Bitcoin
Page 19
Enjoy the ride!
Appendix II:
Who Is Satoshi? The Usual Suspects
Who is John Galt?
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
There are many names that have bandied about in the fruitless search for Satoshi. Here – in addition to those in the main chapter – we look at some of the other usual suspects.
Jed McCaleb is one. McCaleb, an entrepreneur, says he first heard about Bitcoin in July 2010 when it was mentioned on Slashdot. He had been involved in a similar idea – OpenCoin – that was hatched at around the same time as Bitcoin in 2008.
There was no easy way to buy bitcoins, so he turned the MtGox domain he had lying about into a Bitcoin exchange. In 2011 he would then sell it, not wanting the day-to-day hassles of running something so administratively burdensome. He says it wasn’t ‘technically interesting and I had no interest in running it long-term’.198
‘I love Bitcoin’, he said. ‘But the mining process has always bothered me because it wastes so much energy’.199 This process is something Satoshi had always defended staunchly, arguing that bitcoins should have a cost of production to give them value and that this cost is more than justified by the efficiencies it creates elsewhere. This essential contradiction in their point of view of what is a key building block of Bitcoin makes it unlikely that Satoshi and McCaleb are the same person.
In addition, McCaleb’s early MtGox’s encryption of passwords was amateur, irresponsible even. It endangered users, violating basic guidelines that Satoshi would surely have known.
McCaleb would go on to start another cryptocurrency – Ripple. As he was doing so, he advertised on BitcoinTalk for a C++ coder.200 If he were Satoshi, he probably wouldn’t have needed one.
He has since left Ripple and begun work on another Bitcoin project.
It’s also worth noting that, soon after joining the BitcoinTalk forums, he asked some fairly basic questions about Bitcoin in a prose that is not as precise as Satoshi’s.
There are parallels, no doubt. McCaleb has a history of developing peer-to-peer sharing sites, running on the edge of the law. He had an interest in digital cash. But his tendency to build something, sell it and move on suggests to me he doesn’t have Satoshi’s patience, nor would he have hoarded the bitcoins in the way that Satoshi has. He would, more probably, have sold some of them (as he has with his Ripples), but I have no proof of that.
Mark Karpelès, whose Tokyo-based company Tibanne bought MtGox from McCaleb, has also been suggested. There is that same Japanese connection. The fiasco that MtGox would become is surely evidence enough that he was no Satoshi.
The most vulnerable point of the Bitcoin set-up is the point of transference from fiat to bitcoin. Given Satoshi’s foresight, and his knowledge of the way authorities work, we can comfortably assume that an exchange and all the associated headaches is not something he would have wanted to get involved with. Why would anyone who values his privacy as much as Satoshi place himself in such a conspicuous position? It’s not like he needed the money.
Paco Ahlgren is a libertarian author and financial analyst whose name was also thrown into the hat. He denied any connection. He doesn’t have the coding skills, is much more overt in his politics than Satoshi and, as an author selling books, is considerably more avid for publicity.
The broadcaster Max Keiser is another whose name has appeared. The broadcaster has been a prominent champion of Bitcoin, but, again, he does not have the coding skills. He is also more outspoken. While Satoshi was working on Bitcoin, Keiser was making TV programmes. There isn’t time for both.
Amazingly, there is even an argument that Satoshi was Ross Ulbricht. What are these people smoking?
Would Satoshi risk everything he stands to gain by creating the de facto digital cash system on an illegal venture like the Silk Road? Satoshi was more meticulous than Ulbricht – he never accidentally left his real name and email on a website or ordered forged documents to be sent to his home address.
And, of course, Satoshi was more understated in his politics than Ulbricht and the Dread Pirate Roberts. They might both have shared the same views, but Ulbricht/the Dread Pirate Roberts were both much more vocal.
Gavin Andresen, the great coder, who would replace Martti Malmi as Bitcoin’s number two, has also been suggested. A quick glance at the conversations between the two at BitcoinTalk shows there are clearly two different people talking. In addition, they have different coding styles.
‘If you ask a geek to look at some of the code I’ve written in the past’, says Andresen, ‘and look at Satoshi’s early code, they can tell it is written by two different people, a different writing style. I mean you can tell the difference between a Kurt Vonnegut novel and a Jackie Collins novel, or whatever. And so in the geek world, none of the geeks believe that I’m Satoshi. I mean he likes Hungarian notation for this or that variable and I’m, like, nah.’201
Malmi himself is another name that has been ventured. But he is not old enough, in my view, and his English, though excellent, is not as impeccable as Satoshi’s. A quick read of his posts reveals this.
The reclusive Japanese-American mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki was a hot favourite to be Satoshi at one stage, thanks to a YouTube video released by the outspoken Californian academic, Ted Nelson. Mochizuki made no public denial. He certainly has the writing and mathematical ability, but there is no evidence of his having the C++ coding skills, nor the background in cryptography or Cypherpunk, let alone the interest or desire to devise an electronic currency. He’s all about the maths. The plethora of academic papers he released during the 2007–10 period that Satoshi was developing Bitcoin indicates he would also not have had the time for Bitcoin.
