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

Weasel Words:

[Zanadou]

"Suggest(s)" = you could fit the whole universe into that.

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.

Re:Weasel Words:

[Vintermann]

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.

Re:Weasel Words:

[IamTheRealMike]

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?

You keep using that name

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:You keep using that name

[Samantha Wright]

The other day I got ripped off during a TF2 item trade with Gabe Newell!

A link between DPR and an early Bitcoiner

[Agent ME]

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.

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.

Find Andy Kaufman

[Anonymous Coward]

and you'll have found Satoshi Nakamoto.

Re: The interesting question

[Anonymous Coward]

Keyser Soze

Re:The interesting question

[msauve]

Well, we do know that the Walrus was Paul.

Re:Correct Me If I'm Wrong

[bcmm]

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.

Not the person, it's the office

[Okian Warrior]

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.)

Re: The interesting question

[uvajed_ekil]

Hmm, no, I think. While a fair number of the numerous other digital "alt" coins (bitcoin competitors and copycats) are known or suspected to have been "pre-mined," no one credible has ever accused Satoshi of cheating. Sure he was likely the first to mine BTC, but he was not a scammer developing the network merely to cash in himself. And I doubt many earl adopters are still holding their first coins.

Personally, I cashed out several times, like when it hit $6, then again at $20, then again at $110, a few at $210, then more at $140ish a couple months ago, at which time I gave up on mining and mostly stopped trading. We were all optimistic but few of us were patient enough to really amass huge wallets for the long term, nor did most of us really see the huge recent price spike coming, unfortunately. If there is any evidence that Satoshi somehow took advantage of BTC in a secretive, underhanded way, please enlighten us.

Just for shits and giggles, what if DPR and Satoshi were indeed in cahoots at the beginning, with DPR having the balls and skills to build a huge black market and Satoshi providing him with the means to make it work? Sounds unlikely to me, but it is conceivable that Satoshi created bitcoin not only knowing that it would be abused for illegal transactions, but also intending it to be used as such. Hmm...

Re:Correct Me If I'm Wrong

[Teancum]

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.

No, PayPal always for eBay, not porn

[raymorris]

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.

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.

Zerocoin

[Mathinker]

Zerocoin should be launched soon. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to add in a lot of anonymity that bitcoin lacks.

Re:every transaction can be analyzed

[Bert64]

A currency where every transaction can be analyzez and data mined by anyone... That puts everyone on a level playing field.
With traditional currency only a small group of organisations can get access to transaction data, which includes the NSA but doesn't include you.