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Wei_Dai comments on AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything - Less Wrong
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I received a PM from someone at a Portuguese newspaper who I think meant to post it publicly, so I'll respond publicly here.
I think Satoshi is probably one person.
Not sure what the first part of the question means. I don't expect Satoshi to voluntarily reveal his identity in the near future, but maybe he will do so eventually?
Don't understand this one either.
I'm pretty sure it's not a pump-and-dump scheme, or a government project.
No I don't think it's Szabo or anyone else whose name is known to me. I explained why I don't think it's Szabo to a reporter from London's Sunday Times who wrote about it in the March 2 issue. I'll try to find and quote the relevant section.
I worked on it from roughly 1995 to 1998. I've used pseudonyms only on rare (probably less than 10) occasions. I'm not Szabo but coincidentally we attended the same university and had the same major and graduated within a couple years of each other. Theoretically we could have seen each other on campus but I don't think we ever spoke in real life.
To be honest I didn't initially expect Bitcoin to make as much impact as it has, and I'm still at a bit of a loss to explain why it has succeeded to the extent that it has. In my experience lots of promising ideas especially in the field of cryptography never get anywhere in practice. But anyway, it's probably a combination of many things. Satoshi's knowledge and skill. His choice of an essentially fixed monetary base which ensures early adopters large windfalls if Bitcoin were to become popular, and which appeals to people who distrust flexible government monetary policies. Timing of the introduction to coincide with the economic crisis. Earlier discussions of related ideas which allowed his ideas to be more readily accepted. The availability of hardware and software infrastructure for him to build upon. Probably other factors that I'm neglecting.
(Actually I'd be interested to know if anyone else has written a better explanation of Bitcoin's success. Can anyone reading this comment point me to such an explanation?)
Don't have much to say on these. Others have probably thought much more about these questions over the past months and years and are more qualified than I am to answer.
I had the article jailbroken recently, and the relevant parts (I hope I got it right, my version has scrambled-up text) are:
I actually meant to email you about this earlier, but is there any chance you could post those emails (you've made them half-public as it is, and Dustin Trammell posted his a while back) or elaborate on Nick not knowing C++?
I've been trying to defend Szabo against the accusations of being Satoshi*, but to be honest, his general secrecy has made it very hard for me to rule him out or come up with a solid defense. If, however, he doesn't even know C or C++, then that massively damages the claims he's Satoshi. (Oh, one could work around it by saying he worked with someone else who did know C/C++, but that's pretty strained and not many people seriously think Satoshi was a group.)
* on Reddit, HN, and places like http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/03/11/nick-szabo-is-satoshi-nakamoto-the-inventor-of-bitcoin/ or https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-nick-szabo/ (my response) / http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/occams-razor-who-is-most-likely-to-be-satoshi-nakamoto/
Sure, I have no objection to making them public myself, and I don't see anything in them that Satoshi might want to keep private, so I'll forward them to you to post on your website. (I'm too lazy to convert the emails into HTML myself.)
Sorry, you misunderstood when I said "Nick isn't known for being a C++ programmer". I didn't mean that he doesn't know C++. Given that he was a computer science major, he almost certainly does know C++ or can easily learn it. What I meant is that he is not known to have programmed much in C or C++, or known to have done any kind of programming that might have kept one's programming skills sharp enough to have implemented Bitcoin (and to do it securely to boot). If he was Satoshi I would have expected to see some evidence of his past programming efforts.
But the more important reason for me thinking Nick isn't Satoshi is the parts of Satoshi's emails to me that are quoted in the Sunday Times. Nick considers his ideas to be at least an independent invention from b-money so why would Satoshi say "expands on your ideas into a complete working system" to me, and cite b-money but not Bit Gold in his paper, if Satoshi was Nick? An additional reason that I haven't mentioned previously is that Satoshi's writings just don't read like Nick's to me.
Thanks.
I see. Unfortunately, this damages my defense: I can no longer say there's no evidence Szabo doesn't even know C/C++, but I have to confirm that he does. Your point about sharpness is well-taken, but the argument from silence here is very weak since Szabo hasn't posted any code ever aside from a JavaScript library, so we have no idea whether he has been keeping up with his C or not.
Good question. I wonder if anyone ever asked Satoshi about what he thought of Bit Gold?
I've seen people say the opposite! This is why I put little stock in people claiming Satoshi and $FAVORITE_CANDIDATE sound alike (especially given they're probably in the throes of confirmation bias and would read in the similarity if at all possible). Hopefully someone competent at stylometrics will at some point do an analysis.
I've been working hard on this in my book. (Nearly there by the way). I posted this on Like In A Mirror but put it here as well in case it doesn't get approved.
Yes, the writing styles of Szabo and Satoshi are the same.
Apart from the British spelling.
And the different punctuation habits.
And the use of British expressions like mobile phone and flat and bloody.
And Szabo’s much longer sentences.
And the fact that Szabo doesn’t make the same spelling mistakes that Satoshi does.
Ooh and the fact that Szabo’s writing has a lot more humour to it than Satoshi’s.
Szabo is one of the few people that has the breadth, depth and specificity of knowledge to achieve what Satoshi has, agreed. He is the right age, has the right background and was in the right place at the right time. He ticks a lot of the right boxes.
But confirmation bias is a dangerous thing. It blinkers.
And you need to think about the dangers your posts are creating in the life of a reclusive academic.
Satoshi is first and foremost a coder, not a writer. Szabo is a writer first and coder second. To draw any serious conclusions you need to find some examples of Szabo’s c++ coding.
You also need to find some proof a Szabo’s hacking (or anti-hacking) experience. Satoshi has rather a lot of this.
