The Newsweek article mentions that there are several people named Satoshi Nakamoto
No evidence that Dorian Nakamoto programs or has programmed
The reporter tells a straightforwardly false narrative of when and why Bitcoin Satoshi left, which makes me think she’s not honest in general
Bitcoin Satoshi was privacy conscious from the beginning, as evidenced by using vistomail for his email address and registered bitcoin.org through a proxy
The only writing sample of Dorian Nakamoto I’ve seen (an email about model trains) is a mismatch
That would actually be a point against: since now you need to explain how Satoshi could have cashed out a lot of coins early (at low prices) or any coins recently (at high prices), without anyone noticing, keeping in mind people (such as myself) actively are watching early coin-rewards and especially the ones tagged as the Satoshi miner by Sergio’s research.
Not quite what I meant. The fact that Satoshi didn’t sell many of the early coins, and didn’t mix them around enough to keep the option open either, is evidence that he felt financially secure without them. That suggests that he had money already, from a source other than Bitcoin—which, for a skilled programmer, has a high prior already.
Ah, that’s a good point. Yes, I agree with you that I expect Satoshi to be well off based on his other activities (or alternately, have a good excuse for being poor, like being a grad student).
Really? If Dorian Nakamoto had recently and mysteriously come into a lot of money, that would lower your estimate that he was Satoshi? Satoshi is less likely to have accumulated an unexplained fortune than the base rate?
Yes. The early coins have been scrutinized pretty heavily, and the more time that passes, the harder it is to move a lot of coins (eg. with each day, the coin-days-destroyed increases, irrespective of exchange rate; and blockchain analysis gets better, which because Satoshi did not move the coins early on is going to work against him ever more—normally, the more time that passes and the more transactions that happen, the worse and more unreliable blockchain analysis gets, but since he’s done no transactions...).
If Dorian came into a lot of money, I would want an explanation: did he sell an early Bitcoin startup? Did some other project (the things Satoshi moved onto) yield dividends? For example, one problem with Jed McCaleb as a candidate was that he seems to be rich, but that problem was satisfactorily addressed by his MtGox sale & Ripple work.
(That investigation proved pointless, incidentally: I ultimately scrapped McCaleb as a candidate because the password hashing on his MtGox codebase was inexcusably sloppy for Satoshi, and I simply can’t see Satoshi deliberately endangering MtGox users just for the off-chance of a hack revealing the sloppiness and inducing researchers to write him off as cryptographically ignorant.)
Your first paragraph seems to be directed more at P(Dorian came into a lot of money | Dorian is Satoshi) than P(Dorian is Satoshi | Dorian came into a lot of money). It explains why you think that being Satoshi does not significantly increase the probability of coming into a lot of money, but it doesn’t explain why you think being Satoshi decreases the probability.
I think I did explain that. Satoshi is one of the early Bitcoin adopters whose finances we understand best: ie he has cashed out and moved ~$0. Being Satoshi substantially decreases the odds of mysteriously being wealthy as compared to all the other early Bitcoin adopters, whose finances are not so nailed down and so who routinely surprise us watchers.
For example, even as I type this, we are being surprised by an early Bitcoin adopter: the 1933x addresses (with 111k btc or ~$70 million’s worth), generally believed to have been Ross Ulbricht’s Silk Road commissions from the first year of operation, abruptly started moving yesterday after being completely inactive since ~Nov 2011; Ulbricht is still in jail, has not pled, and the FBI presumably long ago finished its forensics, so the inescapable conclusion is that we were completely wrong about it being Ulbricht and it’s an unknown actor. If you find someone involved with Bitcoin early on who matches Satoshi’s profile but mysteriously has millions, you haven’t found Satoshi—you’ve found someone like 1933x!
He’s in jail; he has no access to the hardware the FBI seized (with all his encrypted files on them, and it’s hard to unencrypt an encrypted file when you don’t have a copy, even if you know the passphrase); and there is no particular reason to move the coins at this time, with Mtgox shattered & the database leaked. It’s extremely implausible that it’s Ross, now.
It’s much more likely it’s either Karpeles or a Mtgox insider moving around gains for some reason, or the insider realizes their Mtgox account information is now public and is scrambling to disperse their fortune to less-easily-tracked addresses.
I use two spaces after every sentence, and I’m 23. It’s not a personal quirk either, it was just normal formatting in the American public schools I attended. (By the way, anyone who points out that this very post uses single spaces after a full stop should know that LessWrong messes with formatting. I typed double spaces; it’s just not displaying as written.)
By the way, anyone who points out that this very post uses single spaces after a full stop should know that LessWrong messes with formatting. I typed double spaces; it’s just not displaying as written.
This isn’t a specifically LessWrong thing. Web browsers do that to text—they ignore spaces at the beginning of a paragraph and also between words.
Hungarian notation in a random bitcoin file I opened: coins.cpp
if (!fZero) {
nLastUsedByte = b + 1;
nNonzeroBytes++;
}
See the letters preceding each variable? Those tell you what type of variable they are. Here I suspect “f” is for float and “n” is for “integer”. This is not a common style for programming, and especially this kind of it (“systems hungarian”) is associated with Microsoft.
The only writing sample of Dorian Nakamoto I’ve seen (an email about model trains) is a mismatch
The writing may have been done by another person. The original story was that Satoshi Nakamoto is an unknown, positive number of people; is that a worse hypothesis now?
Nope. I say p~=10%.
