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Wired Thinks It Knows Who Satoshi Nakamoto Is (wired.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In a lengthy exposé, Wired lays out its case that Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto is actually Australian businessman Craig Wright. As evidence, Wired cites leaked communications and posts on Wright's blog from 2008 and 2009 establishing a connection between him and the launch of Bitcoin. Wright is also known to have amassed a significant Bitcoin fortune early on. Wired tried to contact Wright and got some perplexing responses, and they admit that it could all be a (long and extremely elaborate) hoax. But hours after publishing, Gizmodo followed up with the results of their own investigation, which came to the conclusion that Satoshi is a pseudonym for two men: Wright and Dave Kleiman, a computer forensics expert who died in 2013. After questioning (read: harassment) from both publications, Wright seems to have withdrawn from public comment. Regardless, both articles are quite detailed, and it will be interesting to see if the leaked documents turn out to be accurate.
I do. BTC is gaining a lot of traction as the defacto digital currency standard, and we have no idea who's behind it.
Bitcoin is a solid design and has survived a lot of scrutiny so far, but imagine what would happen if we found out that the design was introduced by, say, the NSA.
The current versions may vanish.
However it is inevitable that in near future we will have a globaly accepted and supported digital currency.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
We already do, it's called a debit card. But the fact is, there will always be a significant contingent of people who want to live off the grid, those that want something to hold and pass around more than plastic, and homeless. "Paper" money will never go away. As irrational as it is considering how governments manipulate their paper money, many people feel safer with it than some nebulous concept of concurrency that perhaps you and I understand, but guess what? We will always be in the minority.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It's actually pretty much the exact opposite of fiat. Fiat means the authority declared it to be so. The government says their dollar is valid to satisfy any and all debts, and that dollars MUST be used to pay taxes, which a majority of people have to pay. In other words, you need dollars because the government ordered that you do, and they will put you in prison unless you get some dollars to pay them with. That's what a fiat is - an order, a declaration by the ruling authority.
Bitcoin is pretty much the opposite- noone requires that you use it. It's price is purely based on the hope that tomorrow someone else might buy it from you, who in turn wants it for the same reason- they hope that later someone else might be willing to pay them for it, that the ponzi will continue and someone else will treat it as valuable.
As you mentioned, neither is backed by gold. The dollar is backed by two things. As I mentioned, it's backed by guaranteed demand due to taxes - people WILL want your dollars, because they have to have dollars in order to pay their taxes. Secondly, it is backed by the US government bomd rating (credit score) which the government must maintain because they survive on debt. If the govt devalued the currency beyond expected inflation rate, that would be constructive default on their debt, which is denominated in dollars. If they did that, no-one would lend them money anymore and they'd be unable to function.
So those are the two major things backing the dollar - the fact that people will need dollars to pay taxes, and government's need to protect their ability to continue borrowing.
really... what does it matter who "invented" bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a bit like a pyramid scheme, in that blocks become progressively more computationally expensive to calculate over time. Thus the first blocks were very low-hanging fruit that were quick and easy to calculate. Of course those easy blocks were calculated by the creator of Bitcoin, and it is estimated Satoshi has at least 1 million bitcoins (the current value of which is over $400 million dollars). So I think many people are curious as to who holds this wealth, which is an unduly massive reward for having created a crpytocurrency. It also raises the question of whether bitcoin was created merely to enrich the creator, or if it really was for some larger purpose. The only person who knows the answer to that is Satoshi.
Better known as 318230.
That and the market power if he decided to dump them all at once.
That and the market power if he decided to dump them all at once.
But that is not quite control. He can't move other people's coins, he can't override the community consensus on the blockchain, etc.
Even if he crashes the price many bitcoin users won't care, how the price changed since yesterday won't matter. They just use bitcoins for transfers or payments, they aren't holding bitcoins. They immediately convert to bitcoin as needed and from bitcoin immediately. Especially so for merchants, well that is their 3rd party payment processors do, the merchants never see or touch a bitcoin themselves. The 3rd party converts the merchant's fiat price to bitcoin in real-time, collects the coins and pays the merchant in fiat currency immediately.
