Nakamoto, Satoshi

From MysteryWiki

Satoshi Nakamoto is the possible pseudonym for the individual or individuals who pioneered the development of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin in 2008.

Background

It is believed that the person or persons known as Satoshi Nakamoto began coding what would become Bitcoin in 2007, based on a 2008 Crytography Mailing List post in which he/they stated[1]:

I believe I've worked through all those little details over the last year and a half while coding it, and there were a lot of them. The functional details are not covered in the paper, but the sourcecode is coming soon. I sent you the main files. (available by request at the moment, full release soon)

At 13:19:55 UTC[2] on 18 August 2008, the web domain "www.bitcoin.org" was registered to an unknown applicant[3].

At 18:10:00 GMT on 31 October 2008, an email from Satoshi Nakamoto[4] with the subject "Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper" was sent to the Gmane[5] newsgroup "gmane.comp.encryption.general". Enclosed was a link to a paper entitled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". The paper listed the author as Satoshi Nakamoto and provided the email address satoshin@gmx.com along with the web address "www.bitcoin.org". The paper was reposted with the same subject line by "Satoshi Nakamoto" at 16:16:33 -0700 on 1 November 2008 on The Crytography Mailing List.

Unfortunately, investigating the PDF properties reveals that the currently available paper (http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf) was created on 24 March 2009 at 11:33:15 AM using OpenOffice.org 2.4[6]. The page size is 8.50 x 11.00 inches[7]. Detailed encoding information found in the PDF by Stack Exchange user Vincent Mia Edie Verheyen revealed that the language encoding was "en-GB," United Kingdom English[8].

In addition, the inline bracketed citations are reminiscent of the ACM or IEEE citation style. That being said, ACM has references listed alphabetically, while IEEE has references listed numerically, making IEEE formatting more likely. Unfortunately the center-justified abstract does not align well with IEEE papers or conference proceedings formats.

Finally, there are only eight references total for the nine-page document. Of which, three include both S. Haber and W. S. Stornetta.

ACTIVITY DURING 2008/2009

At 17:05:49 -0800 on 9 January 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto announced the realse of Bitcoin v0.1 and included a download link at the URL "http://downloads.sourceforge.net/bitcoin/bitcoin-0.1.0.rar". A snapshot of the project page, however, was taken earlier, at 20:13:47 on 6 January 2009[9]. Details were listed on web page as follows:

Project Admins nakamoto2, s_nakamoto
Developers 3
Development Status 2 - Pre-Alpha
License MIT License
Operating System 32-bit MS Windows (NT/2000/XP)
Programming Language C++
Topic E-Commerce / Shopping
User Interface wxWidgets
Project UNIX name bitcoin
Registered 2008-11-09 18:58
Activity Percentile (last week) 97.19

The user nakamoto2 (using the public name Satoshi Nakamoto; User ID 2238460) joined SourceForge on 5 October 2008[10]. The user s_nakamoto (also using the public name Satoshi Nakamoto; User ID 2321442) joined SourceForge later on 10 December 2008[11]. The third developer was listed as Hal Finney, username "hal". Hal Finney joined SourceForge on 5 March 2000 (User ID: 17946)[12].

Hal Finney was in fact computer scientist Harold Thomas Finney II[13] (4 May 1956 - 28 August 2014) (Popper 2014).

DISCUSS HOW FINNEY GOT INVOLVED

Satoshi Nakamoto became a member of the P2P Foundation on 11 February 2009. The profile claims Nakamoto to be a Japanese male, age 41 (as of 2016)[14]. Thanks in part to the efforts of Reddit user gwent, it was eventually found that Nakamoto's claimed birthdate was 5 April 1975. Another user, edlund, pointed out that there may be some symbolism behind the choice of 5 April:

On April 5th 1933 U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs two executive orders: 6101 to establish the Civilian Conservation Corps, and 6102 "forbidding the Hoarding of Gold Coin, Gold Bullion, and Gold Certificates" by U.S. citizens.

On 22 November 2009, Satoshi began the BitcoinTalk[15] message board.

