Satoshi ..Private key lost?

[sgk]

- He is afraid of beeing found when he spends one satoshi
- He forgot his wallet passwords
- The harddisk with the wallets crashed
- He is dead

(Most likely in that order)

I think he would have more than one harddisk with the wallets. He's either dead or not deleted the keys, if he was going to spend the coins he would have already.

it would have made sense to give Gavin a backup? lol .. who knows 

That would have been a horrible idea. At the time that Satoshi left he really did not know Gavin that well and he had really not yet shown himself to be as trustworthy as he has shown himself to be today.

Also it is never a good idea to give someone your private keys unless you intend for them to take/spend the bitcoin that the private key controls

Satoshi must have planned for a scenario where his account access would transfer to someone trusted after his death. Like transferring a Gmail account where private keys are stored in 'Draft' folder.

You can setup your Google account to be accessible to someone else in case you don't login for a specified period.

[AGD]

- He is afraid of beeing found when he spends one satoshi
- He forgot his wallet passwords
- The harddisk with the wallets crashed
- He is dead

(Most likely in that order)

I think he would have more than one harddisk with the wallets. He's either dead or not deleted the keys, if he was going to spend the coins he would have already.

it would have made sense to give Gavin a backup? lol .. who knows 

That would have been a horrible idea. At the time that Satoshi left he really did not know Gavin that well and he had really not yet shown himself to be as trustworthy as he has shown himself to be today.

Also it is never a good idea to give someone your private keys unless you intend for them to take/spend the bitcoin that the private key controls

Satoshi must have planned for a scenario where his account access would transfer to someone trusted after his death. Like transferring a Gmail account where private keys are stored in 'Draft' folder.

You can setup your Google account to be accessible to someone else in case you don't login for a specified period.

I wouldn't trust Google security.

[Argwai96]

- He is afraid of beeing found when he spends one satoshi
- He forgot his wallet passwords
- The harddisk with the wallets crashed
- He is dead

(Most likely in that order)

I think he would have more than one harddisk with the wallets. He's either dead or not deleted the keys, if he was going to spend the coins he would have already.

it would have made sense to give Gavin a backup? lol .. who knows 

That would have been a horrible idea. At the time that Satoshi left he really did not know Gavin that well and he had really not yet shown himself to be as trustworthy as he has shown himself to be today.

Also it is never a good idea to give someone your private keys unless you intend for them to take/spend the bitcoin that the private key controls

Satoshi must have planned for a scenario where his account access would transfer to someone trusted after his death. Like transferring a Gmail account where private keys are stored in 'Draft' folder.

You can setup your Google account to be accessible to someone else in case you don't login for a specified period.

I don't think satoshi would have trusted the security of google. I also believe that the threshold to allow someone to use an alternate method of accessing an account is small so satoshi would only need to not access his gmail account for a short period which would potentially give gavin access to the private keys before satoshi intended.

Also google (and probably the NSA/US government) would be able to access anything in the drafts folder)

[sgk]

- He is afraid of beeing found when he spends one satoshi
- He forgot his wallet passwords
- The harddisk with the wallets crashed
- He is dead

(Most likely in that order)

I think he would have more than one harddisk with the wallets. He's either dead or not deleted the keys, if he was going to spend the coins he would have already.

it would have made sense to give Gavin a backup? lol .. who knows 

That would have been a horrible idea. At the time that Satoshi left he really did not know Gavin that well and he had really not yet shown himself to be as trustworthy as he has shown himself to be today.

Also it is never a good idea to give someone your private keys unless you intend for them to take/spend the bitcoin that the private key controls

Satoshi must have planned for a scenario where his account access would transfer to someone trusted after his death. Like transferring a Gmail account where private keys are stored in 'Draft' folder.

You can setup your Google account to be accessible to someone else in case you don't login for a specified period.

I don't think satoshi would have trusted the security of google. I also believe that the threshold to allow someone to use an alternate method of accessing an account is small so satoshi would only need to not access his gmail account for a short period which would potentially give gavin access to the private keys before satoshi intended.

Also google (and probably the NSA/US government) would be able to access anything in the drafts folder)

I sighted Google account as an example of digital afterlife. Doesn't necessarily mean Satoshi used Google for this.

The point is, there are methods to allow someone else to get hold of your data after your death - IF YOU WANT TO.
So even if we assume Satoshi is dead, it doesn't necessarily mean that all his private keys are lost.

[Q7]

I still believe he or she is waiting for the right time. 1000 usd probably is too low and undervalued and at that time when btc reached the peak at 1000, 10% of the stash sold would be enough for him or her to cover all his spending and enough to live comfortably. The balance, I don't know what the plan....

[Crestington]

- He is afraid of beeing found when he spends one satoshi
- He forgot his wallet passwords
- The harddisk with the wallets crashed
- He is dead

(Most likely in that order)

Collectively "Satoshi Nakamoto" is waiting for mass acceptance before revealing himself and starts dumping coin in market.

