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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."
We still do not surely know who is Satoshi Nakamoto.
Regardless if there was an official link, it is probably true that Bitcoin really took off when illegal/quasi-legal enterprises like Silk Road started using them. That's not to say Silk Road created Bitcoin or that all Bitcoin commerce is illegal, just that it would never have grown to real prominence without it.
Well, I don't know the origin of Man's control of fire, nor who first did it, but I,m still quite happy to use it for keeping warm and smelting.
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 reported result sounds like a mildly interesting result that happened to pop up in the first pass.
Given the advanced tools available these days for graph mining (largely developed for social network analysis among other things) I suspect some rather more interesting results may start coming out soon. What may seem hard to track on an individual basis may fall somewhat more easily to powerful analysis tools that get to make use of the big picture. I bet there's some interesting info on cliques and exchanges that could be teased out by serious researchers with some decent compute power at their disposal. Pseudonymity may be even weaker than you might think.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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
However it is a pretty sure sign that the US government is working on generating a publicly acceptable reason to launch an all out attack on bitcoin. Now might well be the opportune time to cash in those bitcoins before an NSA/CIA/SS (secret service) attack nullifies their value.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Unfortunately, the US government will probably try to find a way to do just that. If they can allege a link between Satoshi and DPR-or-Ulbrich, that gives them a better excuse to try to pry information out of anybody involved with Bitcoin, either through legal process in the US or through possibly-illegal wiretapping overseas.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
>it is a scam
Nope.
>Once the governments shut down
And how are they going to do that? It's decentralised, and there are hundreds of clones (LTC for example).
>the illegal transactions
In some jurisdictions. Other jurisdictions rule these transactions are completely legal. If the buyer, the seller, and the marketplace are in a jurisdiction where their actions are legal, what right does the government of another sovereign body have to stop these transactions?
Bitcoin does matter. It may not matter to you, but it matters. It won't bring down the US dollar, but it matters.
Take your moronic FUD elsewhere please.