More evidence that Bitcoin was created by the US government

[legiteum]

There is lots of circumstantial evidence--although no direct evidence--that "Satoshi" was a person or team working within the US government.

Today I came across this paper, which was created in 1996 by employees at the NSA including Satoshi Nakamoto Tatsuaki Okamoto:

How To Make A Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash

(While I don't think Mr. Okamoto himself was Satoshi, I think it would be a fitting tribute name to give the "author" of Bitcoin a name that recalled his).

My circumstantial evidence of "Satoshi" being a person or team within a US agency is as follows:

1. The US government has thousands of employees who do research and have the time and opportunity to do a project like Bitcoin.

2. Various US government agencies i.e. the NSA, CIA and DARPA, have the expertise to pull off the necessary tradecraft to hide the identity of Satoshi. It's doubtful that a mere amateur individual could pull stay anonymous under such intense scrutiny as Satoshi has undergone.

3. US government employees, especially ones working for spy agencies like the CIA and the NSA, and especially those whom are not field agents are not ideological. Moreover, they don't all operate as part of a coordinated strategic plan. The idea that "the US would never create Bitcoin because it hates Bitcoin" is utterly ignorant. The two million employees of the US government don't operate that way, and the CIA/NSA definitely doesn't operate that way.

4. Satoshi never spent a single sat. This fact is simply impossible to overlook, and there is only one reasonable explanation for it: that he/she/they couldn't spend their Bitcoin--even a dollar's worth to try it out--because to do so would create a massive paperwork shit storm within the US government. Then as Bitcoin got bigger, the problem got bigger. (And only the US government is big enough to ignore $hundreds of billions just to keep a state secret).

I continue to solicit comments that will disprove this theory. So far I have heard nothing even remotely compelling. All I have gotten so far is:

1. Satoshi was just a nice guy who didn't want any money. Besides being against everything we know about human nature going back thousands of years, it also doesn't explain how "some guy" could maintain the tradecraft necessary to keep himself hidden like this.

2. Satoshi died before he could spend anything. This doesn't explain why he didn't spend even a single sat, and doesn't explain why he formally said goodbye before he stopped posting, which goes against the idea that he died suddenly.

[Aliciaworld]

I don't know about the US government involvement or whether Satoshi was an agent working with the government, but I've always speculated that Satoshi may have either

1. Been found by the government but his identity is top secret
2. lost access to his wallet
3. Made up as a cover story as a form of distraction from the truth

[Filicius]

I continue to solicit comments that will disprove this theory. So far I have heard nothing even remotely compelling.

I think the problem is not that no one has given you any answer that refutes your theory yet, but the danger that you might end up believing that's enough to prove it. We can put together theories as many as we want, and some of them will sound feasible, but they will not necessarily bring us closer to the truth, although it can be entertaining as an exercise in imagination.

[PostQuantumBTC]

All these that you mentioned did not show that Satoshi Nakamoto is a US government.

But I think the people that created bitcoin are from United States that used a Japanese name as bitcoin creator. But just that Satoshi is not known and I think it will remain just like that as Satoshi want it to be.

I do not care to know who created bitcoin if the people that created it do not want people to know. Just hold is what that is on my mind.

[Alvin_talk]

First of all, your title is misleading. This is just an assumption/hypothesis you made up without any proof, so that's not an evidence.

No government will create a system that can kill its corrupt practices, that is why its a fallacy to believe that the US government owns or created bitcoin.

it also doesn't explain how "some guy" could maintain the tradecraft necessary to keep himself hidden like this.

Yeah, Sotoshi just proved it is possible. That you can't doesn't always mean some body else can't.

[Odohu]

I appreciate your post because you have made a strong argument especially on how Satoshi manages to remain anonymous and never spent a single Sat of his, this is something that can mainly be pulled by the US government.  If they are not involved, they would have found out who Satoshi is, maybe they have but decided to keep him anonymous. I want to see what others will say about this because these is strong connection that can be seen from this post.

[Upgrade00]

I continue to solicit comments that will disprove this theory. So far I have heard nothing even remotely compelling. All I have gotten so far is:

The burden of proof rests on you. This is just a tentative argument, barely so. Not a theory or evidence.