The Newsweek article mentions that there are several people named Satoshi Nakamoto
No evidence that Dorian Nakamoto programs or has programmed
The reporter tells a straightforwardly false narrative of when and why Bitcoin Satoshi left, which makes me think she’s not honest in general
Bitcoin Satoshi was privacy conscious from the beginning, as evidenced by using vistomail for his email address and registered bitcoin.org through a proxy
The only writing sample of Dorian Nakamoto I’ve seen (an email about model trains) is a mismatch
Dorian Nakamoto is old
Dorian Nakamoto isn’t wealthy
That would actually be a point against: since now you need to explain how Satoshi could have cashed out a lot of coins early (at low prices) or any coins recently (at high prices), without anyone noticing, keeping in mind people (such as myself) actively are watching early coin-rewards and especially the ones tagged as the Satoshi miner by Sergio’s research.
Not quite what I meant. The fact that Satoshi didn’t sell many of the early coins, and didn’t mix them around enough to keep the option open either, is evidence that he felt financially secure without them. That suggests that he had money already, from a source other than Bitcoin—which, for a skilled programmer, has a high prior already.
Ah, that’s a good point. Yes, I agree with you that I expect Satoshi to be well off based on his other activities (or alternately, have a good excuse for being poor, like being a grad student).
Really? If Dorian Nakamoto had recently and mysteriously come into a lot of money, that would lower your estimate that he was Satoshi? Satoshi is less likely to have accumulated an unexplained fortune than the base rate?
Yes. The early coins have been scrutinized pretty heavily, and the more time that passes, the harder it is to move a lot of coins (eg. with each day, the coin-days-destroyed increases, irrespective of exchange rate; and blockchain analysis gets better, which because Satoshi did not move the coins early on is going to work against him ever more—normally, the more time that passes and the more transactions that happen, the worse and more unreliable blockchain analysis gets, but since he’s done no transactions...).
If Dorian came into a lot of money, I would want an explanation: did he sell an early Bitcoin startup? Did some other project (the things Satoshi moved onto) yield dividends? For example, one problem with Jed McCaleb as a candidate was that he seems to be rich, but that problem was satisfactorily addressed by his MtGox sale & Ripple work.
(That investigation proved pointless, incidentally: I ultimately scrapped McCaleb as a candidate because the password hashing on his MtGox codebase was inexcusably sloppy for Satoshi, and I simply can’t see Satoshi deliberately endangering MtGox users just for the off-chance of a hack revealing the sloppiness and inducing researchers to write him off as cryptographically ignorant.)
Your first paragraph seems to be directed more at P(Dorian came into a lot of money | Dorian is Satoshi) than P(Dorian is Satoshi | Dorian came into a lot of money). It explains why you think that being Satoshi does not significantly increase the probability of coming into a lot of money, but it doesn’t explain why you think being Satoshi decreases the probability.
I think I did explain that. Satoshi is one of the early Bitcoin adopters whose finances we understand best: ie he has cashed out and moved ~$0. Being Satoshi substantially decreases the odds of mysteriously being wealthy as compared to all the other early Bitcoin adopters, whose finances are not so nailed down and so who routinely surprise us watchers.
For example, even as I type this, we are being surprised by an early Bitcoin adopter: the 1933x addresses (with 111k btc or ~$70 million’s worth), generally believed to have been Ross Ulbricht’s Silk Road commissions from the first year of operation, abruptly started moving yesterday after being completely inactive since ~Nov 2011; Ulbricht is still in jail, has not pled, and the FBI presumably long ago finished its forensics, so the inescapable conclusion is that we were completely wrong about it being Ulbricht and it’s an unknown actor. If you find someone involved with Bitcoin early on who matches Satoshi’s profile but mysteriously has millions, you haven’t found Satoshi—you’ve found someone like 1933x!
It’s possible he hid some bitcoins somewhere the FBI didn’t get to them, and is now moving them.
He’s in jail; he has no access to the hardware the FBI seized (with all his encrypted files on them, and it’s hard to unencrypt an encrypted file when you don’t have a copy, even if you know the passphrase); and there is no particular reason to move the coins at this time, with Mtgox shattered & the database leaked. It’s extremely implausible that it’s Ross, now.
It’s much more likely it’s either Karpeles or a Mtgox insider moving around gains for some reason, or the insider realizes their Mtgox account information is now public and is scrambling to disperse their fortune to less-easily-tracked addresses.
Maybe he hid a backup on some public data hosting site.
That part matches though doesn’t it, given that SN’s code used hungarian notation and otherwise seemed to be a bit old school?
You don’t mean reverse polish notation? There are other signs of age too, like using two spaces after a full stop.
I use two spaces after every sentence, and I’m 23. It’s not a personal quirk either, it was just normal formatting in the American public schools I attended. (By the way, anyone who points out that this very post uses single spaces after a full stop should know that LessWrong messes with formatting. I typed double spaces; it’s just not displaying as written.)
Same. Well, 24.
This isn’t a specifically LessWrong thing. Web browsers do that to text—they ignore spaces at the beginning of a paragraph and also between words.
Actually, there is something specific to LW: view source and you’ll see that it is the server and not just the browser that is doing it.
Hungarian notation in a random bitcoin file I opened: coins.cpp
See the letters preceding each variable? Those tell you what type of variable they are. Here I suspect “f” is for float and “n” is for “integer”. This is not a common style for programming, and especially this kind of it (“systems hungarian”) is associated with Microsoft.
I see, thanks.
I got the part about Hungarian notation from Gavin’s quote here. Hungarian notation is a thing in programming.
Sounds like both systems acquired their names in similar ways (founder / proponent from a particular national origin).
The writing may have been done by another person. The original story was that Satoshi Nakamoto is an unknown, positive number of people; is that a worse hypothesis now?