11 December 2010, at 11:39:16 PM, Nakamura posted the following in response to a PC World article entitled "Could the Wikileaks Scandal Lead to New Virtual Currency?"[16]:

It would have been nice to get this attention in any other context. WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.

Nakamoto's last forum post was made at 18:22:33 on 22 December 2010[17].

Some time in December of 2010, Nakamoto began working alongside Princeton computer science graduate Gavin Andresen (Reutzel). Andresen soon became the "core maintainer" (chief developer) of the Bitcoin source code (Simonite).

REST OF COMMUNICATION DOWNTURN

INTERIM PERIOD

On 8 September 2014, a guest posted the following Pastebin, entitled "Satoshi's Dox For Sale":

Releasing the so called "gods"[18] dox if my address hits 25 BTC[19].

And no, this is not a scam, you can see the below screenshots for proof of inbox ownership and a little teaser.

BTC: 19pta6x1hXzV9F5hHnhMARYbRjuxF6xbbV

Same one posted on p2pfoundation^

Teasers:

https://www.anonimg.com/img/09f6cc92952dc4d539b21cad8daa2adf.png https://www.anonimg.com/img/045d00e4624fb3c3ffc7056af07317d0.pngSa

The included PNG files[20] as provided as evidence of "inbox ownership". The first is supposedly a screenshot of the email account itself (specifically the address satoshin@gmx.com).

Evidence

It has been determined that Nakamoto was likely not Japanese, as his command of the English language was thought to indicate that he was a native speaker of that language (Wallace 2011).

Satoshi is an Anglicization of the rōmaji Satoshi (rendered as さとし in hiragana, and 賀諭 in kanji)[21], and some have noted that "Satoshi" can mean "wise" (Wallace 2011).

Nakamoto's original paper includes a few phrases indicative of American English, namely the words "realizes" and "characterized"[22] (Nakamoto 4, 6). However, analysis of other parts of Nakamoto's work have provided contradictory findings: a newspaper headline encoded in the genesis block[23] came from the Times of London, published in the United Kingdom, and several of his forum posts and comments in the bitcoin source code used primarily British spellings such as "optimise" and "colour" (Wallace 2011).

Stefan Thomas[24] graphed the time stamps for every bitcoin forum post by Nakamoto and determined that almost no posts were made between the hours of 05:00 and 11:00 GMT (regardless of the day of the week) (Wallace 2011). This suggests that, if Nakamoto was privy to a regular sleep schedule during these hours, he was likely residing in a region using either the UTC-05:00 or UTC-06:00 time offset[25].