You should be giving reasons why you think the US government will create a protocol that eliminates the need for a third party (them) and is fully transparent, then leave billions of dollars on the table. I'll say it's more plausible that an altruistic genius who was frustrated with the financial order did this than the US or any government

[Rockstarguy]

There is lots of circumstantial evidence--although no direct evidence--that "Satoshi" was a person or team working within the US government.

If you have no evidence, it means there is no case because everything about Bitcoin is supported by evidence. If you want to counter anything or prove Satoshi wrong, then come with your proof. Since there is no evidence, this story is just the same as every story like that of others without any evidence.

I think this is just an assumption, and I wonder what the benefit of discussing this topic would be. It would have been better if you had meditated on this in your mind.

[Ambatman]

So how does all this point to the fact that bitcoin was created by the US government.
The connection is not connecting.
Why can't it be other countries? Or they won't be able to hold themselves that they created something as groundbreaking as bitcoin.
Many people worked in the past on cryptography and money not just your supposed research by NASA.

Satoshi never spent a single sat.

He did send some Bitcoin to Hal finney
So that's something
Not to mention the patoshi pattern isn't absolute just speculation.
The blockchain doesn't write this coins were mined and owned by satoshi.

[Majestic-milf]

 So if Bitcoin was created by the US, how come they've not monopolized it? The US owns about 307-328 BTC valued at $25-28bn and all this was mostly acquired from seizures and criminal forfeitures so I want to understand how this "evidence" you showed makes it possible that Satoshi is an entity created by the US. The thing is when people struggle to make sense of something, they make up ideas to suit their curious minds. How about we just focus more on growing our Bitcoin than bothering who owns what.

[adultcrypto]

No matter how convincing your argument would be, I will never agree that the US government will create something that eliminates or weaken their grip on the global financial system. Have yiu thought about what that will mean to them? They will lose their power to enforce their sanctions on those who do not agree with them and this is not what the US government will be happy about. You know what damage the Lazarus group of North Korea has done through bitcoin and cryptocurrency in terms of hacking and theft, those money will not flow to them without bitcoin and to think that the US government will willingly create something thaf will make such thing possible is simply inconceivable.  

[suzanne5223]

There is lots of circumstantial evidence--although no direct evidence--that "Satoshi" was a person or team working within the US government.

Today I came across this paper, which was created in 1996 by employees at the NSA including Satoshi Nakamoto Tatsuaki Okamoto:

How To Make A Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash

(While I don't think Mr. Okamoto himself was Satoshi, I think it would be a fitting tribute name to give the "author" of Bitcoin a name that recalled his).

My circumstantial evidence of "Satoshi" being a person or team within a US agency is as follows:

1. The US government has thousands of employees who do research and have the time and opportunity to do a project like Bitcoin.

Firstly, the paper was about anonymous currency.
I dont know if Satoshi is someone who works within the US government. A lot of people believed so years ago, but the idea, and the research of crypto currency is already available in 1996 before Satoshi develop BTC. It's just like the AI that's getting traction now, whose idea and research were done years ago before the OpenAI CEO brought it alive.

The foundations of Bitcoin were set in stone 10 years ago today with the creation of the genesis block, and Bitcoin version 0.1 was officially released a week later. Version 0.1 was amazingly complete, and even more impressively, it had very few bugs. It also had great forward-compatibility, with explicit support for future softforks in the form of the OP_NOPn opcodes. Before anyone knew how a decentralized cryptocurrency would even work, Satoshi was figuring out how to add to Bitcoin things like smart contracts and payment channels. This is incredible, and a lot of people look at Satoshi's amazing accomplishments with Bitcoin and say stuff like, "Satoshi must be a crypto super-genius, the next Einstein." This, I think, is very much missing the point.

