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."'"
Ummm (Score:1)
Bitcoin Inventor Satoshi Nakamoto is Anonymous-style Cell from Europe
Anonymous-style??? Slightly biased headline designed to increase FUD about bitcoins.
I am ... (Score:2, Funny)
Satoshi Nakamoto
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No, I am Satoshi Nakamoto.
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Actually, I have it on good authority that Bitcoin was written by time traveling aliens from Sirius 2. The same people that built the pyramids, and gave mankind astrology. The block chain was first implemented by the Inkas, and passed down for generations on tree bark. There were millions of copies of the ledger, and mining was done with toothpicks and lasers. If you look at the numerological value of the name Satoshi Nakamoto, you get 9. Osiris was also 9. Coincidence? I think not. I think all you non beli
Or.. (Score:5, Funny)
SPECTR, LLC. (Score:4, Funny)
Duh... It's a subdvision of the Keyser Söze Group in the W.A.S.T.E operations department of Illuminatus holdings conglomerate. A few years ago they had a hostile take over bid from KAOS but the man UNCLE subverted it.
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Hey, let's speculate! (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather than engage in actual tech news, let's speculate wildly(second guess in as many weeks) on the identity of someone who explicitly wanted to remain anonymous, and who has committed no crimes. That sounds like a grand engagement in journalistic credibility.
Anyone who really wanted to could find out my identity, but I wouldn't want them to start posting about their ideas as major headlines.
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some governments might in fact decide bitcoin is a crime
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The fact that none has makes your speculation as bad the author of this article.
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governments are just starting to make laws and bans about bitcoins, some of them very unfavorable.
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At the time of creation there were no laws in place to prevent it, if creator has had zero input since creation is there any culpability there?
That's about like suing the inventor of the gun for all gun crimes committed.
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I was not making statement about creator.
If you want to use your gun analogy, guns are regulated, taxed, banned, etc. in various places in the world. For example, I have to have a license to buy one in my state, and my county charges an extra tax on them.
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And only the most backwards of government would make that an ex-post-facto offense. The creator would still have committed no crime.
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I know a large first world country that has done such ex post facto actions even though their constitution forbids it, less than a decade ago. They then siezed gold and silver held by a company that belonged to citizens.
Re:Hey, let's speculate! (Score:5, Insightful)
Without some actual evidence other than just conjecture at a coffee klatsch, there are a lot of parties who could be the BitCoin creator.
Lets check facts:
1: It is someone clued in cryptography. This is very rare because most crypto implementations on virtually anything are very basic
2: It is someone who is clued with regards to the financial sector, perhaps has a lot of coins mined and stashed aside when it took just a CPU to mine them as opposed to ASICs.
3: It is someone who can code, code well, and distribute things out anonymously.
After those three items, it could be anyone, and suspicions could be anywhere.
In any case, the party who made BitCoin is filthy rich, and will only get more so by an exponential margin as time progresses, BitCoins get lost forever, and no new ones are mined.
Re: Hey, let's speculate! (Score:1)
I think the first several hundred or thousand bitcoins have remained untranferred to this day. So the first miners have not cashed out and are not rich.
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Wait, so if you have a million dollars worth of bitcoin you are not rich because yo have not converted it to another currency?
Not rich, since you haven't cashed out yet. Your bitcoins could be worthless next month. Better sell now.
If you have $1 million worth of gold that you have not sold are you similarly not rich?
You are rich, since gold has never been worthless in the history of human civilization.
If you have $1 million worth of stocks that you have not sold are you similarly not rich?
Depends on the stock. Is it a solid company with zero chance of bankruptcy in the foreseeable future, such as Apple or Google? Or is it an Enron?
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Not rich, since you haven't cashed out yet. Your bitcoins could be worthless next month. Better sell now.
On the contrary, today it seems to have lost a bit of value. It looks like a good time to buy.
I guess they could be worthless next month. Or they could be worth $1,000 next month. people were saying the same thing two months ago when it was $130, and now even after the dip it is over $750.
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That's not true, gold only gained value when people got enough real wealth - meaning food, clothes, weapons - that they could start worrying about bling. More importantly, gold price is quite volatile - and, according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], is currently at quite a high level, historically speaking.
