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."

Comments

Re:A link between DPR and an early Bitcoiner

[simonbp]

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.

Re:A link between DPR and an early Bitcoiner

[Coryoth]

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.

Re: The interesting question

[bill_mcgonigle]

Satoshi effectively anticipated all kinds of attacks on bitcoin. Ulbricht co-lo'ed Silk Road in San Franscisco (USA).

'nuff said.

Re:Weasel Words:

[billstewart]

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.