The Munich-based trio Neal J King, Charles Bry and Vladimir Oksman were brought into the fray as a result of a patent they filed a few days before the Bitcoin website was registered. Professor Penenberg, who was Satoshi-sleuthing for Fast Company, argued that it contained some suspiciously similar terms, including the phrase ‘computationally impractical to reverse.’ Except their patent actually contained the phrase ‘reverse-map’, which is different.
Penenberg was also excited by the fact that bitcoin.org was registered in Finland and Charles Fry had travelled to Finland in 2007. The site was registered in Finland for no such reason – it was because Martti Malmi had registered it there. King, Bry and Oksman are a trio – not the one-man band that Satoshi appears to be – they have no background in Cypherpunk culture and their patent was for something very different to Bitcoin.
John Noecker Jr has run stylometrics tests on King, Bry and Oksman, as well as mathematicians Shinichi Mochizuki and Michael Clear, once the New Yorker’s favourite man. Noecker found that King was the most likely of all of them. He then ran the same tests on Hal Finney and concluded ‘Finney is the most likely of all of them.’ And we know Finney is not Satoshi.
Jon Matonis from the Bitcoin Foundation is another suggestion that has been made. Matonis had the vision – he was writing about a digital cash world back in the 1990s, but he doesn’t have the coding skills. The author Robert Hettinga, who focuses on financial cryptography, has also been suggested. Hettinga is another one who has the vision, but he is probably too outspoken – and again he doesn’t have the coding skills. He also prefers Unix to Windows.
David Chaum, the inventor of Digicash, is another possibility, suggested by Andrew Smith in the Sunday Times. I suspect Chaum may have been too controlling to leave his product to the open-source community. Nevertheless, in stylometrics tests, which analysed word-length frequency and character frequency, Chaum ranked as a very low possibility.202 Moreover, Bitcoin makes little use of Chaum’s ground-breaking blind signatures, which is, as blogger Gwern writes to me, ‘a bit like Newton not using Calculus’.
Acknowledgements
To everybody who has funded this book, thank you. Your names are in the back for all to see. Without your generosity and interest, this book would never have happened. I am ver
y grateful. In particular, I mention the names of Carl Holt, Brian Cartmell, Duncan Black, Wade Smith, Bill Reid, Antony Ward, Bandish Nayee, Chris Valle, William Bonner, Salim Halabi, Jane Aitken and Paul Fisher.
The world of computer programming and cryptography was new to me six months ago, but I have discovered its inhabitants to be extremely helpful and generous with their time and expertise. Most, but not all of the names that follow are from that world (and some have asked to remain anonymous). For your help in the researching, writing and fact-checking of this book I thank Rob Fischer, Adam Back, Nick Szabo, Amir Taaki, Alessandro Polverini, Wei Dai, Charles Hoskinson, Martti Malmi, Charles Morris, Jonathan James Harrison, Darren Hopkinson, Andy Alness, Seth Roberts, Adam Poulton, John Noeker Jnr, Jesse Lozano, Paul Gordon and Richard Boase.
I would like to thank the Bitcoin and open-source communities for all that you do online. The contribution that people make to the internet every day in terms of the sharing of ideas, information, knowledge and experience make it the most invaluable resource. You have all made Bitcoin happen.
A special thank you is reserved for Toby Bray, CEO of MoneyWeek, for your immense editorial contribution: feedback that is always prompt and detailed – despite being extremely busy with other, more lucrative endeavours – strong opinions, useful techniques to help me through the tricky stuff and an exceptional understanding of what people want to read.
Thank you also to the maverick that is Gwern Branwen, another prompt replier, highly intelligent and laconic, for your many suggestions and your eye for detail.
I asked Gwern to read this book for what he does know, I asked my dad for what he doesn’t. Aged 82, as computer-illiterate a man as you could ever hope to meet, if Terence Frisby can follow it all, anybody can. Thanks Dad, as ever, for the notes.
I would like to thank everyone at Unbound – in particular editor Isobel Frankish, Caitlin Harvey, Dan Kieran, Baldur Bjarnason, Xander Cansell, Charlie Gleason, Rachael Kerr, Cathy Hurren and Fiona Dempsey. A special mention must be saved for Tim Mahar for so respectfully smoothing over a rough situation, for copy editor Sarah Chamberlain and for the indefatigable Jane Beaton in charge of PR.
I thank Adrian Sear of Soundtracks for recording and mixing the audiobook. What a sound engineer you are. I also thank social networking expert Jimmy Leach because I so rudely didn’t thank him properly for Life After the State. And I thank Tamsin Rickeard for her invaluable help – I haven’t forgotten.
Last, but not least I thank Satoshi Nakamoto. You have given the world something special.
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