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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."
From the article, that one person made a BTC transfer of an equivalent 60,000 USD (at the time of the transfer being made).
It's not likely just a case of an early bitcoin user buying some drugs on silk road.
It's not like Satoshi is controlling the system from the shadows or something - Bitcoin is open-source. You don't need to trust its creators.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
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.
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
No, the evidence is really pretty clear. You can trace the history of any coin. Here's what they show:
* some extremely early coin, from parts of the block that virtually never has exchanged hands, found its way into Silk Road.
* It was a considerable amount, too.
This might be just the slip-up that unmasks the inventor(s) of the currency.
I'm not sure it was an investment, though, as the article suggests. I think Silk Road was profitable enough that they wouldn't really need an investment, at least not in the form of bitcoin.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
The guy who owned that transaction was already located. His name is Dustin and he is not Satoshi. What's more, these transactions had aroused interest before, been researched, the guy who owned them was not really trying to hide his identity and publicly confirmed they were his. And all this was available just by doing a google search on the address in question.
This is the second time Shamir has associated his name with research which contains elementary mistakes, makes wild claims and is funded by the Citi Foundation (as in, Citibank). What is going on?