Based on the timing of the Wikipedia chart [wikipedia.org], I'
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If I was one of the early miners who made thousands of bitcoins and still had them, I might decide to sell the wallet itself rather than transferring them.
Leaves less of a paper trail and makes it somewhat easier to avoid paying capital gains tax on the proceeds.
Re: Hey, let's speculate! (Score:4, Informative)
Of behalf of all of the people who legitimately pay taxes on their capital gains, fuck you.
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Those facts make it sound like some "Anonymous Coward" on Slashdot. What if we all are suspects here at Slashdot?
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Absolute tripe, and no, the two can't be compared. I don't need to read the rest of this comment.
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I have no love for bitcoin, but if you invent something that replaces the entire world money supply, then you've done something pretty useful.
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Can't compute. Please review your data, it's wrong.
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there is an unidentified guy with a fortune estimated to 1.8 trillion dollar
There are 12M bitcoins in existence, with a total value around $10B. So where are you getting $1.8T?
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Update- Those 12M bitcoin are now worth $9B.
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Let's speculate! I think Satoshi Nakamoto is actually a space alien, who introduced the Bitcoin on this planet in order to run his personal intergalactic ponzi scam. Bitcoins are just a tip of the GAWAY group (Galaxy Way), next thing you know, you are peddling your kidneys in the back alleys in exchange for Bitcoins, which you are promptly exchanging for the next dose of Jupiter III Moonshine dust so you can snort it off the back of a three legged blue-skinned tentacle'd hooker with tits for ears. Of-cours
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I think Satoshi Nakamoto is actually a space alien, who introduced the Bitcoin on this planet in order to run his personal intergalactic ponzi scam.
I agree! It's pretty clear that humans of this period of history simply didn't have the technology or intelligence to do what Bitcoin does. It has to be aliens!
Re:Hey, let's speculate! (Score:5, Funny)
My wild theory is that it's the NSA.
See you take the name: satoshi nakamoto
rearrange the letters and you get: ha! NSA is tomatos ok?
and tomatoes are green like MONEY! most of the year.
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Satoshi Nakomoto is Japanese for, you guessed it, Rothschilds 1913. And with middle name Anashi, he's normally referred to as N, S.A. in his publications. They finally got control of all the worlds money. Kudos to China and Norway who see the scam for what it is. While everyone else is using coins minted in difficult mathematical proofs that will be easily stolen by quantum computers as part of the Illuminati's scam to have their octopus tentacles in everyone's pockets, I'll be bartering in tin, foil ha
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Rather than engage in actual tech news, let's speculate wildly(second guess in as many weeks) on the identity of someone who explicitly wanted to remain anonymous, and who has committed no crimes.
He's a public figure so he's fair game. I think though such idle speculation would serve more to hide Satoshi Nakamoto than reveal him.
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Committed no crimes under that Pseudonym. God damn are you petulant.
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No, I'm just going with the basic common law interpretation that you must have evidence a crime has been committed before you can get a warrant to arrest a perpetrator.
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BitCoin has been out for a while now, but since the rannsomware guys have started using it, the value has gone up exponentially.
I wouldn't be surprised that this is a currency that is meant to replace e-Gold as a way for moving ill-gotten gains around. Yes, blockchains are public, but wallets are anonymous, and if a wallet sits untouched for seven years, then it is likely outside the statute of limitations for almost all criminal action, and the value of the coins have likely gone up by a hundredfold as pe
Ah yes, Josh (Score:5, Informative)
Josh Zerlan/Inaba, noted whiz-kid who runs one of the most fly-by-night ASIC companies, and who curses out his customers and insinuates things about their sexual proclivities rather than provide actual customer service. A highly-qualified individual to be speaking on the topic of Bitcoin, surely.
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I am Satoshi Nakamoto. (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure this worked out for Spartacus...
Re:I am Satoshi Nakamoto. (Score:5, Insightful)
> I'm pretty sure this worked out for Spartacus...
Not really - it seemed to backfire on everyone who said it.
The Laughing Man (Score:1)
Everyone has a theory on who he might be, but he might not even exist at all.
