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Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto
wabrandsma writes "Two Israeli computer scientists say they may have uncovered a puzzling financial link between Ross William Ulbricht, the recently arrested operator of the Internet black market known as the Silk Road, and the secretive inventor of bitcoin, the anonymous online currency, used to make Silk Road purchases."
"Suggest(s)" = you could fit the whole universe into that.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
When a person attempts to steal notorieity by using a famous name as a pseudonym, don't feed their ego (and ruin a good movie) by calling them the name they chose. Pick an unused name that implies disrepect to the person, and call them that. e.g. Inept Pirate Doofus.
tl;dr: At least one person who used Bitcoin in the first month also used Silk Road, so we made a news story about it. Could be DPR himself, who knows.
and you'll have found Satoshi Nakamoto.
We still do not surely know who is Satoshi Nakamoto.
tl;dr: BS article....*YAWN*
Correct me if I'm wring, but wasn't the last Bitcoin story full of comments lambasting people for "incorrectly assuming" that Bitcoin was anonymous?
P.S. What's the deal with the "unknown" inventor? Are people so willingly buying into this system with no idea about its origin? I don't know the answer to these two questions, but I don't use Bitcoin, nor do I plan to ever.
...with Cary Elwes character from "The Princess Bride"?
Bitcoin is not anonymous. Bitcoin has never bean anonymous. Bitcoin has never been intended to be anonymous.
Stop pretending that anything otherwise is or has ever been true.
We know Ross William Ulbricht is not Satoshi Nakamoto due to the obvious difference in technical skill. Satoshi Nakamoto would have done a way better job with the security of Silk Road if he ran it.
What's this got to do with Cary Elwes character from "The Princess Bride"?
In the novel (and movie), it was discovered that the "Dread Pirate Roberts" was not a single person.
One person started the legend, got rich and retired. His replacement kept the name in order to take advantage of the reputation, got rich, and retired... and this continued for several generations of the name.
From Wikipedia: "It is revealed during the course of the story that Roberts is not one man, but a series of individuals who periodically pass the name and reputation to a chosen successor. Everyone except the successor and the former Roberts is then released at a convenient port, and a new crew is hired. The former Roberts stays aboard as first mate, referring to his successor as "Captain Roberts", and thereby establishing the new Roberts' persona. After the crew is convinced, the former Roberts leaves the ship and retires on his earnings."
The original SilkRoad founder used the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts", got rich, and turned over the name to his successor (who was sloppy and got arrested). The original founder's choice of name was probably an homage to a popular character, but it has mirrored the backstory of the book character with some measure of irony. (Or maybe it's not irony, it's just unexpected - I can't really tell.)
I doubt the two had any connection, I'm guessing Ross maybe felt that he had accumulated enough bitcoin wealth that he could share the love and simply donated the money to what he had thought or had hoped was one of Satoshi's wallets.
Or was it a CIA front operation???
Bitcoin is US government.
Here is yet another attempt at spreading FUD around bitcoin for it is not a government regulated currency.
FTA:
"Although the authors state that they cannot prove that that account belongs to the person who created the bitcoin currency, it is widely believed that the first accounts belong to a person who identifies himself as “Satoshi Nakamoto,” but who has remained anonymous and has not been publicly heard from since 2010."
Weak and suggestive... but a perfect opportunity for the powers that be to try to stop Bitcoin from becoming a success.
Obviously these people have not understood that the the true value of Bitcoin lies not in it's function as a currency but in the validation mathematics of the blockchain that wrestles validation control out of the hands of the few and creates a distributed validation system...
The powers that be have much to gain from this FUD
On the off-chance that they were in cahoots, and this guy helped start an international currency, in large part, to make silk road a reality... he totally just won drug-dealing.
I can't stop seeing the headline as "Dead Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto" - sounds like a great film or a hell of a band. I call dibs.
But we know who this Satoshi is.
the greatest trick he ever pulled was to convince the world that his hard to find digital apples were worth money
Are you talking about Mr. Nakamoto or Mr. Jobs?
nevermind...
Sent from my ENIAC
Listen to these Nazis, bitcoin is like another show!
PayPal never was popular for porn. On any given day of your choice, there was 100 times as many PayPal transactions on eBay than PayPal transactions for porn.
Porn went from AdultCheck and other AVS systems to iBill and a few iBill competitors. With the fall of iBill, CCBill took over the adult sector.
I went to college with Ross. We even lived in the same phase of the same apartment complex. We had several mutual friends. I never knew him personally (hadn't even heard his name until said mutual friends started posting on Facebook in stunned disbelief that their old friend was arrested for running the Silk Road), but it's entirely possible that we may have ran into each other at parties and were just never introduced.
L4$T p0$t (at the time of writing)
Unfortunately their paper was mostly fail and confusion: https://gist.github.com/jgarzik/3901921, since academia has mostly been steadfastly ignoring Bitcoin there is not any really competent peer review yet and you can basically make anything up you want and get it published, especial if you have a name like Shamir on the paper.
bitcoin was invented solely for buying and selling drugs on the internet. It is evil and must be stopped. queue the ridiculous headlines
I think the more interesting part is the fact that we have some decent mathematicians (in this case Adi Shamir among others) are setting about pulling the entire bitcoin transaction graph and doing some serious data-mining on it.
The more disturbing fact is that bitcoin makes this kind of analysis possible in the first place.
A currency where every transaction can be analyzed and data-mined! Yow.
