hi i'm ili, let's go back to the beginning. a user on this forum published a topic mentioning that bitcoin has a problem with its transaction history being completely public. everybody knows that. later, satoshi mentions:
"If a solution was found, a much better, easier, more convenient implementation of Bitcoin would be possible."
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770.msg8637#msg8637indicating that if a solution were found, there'd be a planned update for the network. it only exists in alternatives like "lightning network" "liquid".
in the same topic, satoshi mentions:
"If we're willing to have clients keep the history for their own money, then some of the information may not need to be stored by the network, such as:
the value
the association of inpoints and outpoints in one transaction"
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770.msg8798#msg8798further down in the same topic, satoshi writes:
"Crypto may offer a way to do "key blinding". I did some research and it was obscure, but there may be something there. "group signatures" may be related."
"When paying to a bitcoin address, you would generate a new blinded key for each use."
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770.msg9074#msg9074and below that, a user named "bytecoin" participates in the topic, one of the first users to interact with this topic about privacy. remember this: "You must also ""discourage people"" from forcing the inclusion of arbitrary data in the block chain."
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770.msg9345#msg9345and below, "bytecoin" mentions something very interesting...
"I wonder why transactions weren't designed like this in BitCoin from the start."
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770.msg9370#msg9370bytecoin is the first cryptonote coin, and the user "bytecoin" was one of the first users to interact with "privacy" on the forum. another interesting thing is that the user "bytecoin" and "satoshi" mention the developer "gavin" a lot, and satoshi's last email was:
"I've moved on to other things. It's in good hands with Gavin and everyone."
now for the cooler stuff...
the first time confidential transactions (ct), existing in cryptonote, were mentioned was by adam back, the "ceo" of "blockstream" in 2013, and later expanded by the developer "gregory maxwell". another interesting thing that gmaxwell mentions in a forum topic was this:
"This doesn't prove anything one way or another, just something to think about— the way it was originally presented sounded to me like you were saying it was solved over there, but instead I think that the experience in Bytecoin and monero brings about more questions than answers."
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=709970.msg8028034#msg8028034the user "bytecoin" creates a very strange topic: "discouraging "selfish" mining"
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327064what is selfish mining? it's an attack where a miner or pool hides newly mined blocks and only reveals them when it's advantageous for them, manipulating the blockchain to get a higher hash rate and, consequently, more rewards. this drastically decreases trust in a blockchain...
users like "gmaxwell" and "gavin andresen" participate in the topic. gavin mentions:
"By the way:
I really like your proposal, ByteCoin."
https://bitcoinalk.org/index.php?topic=327064.msg3563866#msg3563866but do you know what's interesting about all this? the coin "bytecoin" is accused of doing an 80% pre-mining, different from selfish mining. pre-mining is done before a coin is publicly launched. this is worse than selfish mining, and as i mentioned above, "this drastically decreases trust in a blockchain," which is what happened with "bytecoin."
let's go. the cryptonote v1.0 whitepaper was written by nicolas van saberhagen on december 12, 2012:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140706225233/https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper_v1.pdfand the v2 of the whitepaper on october 17, 2013:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140529235502/https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdfand according to a user on the forum, the signatures in the whitepapers were manipulated. the v1.0 signature was created in tex live 2013, which didn't even exist in 2012, and the properties of the whitepaper v1 were from april 10, 2014, and v2 from march 13, 2014, mentioning that the whitepaper v2 came before the whitepaper v1.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740112.msg8361633#msg8361633the user "thankful_for_today"'s first interaction on the forum was with another user named "dstrange" who is from the bytecoin team.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=512747.msg5711328#msg5711328and monero "bitmonero" was initially presented by thankful_for_today on the forum and it was a fork of bytecoin.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=563821the user thankful_for_today was leading the coin and had some proposals that the community and other developers disagreed with, one of them was to do "merge mining" with bytecoin.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=584893one of the reasons they removed thankful_for_today from his project was the merge mining with bytecoin. interesting that one of the devs of monero created another coin that does pre-mining and does merge mining with monero.
https://www.tari.com/tokenomicsthe cryptonote.org website in 2013 was hosted by alain meier, a site for sending and receiving one-time view encrypted messages.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131020133207/https://cryptonote.org/and the following year the site became the official domain of cryptonote. one interesting thing about this is that the cryptonote team has a person named "johannes meier" mentioning that he is chief cryptographer.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140524155845/https://cryptonote.org/the co-founder of blockscore and founding member of the stanford bitcoin group "alain meier" denies involvement with cryptonote.
https://x.com/alain/status/500765479393177601bytecoin supported educational and scientific projects such as KhanAcademy and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), and there is some information that Library Unicorn accepted BTC (Bitcoin) and BCN (Bytecoin) as payment for ordering books and scientific articles.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140713130207/https://bytecoin.org/news.php#news1adam back on march 21, 2014, mentions cryptonote.
https://x.com/adam3us/status/447105453634641921april 8, 2014, he mentions that cryptonote has median privacy and zerocash strong privacy.
https://x.com/adam3us/status/453493394472697856thankful_for_today mentions zerocoin "zcash" would be launched in the future.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=545450.msg5955309#msg5955309nick szabo publishes that monero is better for privacy than bitcoin and "i encourage people to use it."
https://x.com/fluffypony/status/1152666984661864450https://x.com/NickSzabo4/status/1152648193823219712a user on reddit offers a reward if someone makes available the video of nicolas van saberhagen's speech in 2015.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/7v2obe/offering_a_bounty_for_a_video_of_the_speech_by/and in a forum post when nicolas talked by voice on skype, half the audience left the room.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=658884.msg10993521#msg10993521in summary, half the room missed the chance to interact with nicolas van saberhagen "satoshi nakamoto."
conclusions
nick szabo - probably satoshi nakamoto
adam back - probably satoshi nakamoto
nicolas van saberhagen - satoshi nakamoto and cryptonote dev
thankful_for_today - satoshi nakamoto alt
alain meier - cryptonote dev
bitcoin and monero are incredible together, and according to many users, nicolas van saberhagen's writing is very similar to nick szabo's. it's very strange that the user "bytecoin" from the forum writes "discourage people" and nick szabo writes "encourage people." this is not "theory"; there are many points connecting them, and nick szabo encouraging people to use monero is strange. satoshi is not completely "anonymous."
