Bitcoin Inventor Satoshi Nakamoto Could Actually Be Group From Europe 186
An anonymous reader writes "Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto could be a group from Europe which has a strong footing in the financial sector. From the article: 'Josh Zerlan, the Chief Operating Officer of Butterfly Labs and a person familiar with the Bitcoin network, has said it is highly likely that Nakamoto could be a group of people working the financial sector. Speaking to IBTimes UK on the sidelines of a Global Bitcoin Conference in Bangalore, India, Zerlan said: "One of the prevailing theories, I think has credibility, is that it was some group of people from financial sector that created this. They released it and stepped back and let it go. So, Satoshi Nakamoto is a group of people, I think, is a reasonable possibility."'"
As always (Score:5, Interesting)
The olde 'The idea is so clever, it must have been one of us'-Syndrome.
More Likely (Score:3, Interesting)
It is probably the NSA using your hashing power to break encryption.
I make this statement knowing approximately nothing about crypto.
Re:As always (Score:5, Interesting)
No, they didn't say Satoshi Nakamoto was a group of scammers.
(For those not following, Butterfly Labs have become infamous in the bitcoin community by selling ASIC mining machines, promising delivery in one week. If they arrive at all, it's more than six months later, and by that time the difficulty of bitcoin mining has inevitably increased enough to make them unprofitable.
Yet they keep advertising one week's delivery time.
They have a record of breaking down due to defects, too, if they arrive. People suspect that BFL let these miners run for themselves in the months between advertised delivery time and actual delivery time.)
Re:Unlikely (Score:2, Interesting)
I lived for several years in Japan. I speak Japanese fluently. I taught English in Japan. It is almost certain Satoshi is a native English speaker. Reading the archives of the bitcoin forum, he makes absolutely no common mistakes that Japanese people make when speaking English. Personally, I think he is either American or Canadian based on his spelling and choice of phrases, but British might be credible.
If you read his code, he is also almost certainly a professional Windows programmer. His coding idioms are absolutely characteristic of someone who did a fair bit of MFC. In fact, I would go so far as to say that he is likely over 35 years old given that he probably learned to code in the 90's.