Compelling Evidence... (Score:1)
Wow he sure offers some compelling evidence there... Oh wait, no he doesn't.
I think Santa Clause is Satashi Nakamoto.
Three Men (Score:4, Funny)
Three men can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
As always (Score:5, Interesting)
The olde 'The idea is so clever, it must have been one of us'-Syndrome.
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.)
Again and again and again (Score:5, Insightful)
"Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto could be a group from Europe which has a strong footing in the financial sector....could be a group of people working the financial sector.... some group of people from financial sector that created this...Satoshi Nakamoto is a group of people, I think"
Pointless random guesswork aside, why do journalists feel the need to say the exact same thing 3 to 5 times in the first few paragraphs? Once is enough, surely?
Re:Again and again and again (Score:5, Informative)
According to my journalist friend, it's how they were taught. The headline, the first paragraph and then the first... I forgot how much, are each supposed to be readable to get the story in various depths of knowledge. Newspapers have been accounting for TL;DR since long before the Internet.
Even more likely (Score:1)
It's possible that he could be a time traveling alien collective with ties to the porn industry. It's certain feasible that it is possible that it might be that that could be the case.
It certainly seems reasonable that if there was a time traveling alien collective with ties to the porn industry, that a distributed, non-material currency such as bit coin would be advantageous to them. In fact any such group that arrived before bit coin would be almost compelled to create it. So I think we can say, case clo
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I know you're being funny, but aside from the porn and the alien part, but I'm curious about the time traveler aspect.
I've been wondering this wouldn't the most likely thing to be travel back in time be information itself, since we already can send bits at near light speed already? There must be someone on slashdot who can answer this.
BFL has no credibility (Score:1)
Josh and BFL have no credibility. If you'd said Santa Claus said this, it would carry just as much weight.
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Santa Claus actually delivers on time. If BFL ran Christmas, you'd get your Xmas presents next Thanksgiving. And they'd all be 2014 calendars.
I never got this part of Bitcoin.. (Score:2)
Why did the creator(s) of Bitcoin decide to stay anonymous? I never understood the motive for that and it always struck me as a red flag.
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Patent Trolls.
If I ever release software it'll be as part of a large corporation, or anonymously, it's not worth the headache otherwise.
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Many reasons:
1: It was trivial to mine coins in the beginning, so a coin that cost far less than a penny in electricity is on its way to being worth $10,000 in a market that is virtually recession-proof. The reason to be anonymous is just like a lottery winner -- keep the thieves and lawsuits well away.
2: Fear of government or big bank (they usually are the same thing) reprisal. Look how E-Gold was systematically disassembled by FinCEN.
3: Patent/copyright/IP trolling. Even if someone patents 100% of w
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Unlikely (Score:4, Informative)
Zerlan hasn't often been accurate in his estimates of things.
I'm not going to bother to link to these because a quick Google search can turn up the evidence.
Nakamoto registered the bitcoin.org domain on a somewhat obscure Japanese site. His communication in English had all kinds of clues that his native language was Japanese (sentence structure, word choice, etc.). He was active during daylight and evening hours in Japan.
I really wish people would stop speculating who he is. It only matters to those who can't read the code and understand that it ultimately doesn't matter, except the possibility that he may one day "come back" and have several hundred thousand Bitcoin to himself. As benevolent as he acted, it's unlikely that he'll pull a Biff Tannen [wikipedia.org] and rule the world. However, miners have the power to stop him if he tries.
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Nakamoto registered the bitcoin.org domain on a somewhat obscure Japanese site. His communication in English had all kinds of clues that his native language was Japanese (sentence structure, word choice, etc.). He was active during daylight and evening hours in Japan.
I'm playing devil's advocate here, but that could be deliberate misdirection.
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Nakamoto registered the bitcoin.org domain on a somewhat obscure Japanese site. His communication in English had all kinds of clues that his native language was Japanese (sentence structure, word choice, etc.). He was active during daylight and evening hours in Japan.
I'm playing devil's advocate here, but that could be deliberate misdirection.
nah it's been verified by the blockchain
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Re:Unlikely (Score:5, Informative)
Just a few minor corrections (I had multiple private email conversations with Satoshi over a couple of years before he disappeared).
