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How the NSA Identified Satoshi Nakamoto (medium.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The 'creator' of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is the world's most elusive billionaire. Very few people outside of the Department of Homeland Security know Satoshi's real name. In fact, DHS will not publicly confirm that even THEY know the billionaire's identity. Satoshi has taken great care to keep his identity secret employing the latest encryption and obfuscation methods in his communications. Despite these efforts (according to my source at the DHS) Satoshi Nakamoto gave investigators the only tool they needed to find him -- his own words. Using stylometry one is able to compare texts to determine authorship of a particular work. Throughout the years Satoshi wrote thousands of posts and emails and most of which are publicly available. According to my source, the NSA was able to the use the 'writer invariant' method of stylometry to compare Satoshi's 'known' writings with trillions of writing samples from people across the globe. By taking Satoshi's texts and finding the 50 most common words, the NSA was able to break down his text into 5,000 word chunks and analyse each to find the frequency of those 50 words. This would result in a unique 50-number identifier for each chunk. The NSA then placed each of these numbers into a 50-dimensional space and flatten them into a plane using principal components analysis. The result is a 'fingerprint' for anything written by Satoshi that could easily be compared to any other writing. The NSA then took bulk emails and texts collected from their mass surveillance efforts. First through PRISM and then through MUSCULAR, the NSA was able to place trillions of writings from more than a billion people in the same plane as Satoshi's writings to find his true identity. The effort took less than a month and resulted in positive match.
I'd love to meet Satoshi Nakamoto. He/she/they must be brilliant. But if the NSA can positively identify them it is probable that no one is truly anonymous unless you simply don't ever post email, forum posts, or anything else online. I keep a low profile but it sounds like only cave dwellers and hermits can escape big brother!
Be More, Be Manly, The Manly Geek Ubergeek Extraordinaire Blogger: www.manlygeek.com/blog Podcaster: podcast.man
According to the author - ME.
Sounds truthy enough.
It's beneficial that I exercise Grammarly. Straight away those concerned with distinguishing me, will undergo unhingement.
An anonymous reader shares a report... "according to my source at the DHS..."
Well, I am not anonymous and my source at DHS says that these claims are BS. Who is more credible?
In 2014 Newsweek was pretty damn sure they had the right Satoshi and dragged a poor soul through hell and back because of their "beliefs". Can we give this topic a rest, until we know for sure and for real? None of this anonymous reporter citing anonymous sources at DHS crap.
the NSA, I recall lawsuits after the Snowden releases were kicked out of court because they couldn't show they had standing. Apparently Satoshi Nakamoto can show he has standing because the NSA has copies of his emails.
So who was Shakespeare?
Say, we could find that out, couldn't we!
All we have to do is digitize the bulk emails and texts collected from the NSA's mass surveillance of everybody in 16th century England, and compare them to Shakespere's works! Easy.
...will the real Satoshi please stand up
....ducks!......
please stand up
please stand up
they used illegally-gathered data.
There aren't many people crazy enough to pay over $4,000 each for Monopoly dollars, though.
Like it or not, any item (even Bitcoin) is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Whether or not it will still be worth $4,000 a year from now it anyone's guess at this point. It could become the next Mastercard, or the various world governments might outlaw the currency and start prosecuting enough users to make it's value plummet.
Personally, the lack of certainty either way is enough to make me stay away at this point.
Doesn't this person deserve the right not to have their identity known? They have not (as far I as I know) committed a crime or being investigated for a criminal act. I'm sure the motivation behind remaining anonymous is for his own safety and well being. If someone has not released their identity on purpose, and even more so gone to lengths to keep it private why is anyone trying to find out who he is. Sure there's an interest level there. There's quite possibly a lot to learn, but at what cost? I know most of these points are completely obvious and the answers are also unfortunately obvious, but it needs to be said anyway.
Sent from my TARDIS
*Do you enjoy terrorism?*
This IS terrorism.
Now, lets hear from the liberals telling me I need to pay more taxes for crap like this. After all, I do like to use roads, police, and NSA spying on everything everyone writes ever.
I'm not sure what the word "liberals" is doing here. In general, the liberals have been rather vocal in their dislike and distrust of the NSA, CIA, and other TLAs. The support for these has been mostly been voices on the right saying "we need more tools to keep America secure!"
As for the "more taxes" quip, in general government spending goes up under Republican administrations, and is constant or even down under Democratic administrations. (It was the Bush administration, remember, that coined the phrase "deficits don't matter.")
Dogecoin to the moon! Dogecoin will be valued at over two dollars before the end of the year.
