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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."
"Suggest(s)" = you could fit the whole universe into that.
and you'll have found Satoshi Nakamoto.
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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.
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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.)
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.
Zerocoin should be launched soon. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to add in a lot of anonymity that bitcoin lacks.