The bitcoin site was registered via an anonymous DNS registrar that specialises in anonymous speech. For a short while he also used an email account from the same service, again, a service dedicated specifically to anonymous speech. I've seen no evidence it was selected due to any links to Japan.
I don't know where you got the idea that his writing style was that of a native Japanese speaker. He never once wrote anything in Japanese or even referred to Japanese culture. His writing style was actually that of a British guy: full of British English spellings and mannerisms. Also, he timestamped the genesis block by including a headline about the British banking bailouts from The Times. That's a British newspaper that is most commonly referred to outside the UK as "The London Times" due to its rather generic name. It would be rare for an American or Japanese person to refer to it just as "The Times". Finally, his forum account was set to GMT and his posting activity was during evenings GMT.
Having worked with his code and the man himself, at least for a short while, I think Satoshi was very likely to be a single person, who lives in the UK. But that said, I've never dug any deeper because he clearly wished to have his privacy and I think it would be a sad day if Satoshi's real identity were revealed without his permission.
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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 id
He built the Nakatomi building, right? (Score:1)
Harough, Hans!
Happy Bitcoin Day! (Score:2)
lets ask Snowdon (Score:1)
I heard it was the Illumiati (Score:2)
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.
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This would be a good point, except that there's not really much NSA gets from having extreme hashing capacity. Breaking badly salted/hashed passwords, maybe, but if Snowden has taught us anything, it's that they don't need to rely on such crude tactics.
BFL??? LOL (Score:1)
Yeah, the dude who owns BFL can say whatever the fuck he wants. BFL isn't exactly the company you want to go to for reliable information...
Case and point "Our first batch will ship in a month!"... 3 months later..... "Our first batch is still ready to ship this month!"....
Need I say more?
Hey Slashdot (Score:1)
Al Gore did it... (Score:2)
it could also be... (Score:2)
bigsexyjoe's Law of Headlines (Score:2)
If an article title contains the word "could" then you should append on the end "but it isn't", and this will render a true statement.
welcome to 2010 (Score:2)
Bitcoin story every day (Score:2)
Even when there's nothing to talk about, you can have a Bitcoin story on the Slashdot front page every day.
This isn't even "news for nerds," it's Usenet-style speculation for the terminally bored.
Satoshi Nakamoto is actually Banksy (Score:2)
Butterfly Labs? (Score:2)
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It's a straight up assumption based on bullshit. "Writing style" is the singly observed piece of "evidence" being interpreted.
So, if you're a narcissist who wants the world to wonder if you, too, are the real Satoshi Nakamoto, just copy "his" writing style.
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"Hey, there's this really great thing called Bitcoin that you should use and/or invest in. Here's some literature on it."
"Wow, it sounds cool! Who invented it?"
"Uhhhh...."
It's not that big deal. How many can name the inventor of PayPal off the top of their head, for example? Engineering is a thankless job...
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Elon Musk
Re:It's probably true? (Score:4, Insightful)
A group of people, no matter how small, keeping the fact that you're sitting on 1BN a secret? Someone's going to spill the beans to someone soon enough. Or it's one guy, and he's already rich enough that there's little temptation.
That's my wild speculation. :)
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Or he might simply not see money as his primary motivation in life. There are cultures on this planet that know the concept of "enough money", and we know from several scientific studies that happiness increases with money only up to a certain amount of affluence (which is surprisingly low, most adult readers of this site will have reached it).
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The larger the sum, the smaller the group necessary to keep the secret from leaking out.
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It's hard to keep being rich a secret. Somebody gets a girlfriend, some dude brags about having a big wallet full of bitcoins to her, she tells a girlfriend, and then it's on Facebook.
*shrug*
It's my theory and I'm sticking to it.
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The ability to face-to-face transfer wallet information makes Bitcoin's blockchain less than foolproof.
As long as I can create a number of wallets, put a bitcoin in each of them, write those wallets down on pieces of paper; I can trade them like I would cash.
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You mean, exactly the same problem as any printed check?
I'm saying that the block chain record isn't proof of anything, since coins can change hands in unrecorded steps quite easily.
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No, *I* am Spartacus!
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No i'm spartacus! and so's my wife!
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