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ESRogs comments on Open thread, December 7-13, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: polymathwannabe 07 December 2015 02:47PM

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Comment author: ESRogs 09 December 2015 10:15:10AM 10 points [-]

Gwern has written an article for Wired, allegedly revealing the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto:

http://www.wired.com/2015/12/bitcoins-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-this-unknown-australian-genius/

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 09 December 2015 11:00:57AM 6 points [-]

An anonymous source supplies Gwern with juicy facts about this man Wright, they see print after a few weeks, and then within hours his home is raided by Australian federal police. I am reminded that the source of the Watergate leaks was in fact the deputy director of the FBI...

Comment author: CellBioGuy 09 December 2015 10:38:50PM *  1 point [-]

A friend of mine who knows much more about cryptography and computers than I do points me to evidence that documents using the same public keys as Satoshi were back-dated and faked:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3w027x/dr_craig_steven_wright_alleged_satoshi_by_wired/cxslii7

I hardly know what to make of this myself, but she seems convinced.

Comment author: ChristianKl 09 December 2015 10:46:59PM 0 points [-]

While we are at the topic of someone trying to fake Satoshi identity, the LW account http://lesswrong.com/user/Satoshi_Nakamoto/overview/ is worth noting. It stopped posting after I linked it to an attempt of establishing a fake identity for Satoshi. It might be useful to compare the stylometry of those posts with Wright.

Comment author: MrMind 10 December 2015 08:21:07AM 5 points [-]

Just a tangential question: am I the only one perfectly happy not to know who really Satoshi is?

Comment author: Lumifer 10 December 2015 04:07:59PM 1 point [-]

I am perfectly happy not to know who Satoshi is, but I also have a well-developed curiosity :-)

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 16 December 2015 02:51:00AM 0 points [-]

I wouldn't mind knowing myself. However, I don't think having Satoshi's identity publicly known would be good to bitcoin.

Comment author: ChristianKl 09 December 2015 11:45:28AM 5 points [-]

Gwern, what's your credence that Wright is Satoshi?

Comment author: VincentYu 11 December 2015 11:29:42AM 4 points [-]

From the linked Wired article:

The PGP key associated with Nakamoto’s email address and references to an upcoming “cryptocurrency paper” and “triple entry accounting” were added sometime after 2013.

Gwern's comment in the Reddit thread:

[...] this is why we put our effort into nailing down the creation and modification dates of the blog post in third-party archives like the IA and Google Reader.

These comments seem to partly refer to the 2013 mass archive of Google Reader just before it was discontinued. For others who want to examine the data: the relevant WARC records for gse-compliance.blogspot.com are in line 110789824 to line 110796183 of greader_20130604001315.megawarc.warc, which is about three-quarters of the way into the file. I haven't checked the directory and stats grabs and don't plan to, as I don't want to spend any more time on this.

NB: As for any other large compressed archives, if you plan on saving the data, then I suggest decompressing the stream as you download it and recompressing into a seekable structure. Btrfs with compression works well, but blocked compression implementations like bgzip should also work in a pinch. If you leave the archive as a single compressed stream, then you'll pull all your hair out when you try to look through the data.

Comment author: ESRogs 11 December 2015 08:26:42AM 1 point [-]

Follow-up -- after we've all had some time to think about it, I think this is the best explanation for who this would-be SN is:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3w9xec/just_think_we_deserve_an_explanation_of_how_craig/cxuo6ac