NSA must love this.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Fun and all, but using the name to associate to the person, and repeating it endlessly, is surely just a way of demonizing him?
He is at this moment innocent.
> Two Israeli computer scientists
Come on, Adi Shamir deserve more respect than that!
Zerocoin should be launched soon. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to add in a lot of anonymity that bitcoin lacks.
Paypal's primary niche in the early days was being a popular way to pay sellers on eBay using credit cards. The seller could accept Paypal much more easily than opening merchant accounts with multiple credit card services, and the buyer didn't have to give the seller their credit card number, and the transaction fees were competitive. It was way better and faster than buyers having to mail sellers a check, waiting for the post office, sellers having to wait for the check to clear, buyers hoping the seller wasn't scamming them; it cuts a huge step out of the non-credit-card market.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Listen to these Jews, bitcoin is like another show!
There's no puzzling financial problem too small to be missed by a Jew, even if it means sniffing out subtle coinage connections. Lol.
Satoshi's British.
Someone or some group using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto did release source code and a working client as proof of concept, not just a book.
The only connection to DPR is that some coins that had been sitting around since bitcoins early days were moved to his wallet in 2013. Nobody knows who or why.
The link is so weak its unbelievable to see the story being reposted again and again. Its not news.
Unfortunately, the US government will probably try to find a way to do just that.
And that, will be a BOON to Bitcoin as a whole.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Did I call that right?
Trying mining other cyrptocurrents. They should have a lower barrier of entry than something as "over"-mined as Bitcoin. The trick, however, is to know which can be traded for a profit or not too great a loss with Bitcoin or maybe even directly to the fiat currency of your choice (dollars, yens, etc.). Litecoin seems attractive at the moment.
Also be careful of very, very recently forked Bitcoin alternatives. They might be fly-by-night operations designed simply to suck-er in users who want to buy their way into virtual weath.
http://captiongenerator.com/9908/Hitler-not-pleased-with-Bitcoin
I started mining BTC from the beginning, and even bought them when they were $3-5 each.
During the recent runup, I liquidated my entire BTC stash - all 2200 of them, and paid off my house, my student loans, and both of my cars. And yes, I set aside enough to pay the income tax.
Thank you, BTC!
they must be into some very specific niche sick, depraved shit if they can't find it in the ocean of free porn.
The mind boggles.
Abraham Lincoln MLP pterodactyl inflation scat?
Charles Nelson Reilly miniaturization urethral insertion?
Kwanzaabot screw sorting?
As he points out, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote the Bitcoin paper. It was a design paper rather than an implementation. It was later implemented by other people, not including Satoshi, about whom nothing is known, not even that he is a single person.
This is only the biggest critical flaw and display of ignorance in this garbage paper. Others have pointed out the huge gulf between showing that a early Bitcoin keypair paid a large sum to Silk Road, and that it was Satoshi himself. I'm literally shocked and ashamed that someone who is an icon of cryptography would stoop to 'publishing' garbage like this, just in order to hit headlines in publications edited by the ignorant, and appear relevant.
A simple google search https://www.google.com/search?q=12higDjoCCNXSA95xZMWUdPvXNmkAduhWv reveals that the address in question belongs to |}ruid, an early Bitcoin user, and was propagated several steps before hitting Silk Road.
One wonders how such an esteemed crypto researcher (Adi Shamir) could make such basic analytical errors. Oh wait, the research was funded by Citibank.
HOLY SHIT dude, howzabout a few [SPOILER] tags?!!!
Now I just as well shouldn't finish the book.
I though that was still paypal's primary niche.
Bottles.
tl;dr: Silk Road is for illegal drugs & Bitcoin is how you pay for them
So the fact you can pay for drugs and other illegal things means we should ban it or at the very least treat it as extremely suspect?
Alright.
Let's do the same to the dollar, the Euro and ruple. I am fairly certain that more drugs and illegal things get bought for those in an hour than gets bought with BTC for an entire day.
Let's ban the dollar, c'mon, seriously, let's do it.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
You, and whoever modded me as "-1 Flamebait" is putting words in my mouth
I said Silk Road was for drugs and Bitcoin is how you pay for them....**THATS TRUE**
I never said we could solve this problem by "banning" any currency!
YOU SAID THAT
my comment was about the reality of what Silk Road is and how pretending its anything else hurts our profession!!!!!
Thank you Dave Raggett
listen...man...this is decaying fast...
i said, in text written at the bottom of the the comment you responded to what my point was
I said it in plain language:
it's right there...highlighted for you...with bold, italic, and **'s
respond coherently now
Thank you Dave Raggett
alot of people are pretending Silk Road & Bitcoin are not used in conjunction for the drug trade...
look man, my original post, which I linked to has my full comment...
you can't pick one fragment of a sentence, retort with the categorical opposite statement of that fragment, and call it an 'argument'
my point is easy to understand: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4480863&cid=45511411
also: all tech professions, esp internet of any kind
Thank you Dave Raggett
As you mentioned, people pay to get exactly what they want, something specific. Not so much sick and depraved, but specific. Either specific niches like Amelia G's work, or a specific style like Perfect 10. Girls Gone Wild is just flashing of boobs and they have a LOT of customers. See also Netvideogirls.com, a specific style / story line.
Aside from that, the megasites offer a plethora of porn with no popups, no viruses, no bullshit. The value proposition is there for anyone whose time has value.