Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
You're mad! How can you possibly use fire, it's just waiting for the right moment to turn on you and destroy you!
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.
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.
...or at least wouldn't have vaguely bragged about it on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn, ffs...those guys would spam their moms' email if they could convince investors that it would increase their market cap. Don't trust them to hide your shadowy marketplaces either.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
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.)
Or was it a CIA front operation???
Bitcoin is US government.
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.
The only thing that Satoshi controls in the protocol is a hash code which would allow somebody to insert a broadcast message to all "standard" clients. This was presumably done to broadcast something like "the Bitcoin client has been compromised... please upgrade to version x.x!"
Of course it could have any sort of message including publishing a URL, a political message, or even just "Satoshi lives!". Without the hashcode, clients (this isn't even miners) are not supposed to pass on the message in the network. The core group of developers supposedly received this hash code from Satoshi and is guarding its use for things deemed appropriate for all Bitcoin users.
The interesting thing is that this is a distributed network messaging protocol, so such a message could conceivably be inserted by any computer on the network and would in theory be untraceable as well. Other miscellaneous data could also conceivably be put into Bitcoin, but Satoshi deliberately put in some poison pills to keep that from happening in the protocol.
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.
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?
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.
Or the NSA. Using bitcoin and the silk road to finance their secret activities.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
People are likely concerned for the same reason they worry about protocols or algorithms put out by the NSA... the twinge worry that the creator slipped something into the math that others have not found yet.
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.
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
s/coin/torrent/; s/buying and selling drugs/infringing copyright/; s/queue/cue/;
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
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 !
I don't mean to get all "Minority Report" on your ass, but if I set a large boulder rolling down a hill towards a village, with the intent to destroy it, how much control of the system do I need? Oh, it's an open-source boulder, so everyone can chart its position and velocity over time. Big deal.
I know it's not very popular these days to conceive of "prime movers" effectively controlling the future by setting the initial conditions. But if you can conceive of that, you can also see how such a system can provide its participants with large quantities of "free will", while not affecting the ultimate outcome at all. Maybe Satoshi's exploitation of these modern philosophical blind-spots is his ultimate genius.
(I'm not saying this is true, just food for thought.)
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.
Well, at least one possibility is that they would not really 'counterfeit' if there was a flaw that allowed for creating new bitcoins (or even there being some kind of pre-generated cache) at a much lower computational complexity. Or some other flaw that would allow a small number of machines to invalidate parts of the blockchain and make other people's coins get wiped, or even somehow transfered away from them.
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.