Candidates

Gavin Andresen

Charles Bry

Michael Clear

Hal Finney

Neal King

Vili Lehdonvirta

Jed McCaleb

Shinichi Mochizuki

Dorian Nakamoto

Vladimir Oksman

Nick Szabo

Dustin D. Trammell

Craig Steven Wright

Notes

  1. This post was made on 17 November 2008 at 16:33:04 UTC and is available here.
  2. UTC is inferred from the exact timestamp 2008-08-18T13:19:55Z in which the "Z" refers to "Zulu time" (or UTC). All information on the domain was acquired from Whois.net on 22 July 2016.
  3. The registrant name, among other things, was hidden by the service WhoisGuard. It should be noted that sources state that the site was registered to "Anonymousspeech LLC" (Walker & Wile 2014)
  4. Specifically from the email satoshi@vistomail.com.
  5. Gmane is a website which allows users to access electronic mailing lists in a method akin to Usenet newsgroups. See their website here.
  6. The OpenOffice Wiki reports that this version was released on 27 March 2008.
  7. This paper size is commonly used in the United States, Canada, Chile, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and the Philippines. This size was originally defined by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
  8. His post is available here. It should also be noted that "en-GB" refers to the form of English used not only in the United Kingdom, but also in some parts of Canada and Australia.
  9. This snapshot is available here.
  10. Information available here.
  11. See web page here.
  12. Finney's SourceForge page is available here.
  13. This can be seen in a "users.yaml" file located here, which links Finney's email addresses, hal.finney@gmail.com and hal@finney.org to the hal SourceForge account. Hal Finney further supplied several of his email correspondences from his Gmail address to The Wall Street Journal in the spring of 2014. These emails are available here.
  14. This is all located on the P2P profile page here. Being 41 in 2016, would mean that "Satoshi" was born in either 1974 or 1975.
  15. Sometimes stylized as "Bitcointalk."
  16. The article was written by Keir Thomas and published online on 10 December 2010 at 4:30 PM PT. It is still available here.
  17. The forum post is located at this web address: bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3;sa=showPosts (note that this site is not directly linked because it is a blacklisted external site).
  18. Referring to Satoshi Nakamoto.
  19. Abbreviation for Bitcoin. It should be noted that, as of 8 September 2014 (according to the CoinDesk BPI) that 1 bitcoin was worth about $475.81 USD (making 25 bitcoins worth approximately $11,895.25 USD).
  20. The first one located here and the second one, no longer available online.
  21. This information was acquired from the English Wiktionary, located here.
  22. If these words were spelled as there are in traditional British English, they would be rendered as "realises" and "characterised" respectively.
  23. The "genesis block" refers to the first 50 bitcoins mined by Nakamoto on 3 January 2009 (Wallace 2011).
  24. LinkedIn profile located here.
  25. Principal cities in these regions, according to Wikipedia, include Bogotá, Chicago, Guatemala City, Havana, Mexico City, New York City, Kingston, Lima, San José, San Salvador, Toronto, and Winnipeg

External Links

References

  • “Citation Style and Reference Formats.” Association for Computing Machinery, ACM, Inc., www.acm.org/publications/authors/reference-formatting.
  • “Computer Science Research Guide: Examples for ACM, APA & IEEE.” LibGuides at Dalhousie University, Dalhousie University Libraries, 1 Feb. 2018, dal.ca.libguides.com/c.php?g=257109&p=1717772.
  • Barber, Simon, Xavier Boyen, Elaine Shi, and Ersin Uzun. "Bitter to Better — How to Make Bitcoin a Better Currency." Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7397 (2012): 399-414. Print.
  • Greenberg, Andy. "Nakamoto's Neighbor: My Hunt For Bitcoin's Creator Led To A Paralyzed Crypto Genius." Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 25 Mar. 2014. Web. 22 July 2016.
  • Grinberg, Reuben. "Bitcoin: An Innovative Alternative Digital Currency." Hastings Science & Technology Law Journal 4.1 (2011): 159-208. Print.
  • gwern. “Happy Birthday, Satoshi Nakamoto - r/Bitcoin.” Reddit, Reddit Inc., 5 Apr. 2015, www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/229qvr/happy_birthday_satoshi_nakamoto/.
  • Harrigan, Martin. "An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System." Security and Privacy in Social Networks. By Fergal Reid. New York City: Springer-Verlag, 2012. 197-223. Print.
  • L. S. "The Economist Explains; Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto?" The Economist. The Economist Newspaper Limited, 2 Nov. 2015. Web. 22 July 2016.
  • Nakamoto, Satoshi. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. Publication. N.p.: Bitcoin P2P Virtual Currency, 2008. Print.
  • Popper, Nathaniel. "Hal Finney, Cryptographer and Bitcoin Pioneer, Dies at 58." The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 30 Aug. 2014. Web. 22 July 2016.
  • Reutzel, Bailey. “Where Is Gavin Andresen? The Quiet Exile of Bitcoin's Former Face.” CoinDesk, Digital Currency Group, 21 May 2017, www.coindesk.com/where-is-gavin-andresen-the-quiet-exile-of-bitcoins-former-face/.
  • Simonite, Tom. “Meet Gavin Andresen, the Most Powerful Person in the World of Bitcoin.” MIT Technology Review, 7 Jan. 2017, www.technologyreview.com/s/527051/the-man-who-really-built-bitcoin/.
  • Walker, Hunter, and Rob Wile. "What Did This Swiss Software Developer Have to Do with the Launch of Bitcoin?" Business Insider. Business Insider Inc., 1 Apr. 2014. Web. 22 July 2016.
  • Wallace, Benjamin. "The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin." WIRED. Condé Nast, 23 Nov. 2011. Web. 22 July 2016.