannot run a server over tor aren‘t ? Did he rent an anonymous server ? Has anybody informations about that ?

I was wondering if bitcoin boot up was more or less like tor network boot up ... Alice node will need the minimum of three keys (k₁, k₂ and k₃, to split the message among nodes ..

Quick explanation 

Onion Routing - Computerphile
https://youtu.be/QRYzre4bf7I

[cellard]

You can't get incoming connections over Tor without other peers also using Tor, that is correct.
I doubt he would've used it anyway.

Perhaps he took great care and never ran Bitcoin from home in the begging, but I doubt it.
Now that IP address he used is lost in time, but I am sure government recorded it and still have it.
It was always reasonable to assume that government knew who Satoshi is, in my opinion, once they were interested enough to find out.

I assume they started bothering him once Wikileaks started using Bitcoin to get around the banking blockade.
As far as I know, he announced he was leaving the project soon after that. Bitcoin just became too high profile.

I think someone confirmed that he was using Tor for all his online profiles, including this forum, p2pfoundation profile website, and the bitcoin mailing list originally on sourceforge website I think:

http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/profile/SatoshiNakamoto

https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/code/1/tree//trunk/

Also to access all his emails.

To run the actual node probably VPS. I wonder what the state of VPN services was in 2009.

[Yurkov]

Hi, how satoshi could be anonymous when he was the first and only  node (9th of January 2009)? You cannot run a server over tor aren‘t ? Did he rent an anonymous server ? Has anybody informations about that ?

If he made something like bitcoin and he started the "crypto" market that mean he was to clever to made himself not anonymus, he thought 1000 times how to made his server private before he started doing anything.

[Pixel_Boss]

Hi, how satoshi could be anonymous when he was the first and only  node (9th of January 2009)? You cannot run a server over tor aren‘t ? Did he rent an anonymous server ? Has anybody informations about that ?

If he made something like bitcoin and he started the "crypto" market that mean he was to clever to made himself not anonymus, he thought 1000 times how to made his server private before he started doing anything.

Definitely clever enough, but I don't think he'd correctly anticipated Bitcoin's future and decided on day 1 that he's going to go full length to make sure all of his activities are anonymous. Just my thought.

[Emilstud]

The most known day 1 bitcoin users are now dead  . (Hal Finney, Dave Kleiman) so we cannot ask them for their logs. Maybe another bitcoin pioneer still have logs.

[danda]

I wonder if there are logs of that IRC channel from back in 2009/2010 somewhere...

or for that matter, ~/.bitcoin/debug.log from some time period...

Rather Bitcoin used an IRC channel to announce your node's IP address and allow other nodes to discover other nodes to connect to.

[CHENIEN]

This is how cryptocurrency business being managed, the anonymity system. We are here also joins with anonymity of our personal informations, that no what knows who we are, even both of us discussing with different opinions and ideas but still we are using anonymous profile that no one knows about our personal identity and places or even our life status and life situation. This is how good cryptocurrency business being manage, and we accept the fact that cryptocurrency business are fully being anonymous.

[btj]

I think there was more than 1 node when he launched it, if that was the case then anyone else was able to take control of the blockchain at that time.

Second thing, is the domain name bitcoin.org, how he used to purchase it ? Purhapse any anonymous payment method at that time like Liberty Reserve or ...

But at that time, why he would manage to keep him self anonymous with this revolutionary technology ? except if he didn't want that someone will make pressure on him in the futur to stop or limit it.

[Emilstud]

I think there was more than 1 node when he launched it, if that was the case then anyone else was able to take control of the blockchain at that time.

Second thing, is the domain name bitcoin.org, how he used to purchase it ? Purhapse any anonymous payment method at that time like Liberty Reserve or ...

But at that time, why he would manage to keep him self anonymous with this revolutionary technology ? except if he didn't want that someone will make pressure on him in the futur to stop or limit it.

He bought it at AnonymousSpeech. Probably he used somethibg like paysafecard. The only guy who had the ability to know who satoshi really is, is Mr. Weber the owner of anonymousspeech. But if he cares about the privacy of his user, he already deleted this infos

[Smarty14392]

Yes, we can say that he could use a tor server as it is near to impossible to track it and Satoshi could also be using an anonymous service for himself to protect his identity as he was concerned about it from the start of the development process.

[raymondspeaks]

He could have paid a kid in India to do it for him. I think there are many ways around the full-node theory

[Emilstud]

He could have paid a kid in India to do it for him. I think there are many ways around the full-node theory

But how he paid the kid anonymously ? Probably not with bitcoins