When Satoshi was working on Bitcoin in 2007-2009, almost all of the core ideas of Bitcoin were well-known in the cryptography community. In 1996, a summary of previous academic work on electronic cash was published, talking at length about most of the low-level cryptographic primitives used in Bitcoin and using familiar terms like "double spending". Hashcash proof-of-work was well-known, and I remember reading about it prior to Bitcoin as an idea to prevent email spam. git uses the same unbreakable chain of hashes as Bitcoin's block chain, and was first released in 2005. Satoshi made one major leap: combining all these pieces to prevent double spending through a PoW block chain. This was impressive, but the same flash of brilliance could've happened to anyone who was following this stuff.

Satoshi is not awesome because he was watching the crypto world and had a brilliant idea. He's awesome because upon having this idea, he carried it out. You know what I would've done if this idea had come to me? I probably would've mentioned it to a few people, maybe written some very basic code if I was feeling especially ambitious. You know what Satoshi did? He spent 2+ years contemplating every possible aspect of the system he could think of, and wrote code that worked brilliantly in the real world. Satoshi's code was good, but anyone who had read a good C++ book could've written similarly-good code. Anyone who had taken an intro crypto course or read a few books on the subject would understand Satoshi's usage of crypto primitives. The task of creating Bitcoin required a small flash of brilliance, moderate skill, and an unbelievably huge amount of dedication to thinking about, coding, and testing the system until it worked exactly as envisioned.

Satoshi's lesson is that you don't need to be the next Einstein in order to change the world. Nor do you need to have much money, or influence with the world's "movers & shakers". You just need to put in the effort. Satoshi, probably just an ordinary hobbyist like anyone here, saw that something was lacking in the Universe, and he fought tooth-and-nail for 2+ years until this imperfection was corrected. This is what makes Satoshi and his work my greatest inspiration.

2. Various US government agencies i.e. the NSA, CIA and DARPA, have the expertise to pull off the necessary tradecraft to hide the identity of Satoshi. It's doubtful that a mere amateur individual could pull stay anonymous under such intense scrutiny as Satoshi has undergone.

Satoshi is not an amateur individual, and he works with experienced people (Theymos, Sirius, Hal Finney, Gavin Andresen, etc.) on Bitcoin. Aside that, someone with the core knowledge of OpSec can stay anonymous.

3. US government employees, especially ones working for spy agencies like the CIA and the NSA, and especially those whom are not field agents are not ideological.

What you said here was one of the early presumptions of people about Satoshi, but no one has provided the evidence to back it up, and one thing i'm sure about who Satoshi is, he's a computer programmer and an advocate for self-custody.

Moreover, they don't all operate as part of a coordinated strategic plan. The idea that "the US would never create Bitcoin because it hates Bitcoin" is utterly ignorant.

No, it is not.
No government in the whole world will create a monetary system that has the potential to make them powerless when they like to be in control or have the potential to surpass their national currency.

4. Satoshi never spent a single sat. This fact is simply impossible to overlook, and there is only one reasonable explanation for it: that he/she/they couldn't spend their Bitcoin--even a dollar's worth to try it out--because to do so would create a massive paperwork shit storm within the US government. Then as Bitcoin got bigger, the problem got bigger. (And only the US government is big enough to ignore $hundreds of billions just to keep a state secret).

I continue to solicit comments that will disprove this theory. So far I have heard nothing even remotely compelling. All I have gotten so far is:

1. Satoshi was just a nice guy who didn't want any money. Besides being against everything we know about human nature going back thousands of years, it also doesn't explain how "some guy" could maintain the tradecraft necessary to keep himself hidden like this.

2. Satoshi died before he could spend anything. This doesn't explain why he didn't spend even a single sat, and doesn't explain why he formally said goodbye before he stopped posting, which goes against the idea that he died suddenly.

If you're talking about the BTC's genesis wallet here. Then I won't agree with you because it's deemed a quirk in the model of how the genesis block is expressed in the code.
Therefore, it has nothing to do with what you think.

1. It doesn't mean Satoshi didn't want any money. I believe creating something that truly serves its purpose was his aim.
You know, i you truly want to do something that will bring change, it has to start from the person working on the change. Leaving the genesis BTCs, doesn't Satoshi dont mine another BTC after the success of the invention of BTC.

2 I dont know if Satoshi is still alive. What i explained above is the reason why the genesis mined BTC are not spent, but the BTC sent later to the genesis wallet as donations or rewards can be spent.