And you need to consider the possibility that Satoshi learnt his English on both sides of the Atlantic. And that English was not his first language. I don’t think it was.
Szabo has extensively studied British history for his legal and monetary theories (it's hard to miss this if you've read his essays), so I do not regard the Britishisms as a point against Szabo. It's perfectly easy to pick up Britishisms if you watch BBC programs or read The Economist or Financial Times (I do all three and as it happens, I use 'bloody' all the time in colloquial speech - a check of my IRC logs shows me using it 72 times, and at least once in my more formal writings on gwern.net, and 'mobile phone' pops up 3 or 4 times in my chat logs; yet I have spent perhaps 3 days in the UK in my life). And Satoshi is a very narrow, special-purpose pseudonymic identity which has one and only one purpose: to promote and work on Bitcoin - Bitcoin is not a very humorous subject, nor does it really lend itself to long essays (or long sentences). And I'm not sure how you could make any confident claims about spelling mistakes without having done any stylometrics, given that both Szabo and Satoshi write well and you would expect spelling mistakes to be rare by definition.
Points noted. All well made. Mine was a heated rebuttal to the Like IN A Mirror post.
I could only find one spelling mistake in all Satoshi's work and a few punctuation quibbles. It's a word that is commonly spelt wrong - but that Szabo spells right. I don't want to share it here because I'm keeping it for the book
Done: http://www.gwern.net/docs/2008-nakamoto
(Sorry for the delay, but a black-market was trying to blackmail me and I didn't want my writeup to go live so I was delaying everything.)
Thank you so much Wei Dai.
My idea with second question was to understand if there is like an anarchist motivation around bitcoin that may have some risks in the future. I mean, if somehow when it reaches Wall Street the original developers can do anythink to affect credibility.
You say you don't think it was Szabo. Have you ever try to know who he was? Could you share who is your solid hunch and why?
Is relevant to know Satoshi?
If you know what you know today, would you have patented bmoney? Do you think bitcoin inventers would have done the same?
Kind regards Marta
Ok, I think I see what you're getting at. First of all, crypto-anarchy is very different from plain anarchy. We (or at least I) weren't trying to destroy government, but just create new virtual communities that aren't ruled by the threat of violence. Second I'm not sure Satoshi would even consider himself a crypto-anarchist. I think he might have been motivated more by a distrust of financial institutions and government monetary authorities and wanted to create a monetary system that didn't have to depend on such trust. All in all, I don't think there is much risk in this regard.
I haven't personally made any attempts to find out who he is, nor do I have any idea how. My guess is that he's not anyone who was previously active in the academic cryptography or cypherpunks communities, because otherwise he probably would have been identified by now based on his writing and coding styles.
I think at this point it doesn't matter too much, except to satisfy people's curiosity.
No, because along with a number of other reasons not to patent it, the whole point of b-money was to have a money system that governments can't control or shut down by force, so how would I be able to enforce the patent? I don't think Satoshi would have patented his ideas either, because I think he is not motivated mainly to personally make money, but to change the world and to solve an interesting technical problem. Otherwise he would have sold at least some of his mined Bitcoins in order to spend or to diversify into other investments.
Thank you so much Wei Dai for all the answers.
You say other previously active member would have been identified base on this writing and coding style. There is exacly what Skye Grey says he/she's doing for matching Szabo with Satoshi on the blog LikeinaMirror - he say's he's 99,9% sure Szabo is Satoshi. https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2014/03/
Dorian Nakamoto theory may have any ground?
What made you think Satoshi motivation was distrust rather than crypto-anarchy? Someone that have loose money for instance in Lehman Brothers banrupcy? It was also in 2008
Why is anonimity important to crypto community? Just to confirm, Wei Dai is a pseudonym?
Thank you again
I agree with gwern's answers and will add a couple of my own.
No, I doubt it.
Grey's post is worthless. I haven't written a rebuttal to his second, but about his first post, see http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ruluz/satoshi_nakamoto_is_probably_nick_szabo/cdr2vgu
Because he said so. Haven't you done any background reading? (And how many private individuals could have lost money in Lehman Brothers anyway...)
Seriously?
No, it's real.
The concerns in this space go beyond personal safety, though that isn't an insignificant one. For safety, It doesn't matter what one can prove because almost by definition anyone who is going to be dangerous is not behaving in an informed and rational way, consider the crazy person who was threatening Gwern. It's also not possible to actually prove you do not own a large number of Bitcoins-- the coins themselves are pseudonymous, and many people can not imagine that a person would willingly part with a large amount of money (or decline to take it in the first place).
No one knows which, if any, Bitcoins are owned by the system's creator. There is a lot of speculation which is know to me to be bogus; e.g. identifying my coins as having belonged to the creator. So even if someone were to provably dispose of all their holdings, there will be people alleging other coins.
The bigger issue is that the Bitcoin system gains much of its unique value by being defined by software, by mechanical rule and not trust. In a sense, Bitcoin matters because its creator doesn't. This is a hard concept for most people, and there is a constant demand by the public to identify "the person in charge". To stand out risks being appointed Bitcoin's central banker for life, and in doing so undermine much of what Bitcoin has accomplished.
Being a "thought leader" also produces significant demands on your time which can inhibit making meaningful accomplishments.
Finally, it would be an act which couldn't be reversed.
Why do you think so?
Bruce Wayne: As a man, I'm flesh and blood, I can be ignored, I can be destroyed; but as a symbol... as a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting.
--Batman Begins
This is interesting and something I hadn't thought about. Now I'm more curious who Satoshi is and why he or she or they have decided to remain anonymous. Thanks! You might want to post your idea somewhere else too, like the Bitcoin reddit or forum, since probably not many people will get to read it here.