Only the speculators will get hurt, well, that is if they sell in the panic. So the creator cashes out, his coins are still in the system, in the hands of others, others who bought his coins at their preferred price. The price may be depressed temporarily, but he wasn't able to shut down anything or take a single coin from anyone. So transactions and the blockchain continue.
The concept of centralised control over the generation, storage and transmission of tokens of value is unravelling faster than the centralised control and distribution of information and knowledge has.
While that sounds nice, it also would not be hard for the government to regulate, or outlaw the use of Bitcoins.
Oh sure, criminals could still use them, but if you can't use them at any legal reputable merchant, then they aren't going anywhere.
It is much more likely we'll see digital cash issued by governments before Bitcoin or any other digital currency gets used by anything other than the extreme fringe of society. And there are reasonable reasons for this to happen.
The cops were already on to him. They knew who he was. The Wired story blew it open and forced the police to act. The police did not surf around and see the Wired story and say "hey we should arrest that guy! This magazine says it's him!" They already knew. They were watching and waiting.
The magazine blew away the option to keep watching. The way the police swooped in so fast means they had warrants and plans already in the works. He was going to get raided soon.
In a sense the magazines may have done him a huge favor: there cannot now be a shadowing secret raid where the key "person of interest" nobody has ever heard of simply disappears into a prison. Wired knows who he is and so do we all now. And there will be reporters all over this like lions on meat. Wright may not escape the cops, but the cops won't be able to just bury him in jail without hundreds of reporters nagging them silly about it. Wright's cover got blown AND his ass got saved at the same time.
Sig for hire.
Hmm... I can kind of, sort of, see tax information being private for individuals. Back in 2008 or so, someone doxxed me, partially, and that resulted in someone posting my tax information online. It kind of felt intrusive and sucked to have it made public. I did the only "rational" thing that I could think of and that was just to accept it and move on. Sure, they got to see that I'd donated a bunch of money and had made a few dollars but it wasn't too bad. I'd made the mistake of mentioning the parent company that bought my company and, sure enough, that information was enough to get them started.
It was just felt intrusive. I know it's public information and all that but, really, it just seemed excessive. The forum's dead but I'm sure the stuff is cached somewhere. It might not seem like much and, really, so they learned I give money to Red Cross, ACLU, Heifer International, etc... I did have some negative repercussions. I had people crawling out of the woodwork to email me and asking me to support this cause, that cause, etc. I got hate-mail (I even got some snail mail) for not donating to a few causes. (The urge to name and shame is strong but these weren't "official" things but just zealots.) I'm not entirely sure how they got all of the information but they managed to put enough together and dox me pretty well.
Now, I'm running for office in 2016 and that means I'll be subjected to more scrutiny but that's because I'm electing to do put myself in that position. I'm accepting that I'll be public information (for a very small group of people, it's a rather tiny district) and I'm okay with that. There's a big difference between that and being doxxed and having your tax information posted online. I was already in the process of moving so it wasn't too tough to change some of the information but I ended up closing a few sites, getting rid of some email addresses, and things like that.
So, I guess, I can kind of see keeping tax data private for individuals or I can at least see a reason why we might want to have that discussion as a society. I'd not done anything wrong and I didn't stress over it a whole lot but it sucked. I got some pretty crappy emails, a bunch of begging emails, regular mail, and had to clean up after that but it really felt intrusive. It did show that I paid my taxes, in full, to the letter of the law. It did show that I have some favorite charities. I can imagine that it'd be much worse if I didn't pay my taxes or if I'd been donating to causes that were harmful. I also imagine that it would have been different if I'd stressed out over it and gone on an internet rampage trying to take it all down.
Meh... It's probably cached somewhere. One could probably find it by Googling my SSN. The genie doesn't go back in the bottle. 'Snot much I can do but it still kind of sucks. So, as I said, maybe we can have that discussion but it does presuppose that the government is doing its job and collecting taxes effectively and efficiently.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."