Revealing Satoshi - Part IV: The End Is Nigh

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Written by

Pantera

Bitcoin Is Cash

2 years ago

Topics: Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin, Satoshi, Identity, Cryptocurrency, ...

Satoshi undoubtedly wanted to remain anonymous, yet this approach allowed the ground for anyone to claim this name. Yet, we find nobody able to prove their connection to Satoshi other.

Some leads remain hidden from the public, and some people know more than it appears.

With time, though, a researcher can make all the essential connections, study all the pages written on the topic and eventually figure it out.

I found traces beyond what already publicly exists leading to several individuals that formed a team, but I can’t write about this part since I don’t have acceptable evidence.

All previous investigative work on the topic makes theoretical connections, but consistently the result was disappointing.

We examined the most convincing cases already, with a few exceptions.

The Most Elusive Identity On the Internet

While Barely Sociable influenced me to investigate this mystery with a different approach, he was still missing enough evidence.

The evidence presented in the "Bitcoin - Unmasking Satoshi Nakamoto" documentary does not suffice. There are leads, but Adam Back can defend his position with ease.

The final part of this mini-series concerning Satoshi's identity begins with one of my previous articles: The Futile Search For Satoshi.

Only when I decided to revisit my previous work did new information emerge.

We pivot from one suspect to another, and the moment we think we can specify Satoshi's identity, new doubts immediately arise.

There was no plan B for Bitcoin initially. Still, many things changed, and the narrative changed as well.

Maybe Szabo once said:

I’d definitely go for a second layer, I mean, I designed Bitcoi … gold with two layers.

To put some things under perspective, a slip of the tongue doesn't represent anything. Maybe Szabo was involved, or perhaps the whitepaper was his creation, but if it was Szabo, he wasn't alone in this.

Some critical points Barely Sociable made about Adam Back:

Adam Back is a cryptographer with an academic background (computer science Ph.D. in distributed systems from the University of Exeter.)
Excels in C++
Adam Back worked for Microsoft, so he was skilled in Windows-based systems. Bitcoin was released on Bitcoin and only adapted for macOS after its release.
The use of double space
The British accent
The mention of hashcash in the whitepaper
The Satoshi e-mails
The case of Malta as a tax heaven
The consistency of the dates between Adam Back's silence and Satoshi's activity

Until his arrival on the bitcointalk forum in 2013, this annoying guy, Adam Back, was not considered a Satoshi suspect, and researchers focused investigation on anyone else but Adam Back.

Upon his appearance on that forum, Back mentioned some links containing cryptographer's communications from 1999 as a history lesson on digital cash. While some of the anonymous comments could easily be Adam Back responding to himself to enhance his point of view, he also pointed out to a few more cryptographers (link1, link2, link3, link4) discussing Wei Dai's b-money and David Chaum's ecash.

Some of the cryptographers names are not so popular as candidates still most of them have worked towards this common goal of cryptographic money for decades. Certainly Adam Back is not a perfect match and not the only name that can be connected to Satoshi either.

We encounter too many candidates to overlook. Maybe Back was involved in a particular way as part of a team. Still, there is no confirmation. Only accusations easily countered by Back.

We can't ignore bit gold either, and the similarities with Bitcoin or the fact that Szabo changed the dates on his website to make it look like Bit gold was post-dated.

While Szabo envisioned bit gold in 1998, he only announced it publicly in 2005 and discovered having post-dated his bit gold articles:

.. Nick deliberately post-dated his bit gold articles to look posterior to Bitcoin, shortly after the announcement of Bitcoin

(techcrunch)

This occurrence is stranger than anything relating Adam Back to Satoshi.

Bitgold was only theoretical. And Szabo iBit gold ten years before the release of Bitcoin. Certainly, someone could pick this idea and evolve it. Everything was public already, just pending an implementation.

Why would Nick Szabo post-date his own articles though, and make it seem like his bit gold idea succeeded Bitcoin's release? That would only make bit gold look like a cheap copy of Bitcoin.

[*Added in May 28th, 2022]
Nick Szabo had preannounced since August 2008 he was going to to repost some of his best articles in his blog.

Thus, it wasn't a deliberate attempt to undermine Bit gold and make it seem a posterior to Bitcoin idea.

[Finished Editing]

Then, we got the hashcash reference on the whitepaper.

Adam Back supports that he created Proof Of Work, claiming he wasn't aware similar work was already published five years before hashcash. (see: Proof of Work Begins with the work of Dwork & Naor (1992), Not Hashcash (1997)).

Satoshi did not invent anything with Bitcoin but only compiled tools already available.

Satoshi utilized components that were already there.

A well-known fact, that is not mentioned often. Still, this does not reduce the immense significance of Satoshi's creation.

A decentralized cryptocurrency was a concept multiple cryptographers tried to create for decades. Yet, Satoshi was the only one that achieved it.

Satoshi extracted ideas from b-money, bit gold, and as the whitepaper suggests, Adam Back's hashcash, which as we already know, is not the first paper that describes the Proof-of-Work concept but it was already popular in the tech world since 1993 by Moni Naor and Cynthia Dwork (Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail).

Innovation doesn't have to be irrelevant to previous work. Innovation can improve or make functional excisting ideas.

We can't deny that Satoshi made it possible when others couldn't. Satoshi had the technical knowledge and intelligently combined various elements to create what cryptographers were trying for decades.

Satoshi didn't abandon Bitcoin as a failure but as one of the most promising projects of the century.

We can be confident he had this planned all along. To quit Bitcoin at a predetermined time, when the Satoshi identity was at stake.

Time Will Tell

Probably Satoshi was not just a single person.

And perhaps this is also a threat considering if those involved were not cooperating anonymously, then trust is involved.

I decided not to publish another part of this story for the time being. I will finish the draft for the final part, and perhaps I will publish it some other time.

We can all make assumptions, and I expect a new Satoshi soon will appear and further confuse research on the topic.

The Bitcoin community is full of drama and betrayal, a collective of a diverse range of characters that was initially supposed to work together towards a common goal and support Bitcoin to succeed as P2P electronic cash.

Still, part of the same community proceeded to reduce the availability of this network and looked after its privileges instead.

Anyone joining Bitcoin after 2015 finds only doubts about the ability of this network to become operable, and only speculators attached to their investment can't see past the massive deception and propaganda.

I expect the Satoshi topic to resurface (soon), as any reporter in mainstream media discovers there is a target group of approximately one hundred million newcomers in the cryptocurrency field that would love to learn more regarding this topic.