He might never know when that stage is achieved. It might already have or might happen soon. Even if it is mass accepted, the price won't necessarily sky rocket.

Occam's razor (or Ockham's razor) is a principle from philosophy. Suppose there exist two (or more)explanations for an occurrence. In this case the simpler one is usually better. Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation is. Occam's razor applies especially in the philosophy of science, but also more generally.

Which is the simplest explanation with the least amount of assumptions?

The simplest explanation is that he is dead, killed by a jealous government when Bitcoin was just starting because it was suddenly new and associated with Wikileaks.

[FenixRD]

The simplest explanation is that he is dead, killed by a jealous government when Bitcoin was just starting because it was suddenly new and associated with Wikileaks.

That requires a rather not-simple explanation for how someone posted as Satoshi during the Dorian thing.

[AGD]

The simplest explanation is that he is dead, killed by a jealous government when Bitcoin was just starting because it was suddenly new and associated with Wikileaks.

That requires a rather not-simple explanation for how someone posted as Satoshi during the Dorian thing.

Satoshis gmx email account was hacked. With this email adress the hacker was able to change the account passwords of sites like the p2pfoundation, where he posted that message on. Months later he wrote an email to a trusted member of bitcointalk, saying that he has proof of Satoshis identity and that SN is still alive.

Hacker was "doxxed" by a bitcointalk user called "greaterninja", but since there is still a bounty on hackers "head" I don't believe the doxxing hit the right person. "Greaterninja" enjoyed the fame for beeing "the one who doxxed the hacker of the satoshin@gmx.com account within 30 minutes", but he never explained why the big bounty is still up there. If he doxxed the real hacker, he truly deserves the bounty. He doesn't seem to have ever claimed it.

This is how you can read it in this forum, but it does not necessarily mean, that all of it is true.

[exoton]

I still believe he or she is waiting for the right time. 1000 usd probably is too low and undervalued and at that time when btc reached the peak at 1000, 10% of the stash sold would be enough for him or her to cover all his spending and enough to live comfortably. The balance, I don't know what the plan....

I would say that he is probably waiting for trading volume and consumer/merchant adoption to more mainstream levels. This will consequentially probably will mean a much higher price.

He is probably also waiting for much of the bitcoin community to "follow" him much less, and look to what he has said less.

[turvarya]

What I think funny, is that a lot of people think, he would sell his Bitcoin, if he ever uses them.
That wouldn't make much sense, since it would pretty much hurt Bitcoin and he couldn't just sell them in one junk. They would decrease in value, before he had sold them all.
It is more likely, that he would just use them as Bitcoin.

[AGD]

Why would selling his Bitcoins hurt Bitcoin???

[turvarya]

Why would selling his Bitcoins hurt Bitcoin???

Is that a serious question?
Dumping a lot of Bitcoin any asset on the market decreases the value. You know: supply and demand
Furthermore, it would be a bad signal, when the Founder of Bitcoin would want to get rid of his Bitcoin. That's like Bill Gates selling all his Microsoft stock.

[Flashman]

Satoshis gmx email account was hacked. With this email adress the hacker was able to change the account passwords of sites like the p2pfoundation, where he posted that message on. Months later he wrote an email to a trusted member of bitcointalk, saying that he has proof of Satoshis identity and that SN is still alive.

I have not seen convincing proof that the hack occurred before the months earlier p2pfoundation post.

[AGD]

Why would selling his Bitcoins hurt Bitcoin???

Is that a serious question?
Dumping a lot of Bitcoin any asset on the market decreases the value. You know: supply and demand
Furthermore, it would be a bad signal, when the Founder of Bitcoin would want to get rid of his Bitcoin. That's like Bill Gates selling all his Microsoft stock.

Well, you didn't say "dump" in your previous post. Selling all of his BTC at or above market price would possibly even raise the price or have no effect at all, like the last SR auction of 50000 BTC or the other one before of 144000 BTC.

[AGD]

Satoshis gmx email account was hacked. With this email adress the hacker was able to change the account passwords of sites like the p2pfoundation, where he posted that message on. Months later he wrote an email to a trusted member of bitcointalk, saying that he has proof of Satoshis identity and that SN is still alive.

I have not seen convincing proof that the hack occurred before the months earlier p2pfoundation post.

I am not convinced about the hacker story as a whole.

[jyakulis]

Who knows. Are they going to release physical coins? Maybe he can see how many he can stuff up his own ass?

Kids a sham anyway. Probably stole the idea from some schizo on some message board somewhere anyway. Go fuck yourselves.

My dream of spending the latter days of my life like Tesla have already been realized. YAY!