[legiteum]

I continue to solicit comments that will disprove this theory. So far I have heard nothing even remotely compelling.

I think the problem is not that no one has given you any answer that refutes your theory yet, but the danger that you might end up believing that's enough to prove it. We can put together theories as many as we want, and some of them will sound feasible, but they will not necessarily bring us closer to the truth, although it can be entertaining as an exercise in imagination.

I don't believe that's enough to prove it. You can have evidence of something which isn't proof. I didn't title my post, "THE FINAL PROOF OF THE SATOSHI IDENTITY" for that reason. 

But there's a lot of evidence, and no evidence of anything else that's compelling, so this certainly increases the odds of the theory being true.

First of all, your title is misleading. This is just an assumption/hypothesis you made up without any proof, so that's not an evidence.

Proof and evidence are different things. You can have evidence of something that isn't proof (but you can't have proof without evidence).

No government will create a system that can kill its corrupt practices, that is why its a fallacy to believe that the US government owns or created bitcoin.

No matter how convincing your argument would be, I will never agree that the US government will create something that eliminates or weaken their grip on the global financial system. [...]

I've put these two posts together because it's a common argument against this theory--and it's simply crazy. The is no such thing as "The US Government" in the way you are making it out to be.

You make it sound:

• Like the two million individuals who work for the US government are all the same person, all follow the same orders, and all think the same way.
• Like the CIA and the NSA have never gone rogue and done things against the explicit will of Congress, which is absolutely hilarious. 
• Like the US government would be, even if it were a "thing", against Bitcoin even though Bitcoin is perfectly legal in the USA.
• Like Bitcoin actually "weakens their grip on the global financial system" which it doesn't.

This idea that "the US government wouldn't do that" comes from a very, very naive place. Of all of the objections to this theory, this is by far the weakest. You simply don't know anything about how the US government works--especially the CIA/NSA/etc.--if you think there's some overarching ideology that exists, let alone one that controls the minds of every single worker within the US government, let alone one that controls the minds of workers in US spy agencies.

2. Various US government agencies i.e. the NSA, CIA and DARPA, have the expertise to pull off the necessary tradecraft to hide the identity of Satoshi. It's doubtful that a mere amateur individual could pull stay anonymous under such intense scrutiny as Satoshi has undergone.

Satoshi is not an amateur individual, and he works with experienced people (Theymos, Sirius, Hal Finney, Gavin Andresen, etc.) on Bitcoin. Aside that, someone with the core knowledge of OpSec can stay anonymous.

Not like this they can't. There have literally been millions of people who have looked for Satoshi, and millions of dollars have been spent doing so. People stay anonymous because they take the usual precautions AND nobody seriously bothers to look for them. Satoshi is clearly on an entirely different level.

Moreover, they don't all operate as part of a coordinated strategic plan. The idea that "the US would never create Bitcoin because it hates Bitcoin" is utterly ignorant.

No, it is not.

No government in the whole world will create a monetary system that has the potential to make them powerless when they like to be in control or have the potential to surpass their national currency.

Do you understand that there are two million people who work for the US government? Do you even understand what you are saying? I covered this above, but you believe the same falsehoods about Bitcoin that many hard-cores seem to believe, i.e. that the US government even cares about Bitcoin one way or another. It's been 17 years and Bitcoin is no closer to "overthrowing the world's financial system" than it was when it started.

If anything, the intransigence on this lunacy is strong evidence for me since so many people believe it that they discount a theory with so much evidence behind it. It seems like people don't think the theory can be true because that would ruin their religion.

Christopher Columbus was up against the same obstacles if I recall. 

1. It doesn't mean Satoshi didn't want any money. I believe creating something that truly serves its purpose was his aim.
You know, i you truly want to do something that will bring change, it has to start from the person working on the change. Leaving the genesis BTCs, doesn't Satoshi dont mine another BTC after the success of the invention of BTC.

So he willfully ignores 80 billion dollars. That's impossible. You can do a lot of "changing" for 80 billion dollars.