#DeleteFacebook
Is Satoshi Nakamoto suspected of a crime? Is he or she a threat to national security?
The NSA has expended all this effort and violated Satoshi's and a billion other people's privacy for.... what? Shits and giggles?
in a 50d space, "trillions" is still going to be fairly wide spread. assuming your axes all go from 0 to 1 and that's it, and you avoid fractions, you've still got 2^50 nodes, which is on the order of a quadrillion, or 1000 nodes per text block.
Sure, there's likely to be clustering, but it's not quite as inevitable as you're assuming from just the number of data sets.
I'm sure there will be loads of posts here denouncing the NSA for this, because it is in fact creepy and invasive. However, this kind of thing is *exactly* what they should be doing. "Satoshi Nakamoto" is a figure who created a economy-changing product, and as a result holds assets that value in the billions. Their motivations, ideology, and state ties were unknown, though they maintained they were not an American. It's completely reasonable for government to find out who this person is, and determine if they were and ally, an enemy, or neither. Now that they know they can act accordingly.
liberals = tax and spend conservatives = tax cut and spend see the difference?
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
violated Satoshi's and a billion other people's privacy
They violated Satoshi's privacy just for the practice. They violated a billion other's privacy to build a baseline corpus to tune their search application.
Have gnu, will travel.
No he did not. As soon as someone tells you a wallet address you can see everything that's happening on it, you cannot troll/fake this.
And what's with that transaction done on 2017-08-22? Is it stuck or something?
#DeleteFacebook
YES, the NSA is reading ALL our emails, recording ALL our phone calls. Damn the Constitution full autocracy ahead.
If this is true, it begs the question: why is the NSA looking for Satoshi? Where are the warrants to do this kind of search? This is a fairly involved process, even if the software was already written, collecting the entirety of Satoshi's writing for input is time consuming work.
As a taxpayer, there be something pretty fuckin important they need to ask Satoshi personally to justify this waste of my tax money.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Nothing new here folks, same method was used to nail Ted Kaczynski - of course it was much more difficult back then so a far greater accomplishment.
Actually, I think David Kaczynski simply turned in his brother after reading his manifesto and recognizing his brother's writing style...
If you want call that the same method, well, I guess you are entitled, but that probably implies that Satoshi's brother works for the NSA... If that were true, I think the NSA creating bitcoin would be a far greater accomplishment than nabbing Ted...
When two men claim they are Jesus, at least one of them must be wrong.
But when four AC's claim to be old queens, we gotta figure they are all correct.
I imagine the IRS wants his name and a good chunk of any cash it feels entitled to.
But Canadian money does have a real and considerable threat physical force behind it, unlike Bitcoin. If you don't think it does, try counterfeiting the Canadian dollar in any useful quantity and see what happens.
I wonder how long it will take the NSA to unmask Slashdot's Anonymous Coward.
Supply/Demand Problems with your analysis.
If the supply of BitCoin in active circulation ever increased with the amount SN is supposed to have (guestimates) I would crash the market in no time flat.
Then there is the problem of "I don't remember where I put them" or "I forgot my key" or "I lost the wallet" or ... any number of excuses he might have. And until he actually uses the BitCoins, they are unrealized gains and the government can't really touch them.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Real money also doesn't use 170kW/h of electricity for every transaction.
(current power usage of the Bitcoin network is 0.08% of the worlds production)
https://digiconomist.net/bitco...
No sig today...
One of the theories regarding Bitcoin is that it is an effort by a national actor to crash other nation's economies.
Bruce Perens.
I don't need to! I earn Canadian Tire money with every purchase I make on my MasterCard!
#DeleteFacebook
I will never be found parently becaus3 of my brilliance disguises but also styling metering thinks I am smartphones autocarrot.
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David's wife recognized the writing; only after an FBI profiler and a scientist in the budding field did all the grunt work and learned to tie all the bits of evidence together, letters, etc.; then decided to publish the manifesto. They knew who it was through the same techniques, they only needed a name.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
Is Satoshi Nakamoto suspected of a crime? Is he or she a threat to national security? The NSA has expended all this effort and violated Satoshi's and a billion other people's privacy for.... what? Shits and giggles?
For national security obviously. You might not agree, but information is power, and our security agencies are charged with maintaining position of power. Or do you think all decisions around national security should be held by popular vote instead?
Satoshi is a serious threat to any large government since he/she/they single-handedly created the most popular and valuable de-centralized currency in the world.
Currency in any form is one that any government wants exclusive control over.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?