[AWKWARDminer]

I've had lots of time to think about this, as have all of you and a couple of things stick out to me:

1. He wouldn't sell his coins - even if he has the private keys, he didn't create Bitcoin to become rich. Bitcoin is his baby and he knows what would happen if he ever put any of those coins on the market.

2. He obviously has a background in Hacking and Cryptography. He probably made a decent living before he created Bitcoin and probably continues to do the same.

3. I used to think maybe he ended up in jail but the day he came out of the shadows to renounce newsweeks claim proves that he either is not OR if he is, Satoshi Nakamoto is part of a team and therefor could act as satoshi even if the real one was in jail. I doubt jail is likely.

4. I would guess that he is living a normal life, he bought some asics when they came out and probably has a hefty sum of personal bitcoins that are not the ones everyone is watching..

5. Possible scenario: He was already working as a securities expert or systems administrator. Gavin tells him he is going to the C.I.A. and Satoshi has a realization; he has to disappear. He counts his Bitcoins to date as a necessary evil and locks them away, possibly throwing away the private keys.

(If he was in anyway doubtful about the C.I.A.'s involvement or intend -this is how I would've handled the situation)

He throws away anything linking him to Bitcoin, moves, starts a new job as a securities expert or consultant. And gets back into Bitcoin, this time appearing as a novice. He starts mining again breaking up his transactions and wallets to smaller numbers so he doesn't have all of his eggs in one basket. And he moved on.

Now he is one of us, or at least appears to be. He lives a different life now, knowing that he can never touch those coins but in the past years has built back a large amount from "hobby mining". He attends the conventions. I'd like to believe that whatever company he works for was probably one of the first security companies to enter the arena - that is where I would expect to find him.. The thing is now, even if he was to reveal his identity no one would believe him. He has shed A LOT of the evidence of his "Satoshi Nakamoto" pseudonym.

[FenixRD]

I have not seen convincing proof that the hack occurred before the months earlier p2pfoundation post.

I am not convinced about the hacker story as a whole.

Exactly. To my original quote about where this requires a not-so-simple explanation, I mean less simple than just, “Satoshi posted it.”

[FenixRD]

I've had lots of time to think about this, as have all of you and a couple of things stick out to me:

...

In general I agree. He's got plenty of bitcoins that aren't ID'd as Satoshi coins. Gavin going to the CIA is likely what caused him to withdraw. And he's probably still around here somewhere.

However, there is something to the Nick Szabo connection. Yet, Szabo himself appears to be possibly a pseudonym, so it's really hard to say. He may well have been a close follower of Szabo's work, and hid his tracks a bit that way. One standout word to me, which Satoshi used and is characteristic of a Japanese writing in English, is “ellided”. This isn't a commonly-known thing, but is apparent on use of Google n-grams, so it seems unlikely this would be a false clue. They did, however, both use the less-common term for hourglass ("sandglass"). So I am 50/50 on whether it's Szabo or an actual Japanese.

[AWKWARDminer]

I would believe that he was living in Japan at the time of Bitcoins creation and possibly is still, because at that point in the game why would you have to lie about what country you live in?  (Why not put your location as Berma?)

I am extremely skeptical that he is in fact Japanese. Japan is home to many contractors, especially in tech industry, who come from abroad. Japan is always looking for Americans who speak Japanese. (Still possible he could be ethnically Japanese but definitely raised in the west)

Combine that with the type of prerson who would create such a technology: Hacker, Anarchist, Free Thinker - and you have the profile of bright young man - possibly American, British, or Canadian (the English is too good) - who had the opportunity to Study abroad, possibly had family there.

So he was living in Japan, working at a tech firm or software developer and tinkering with this "Bitcoin" idea. You can't deny the connection between the August 15th patent filed by Neal Kin, Vladimir Oksman, and Charles Bry and then bitcoin.org registered three days later.

I feel pretty confident that they were part of a collective, working on Cryptographic transactions. This is not to imply that bitcoin was created by a group effort but rather developed independently by one of the members.

At some point the creator showed his collaborators his proposal. When they realized what they had - they stopped everything. They realized that if they continued that one change needed to happen:

It has to be created by a ghost: A pseudonym was created by the collective to mask the original creator. Satoshi as you think you know him doesn't exist. He was a guy, he made a code that the collective helped tweak, innovate, and implement. His involvement after that was just as much, maybe a little more than his collective - who were still free to work in the shadows as long as he assumed fully responsibility of the system.. This way instead of a hacker group getting busted you only have one guy who can easily erase his existence with the click of a button (should the option be needed). Everyone involved had to not be involved: A plan was set forth within the group to distance themselves from Satoshi and make it appear to be a mysterious hacker who acted alone. This would free up the members of the collective to work on Bitcoin while denying a link to Satoshi.

Where is he now? I don't know but if my theory is correct - you can find the collective by looking at people really early in the game that deny having a link to him AND can prove they don't have a link to him because that's how they set it up.

So basically everyone.