Bitcoin Inventor Satoshi Nakamoto Could Actually Be Group From Europe

An anonymous reader writes "Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto could be a group from Europe which has a strong footing in the financial sector. From the article: 'Josh Zerlan, the Chief Operating Officer of Butterfly Labs and a person familiar with the Bitcoin network, has said it is highly likely that Nakamoto could be a group of people working the financial sector. Speaking to IBTimes UK on the sidelines of a Global Bitcoin Conference in Bangalore, India, Zerlan said: "One of the prevailing theories, I think has credibility, is that it was some group of people from financial sector that created this. They released it and stepped back and let it go. So, Satoshi Nakamoto is a group of people, I think, is a reasonable possibility."'"

Comments

Or..

[Errol backfiring]

Then again, it could be not. Interesting. I think I have had my number of conspiracy theories for today.

Hey, let's speculate!

[i kan reed]

Rather than engage in actual tech news, let's speculate wildly(second guess in as many weeks) on the identity of someone who explicitly wanted to remain anonymous, and who has committed no crimes. That sounds like a grand engagement in journalistic credibility.

Anyone who really wanted to could find out my identity, but I wouldn't want them to start posting about their ideas as major headlines.

Re:Hey, let's speculate!

[Anonymous Coward]

Without some actual evidence other than just conjecture at a coffee klatsch, there are a lot of parties who could be the BitCoin creator.

Lets check facts:

1: It is someone clued in cryptography. This is very rare because most crypto implementations on virtually anything are very basic

2: It is someone who is clued with regards to the financial sector, perhaps has a lot of coins mined and stashed aside when it took just a CPU to mine them as opposed to ASICs.

3: It is someone who can code, code well, and distribute things out anonymously.

After those three items, it could be anyone, and suspicions could be anywhere.

In any case, the party who made BitCoin is filthy rich, and will only get more so by an exponential margin as time progresses, BitCoins get lost forever, and no new ones are mined.

Re:Hey, let's speculate!

[Charliemopps]

My wild theory is that it's the NSA.

See you take the name: satoshi nakamoto
rearrange the letters and you get: ha! NSA is tomatos ok?
and tomatoes are green like MONEY! most of the year.

Re: Hey, let's speculate!

[rsmith-mac]

Leaves less of a paper trail and makes it somewhat easier to avoid paying capital gains tax on the proceeds.

Of behalf of all of the people who legitimately pay taxes on their capital gains, fuck you.

Ah yes, Josh

[Anonymous Coward]

Josh Zerlan/Inaba, noted whiz-kid who runs one of the most fly-by-night ASIC companies, and who curses out his customers and insinuates things about their sexual proclivities rather than provide actual customer service. A highly-qualified individual to be speaking on the topic of Bitcoin, surely.

Three Men

[Anonymous Coward]

Three men can keep a secret if two of them are dead.

As always

[nospam007]

The olde 'The idea is so clever, it must have been one of us'-Syndrome.

Re:As always

[Vintermann]

No, they didn't say Satoshi Nakamoto was a group of scammers.

(For those not following, Butterfly Labs have become infamous in the bitcoin community by selling ASIC mining machines, promising delivery in one week. If they arrive at all, it's more than six months later, and by that time the difficulty of bitcoin mining has inevitably increased enough to make them unprofitable.

Yet they keep advertising one week's delivery time.

They have a record of breaking down due to defects, too, if they arrive. People suspect that BFL let these miners run for themselves in the months between advertised delivery time and actual delivery time.)

Again and again and again

[Threni]

"Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto could be a group from Europe which has a strong footing in the financial sector....could be a group of people working the financial sector.... some group of people from financial sector that created this...Satoshi Nakamoto is a group of people, I think"

Pointless random guesswork aside, why do journalists feel the need to say the exact same thing 3 to 5 times in the first few paragraphs? Once is enough, surely?

Re:Again and again and again

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Pointless random guesswork aside, why do journalists feel the need to say the exact same thing 3 to 5 times in the first few paragraphs? Once is enough, surely?

According to my journalist friend, it's how they were taught. The headline, the first paragraph and then the first... I forgot how much, are each supposed to be readable to get the story in various depths of knowledge. Newspapers have been accounting for TL;DR since long before the Internet.

Re:I am Satoshi Nakamoto.

[dpilot]

> I'm pretty sure this worked out for Spartacus...

Not really - it seemed to backfire on everyone who said it.

Unlikely

[Rinisari]

Zerlan hasn't often been accurate in his estimates of things.

I'm not going to bother to link to these because a quick Google search can turn up the evidence.

Nakamoto registered the bitcoin.org domain on a somewhat obscure Japanese site. His communication in English had all kinds of clues that his native language was Japanese (sentence structure, word choice, etc.). He was active during daylight and evening hours in Japan.

I really wish people would stop speculating who he is. It only matters to those who can't read the code and understand that it ultimately doesn't matter, except the possibility that he may one day "come back" and have several hundred thousand Bitcoin to himself. As benevolent as he acted, it's unlikely that he'll pull a Biff Tannen and rule the world. However, miners have the power to stop him if he tries.

Re:Unlikely

[IamTheRealMike]

Just a few minor corrections (I had multiple private email conversations with Satoshi over a couple of years before he disappeared).

The bitcoin site was registered via an anonymous DNS registrar that specialises in anonymous speech. For a short while he also used an email account from the same service, again, a service dedicated specifically to anonymous speech. I've seen no evidence it was selected due to any links to Japan.

I don't know where you got the idea that his writing style was that of a native Japanese speaker. He never once wrote anything in Japanese or even referred to Japanese culture. His writing style was actually that of a British guy: full of British English spellings and mannerisms. Also, he timestamped the genesis block by including a headline about the British banking bailouts from The Times. That's a British newspaper that is most commonly referred to outside the UK as "The London Times" due to its rather generic name. It would be rare for an American or Japanese person to refer to it just as "The Times". Finally, his forum account was set to GMT and his posting activity was during evenings GMT.

Having worked with his code and the man himself, at least for a short while, I think Satoshi was very likely to be a single person, who lives in the UK. But that said, I've never dug any deeper because he clearly wished to have his privacy and I think it would be a sad day if Satoshi's real identity were revealed without his permission.

Re:I am ...

[Anonymous Coward]

His name was Robert Paulson. Check the blockchain.

More Likely

[dale.furno]

It is probably the NSA using your hashing power to break encryption.

I make this statement knowing approximately nothing about crypto.

Re:It's probably true?

[mythosaz]

A group of people, no matter how small, keeping the fact that you're sitting on 1BN a secret? Someone's going to spill the beans to someone soon enough. Or it's one guy, and he's already rich enough that there's little temptation.

That's my wild speculation. :)

SPECTR, LLC.

[goombah99]

Duh... It's a subdvision of the Keyser Söze Group in the W.A.S.T.E operations department of Illuminatus holdings conglomerate. A few years ago they had a hostile take over bid from KAOS but the man UNCLE subverted it.