[Stalker22]

4. Satoshi never spent a single sat.

And how do you know that?

Look, nobody is arguing that the ~1.1 million BTC sitting in those old "Patoshi" blocks have not moved.  But to say that he never moved a single sat is not a fact, it is just speculation.  We have no idea how much Satoshi mined in those early days, and he could have gone on mining long after he disappeared in 2011.  Every now and again, we get hit with an old 2009-2010 wallet suddenly waking up and selling a couple hundred coins.  Was that Satoshi moving coins from an untagged wallet he mined down the line?  Maybe.  Was it some other lucky early nerd?  Maybe.  The point is, nobody knows.

[Youngrebel]

Satoshi never spent a single sat. This fact is simply impossible to overlook, and there is only one reasonable explanation for it: that he/she/they couldn't spend their Bitcoin-

To me oo I don’t feel like there is only one reasonable explanation for Satoshi not spending the coins, because could be a deliberate choice maybe protect their identity, or maybe they want to leave Bitcoin to grow and allow others use it without their involvement. You analyse and reason it our fact that the coins actually remain untouched is interesting, but it doesn’t prove that Satoshi was working for the US government and until stronger evidence is shown it to us i dont think I can be convinced.

[Wiwo]

This you mentioned above ops is the whole thing that has always been speculated about Satoshi's origin or his person.

Bitcoin holds it position in terms of value and independence, because Satoshi identity remained private which is the real concept behind Bitcoin's true privacy.

Until you have some other form of new evidence, this thread remains, like every other speculative thread about Satoshi.

[Alphakilo]

This post isn't proof enough that Bitcoin was created by the U.S government because it is full of flaws.
There's a story I read sometimes back that said Satoshi Nakamoto is a psuedonmyn for the group of developers who made the Bitcoin idea a reality and it kind of made sense because how can there be a name of a founder with this working idea that even the U.S government owns a reserve bank for this particular asset and other crypto currencies, without ever having a picture of the creator or knowing anything about him.

Now with this inconclusive evidence, it isn't justified to say Satoshi died without spending his coins because no one actually knows who he is or his whereabouts and am sure he might as well still be alive if it was a single person and not a group of developers.

[retreat]

Everyone can speculate about who Satoshi is – people have been speculating about him for a long time, so adding more people trying to figure out who he really doesn't change anything. But everything that's said is just guesswork. "Satoshi is from the US," "Satoshi is Japanese," and a lot of other claims. Still, Satoshi's identity is a mystery – no one knows who he really is – what you're saying is just like, "yeah, he most likely is this based on these points," but that's just a "possibility," so all of this is just trying to match things up – and it really doesn't mean anything for real. Unless there is a much stronger point, it might be worth considering, but I doubt that.

[uneng]

Why would US government create Bitcoin? What is the motivation behind it?

If something like that was real, it would have already leaked, especially once a transition of government took place.

There isn't any evidence Bitcoin was created by the government, and this theory remains side by side with UFOs legends, which also don't have any real and solid evidence, still people claim it's real and that governments are hidding the facts.

[Sammysmart001]

4. Satoshi never spent a single sat.

And how do you know that?

Look, nobody is arguing that the ~1.1 million BTC sitting in those old "Patoshi" blocks have not moved.  But to say that he never moved a single sat is not a fact, it is just speculation.  We have no idea how much Satoshi mined in those early days, and he could have gone on mining long after he disappeared in 2011.  Every now and again, we get hit with an old 2009-2010 wallet suddenly waking up and selling a couple hundred coins.  Was that Satoshi moving coins from an untagged wallet he mined down the line?  Maybe.  Was it some other lucky early nerd?  Maybe.  The point is, nobody knows.

Am with you on this. Most people do always assume that Satoshi only owns the famous untouched stash of coins.

Come to think of it, what if he mined on other computers with different wallets ? Like you made mention also we do see old 2009 or 2010 wallets showing up out of nowhere to sell out some coins. Satoshi might be one of this early whales cashing out cold deadly without drawing any attention to self.

The whole US government theory is just an overthinking things. Cause the main know wallet has not moved does not mean the creator has not spent a single sat.