Honest inquiry here - What I don't understand is how people think the identification of Satoshi is "bound to happen". What did the person do wrong, exactly?
Based on how I understand it, if the person did nothing wrong by inventing Bitcoin, no investigation will occur and no judge will sign off on a search warrant to get the ID data. No private investigator will be able to obtain the data either, as ISPs wouldn't just dish out private info like that without a warrant.
Did the inventor of Bitcoin do something wrong to allow for a judge to violate their privacy in a court case? That's the only way I see the info getting out, but is there a crime to allow that situation to arise?
What other (legal or illegal) path is there to identify a person who posted something online?
The space has moved past this risk for a lot of reasons, to start. And it’s hard to understand I think in light of modern (relative to pre-2018/19) widespread mainstream adoption.
But, a long term protection for BTC when it was smaller and tbh anyone’s guess how it would turn out (still is IMO), was: who are you going to haul into senate hearings, court, cryptography export control violations, whatever over BTC?
This happened ample times in the recent past before BTC with digital money attempts and cryptography projects. It’s happening now with mixers on btc and ethereum. It was a real risk to BTC in its own way.
With BTC then and now, there was no real leader though. There were important core devs and industry leads, but no one held true sway like, say, Vitalik did with eth early days.
So it wasn’t so much a firm “did something wrong” risk for BTC’s founder, but more of a concern that the US govt had taken very heavyhanded measures against many similar projects to BTC. As there was no one to target in BTC’s case, this protection played a large role in its early push into staying power.
Also going to color this with CIA had the lead dev at the time visit them to discuss it in 2011. So there was certainly some real sustained attention to it from the start.
Sounds like this person was really smart to begin with. High-level societal awareness caused them to choose the private route, and focus on releasing something for the greater good.
I wouldn't be surprised if this person never even took a single bitcoin for themselves, other than the ones used for code testing purposes. That would create another avenue for people to come after them if it became public that they hoarded some of the Bitcoin for themselves.
This. Maybe, Satoshi saw where it was going, knew it had wings, didn’t want to be the elephant’s plaything in some senate hearing, and bowed out. Sometimes people make things because it’s the right thing to do. Other times people make things because they are experimenting and seeing what sticks. This was a case of both. The right idea, at the right time, without hubris, and without someone to blame or throw in court if the experiment fails.
Satoshi could have chosen a 0 BTC subsidy in the blocks he mined. Or he could have burned all the BTC he mined. But he chose to do neither, leaving himself as the biggest BTC owner ever.
Other coins have been designed in a way where the founders can only obtain coins by mining them in very small quantities or buying them on the open market (mostly by fixing the block subsidy forever).
When in 2011 ? You seem to mean that it was unknown by then, but it wasn't : 2011 was pretty much the year when it blew up into the public consciousness, spreading from the likes of Slashdot and Ars Technica into more generalist publications (also causing its first - or was that 2nd? - bubble popping) :
(I love how I picked it randomly, and the first two subtitles are "Bitcoin and its mysterious inventor." and "It’s not clear if bitcoin is legal, but there is no company in control and no one to arrest.")
I know what you’re getting at but I disagree with the analysis and I’ll try to frame what I mean, which is somewhat the opposite.
I mean the ‘11 visit is indicative of serious attention paid to by serious people very early on relative to the rest of crypto’s history. As in, the founder was right to be cautious.
“Early on” in this case means that outside of tech pubs and curiosity pieces due to the compelling founder mystery, the space was treated as a joke by and large. Like watch Banking on Bitcoin, and imagine trying to convince critics of it at that time that ETFs, crypto aide to Ukraine, 3x nation state adoptions, custody teams at big banks, and so on were all coming. I would just completely disagree if you argued this wasn’t the theme then. So yes, 2011 and intel agency interest is quite early on.
For example, it’s taken 15 years to get tangible regulatory clarity which arguably just starting finally with the ETF.
this is like winning lotto ticket but not cashing it . anyone in theory could have read the article or related ones and bought some, but you would needed to hold
I hear your point and it's a valid one. Consider the recent case of Tornado Cash and the Open Source Is Not A Crime movement. Two individuals were arrested for developing open-source code on GitHub. Just last week, GoFundMe shut down the Tornado Cash legal defense crowdfunding. This suggests that the state is more interested in protecting itself from individuals rather than defending their rights. This could potentially set a precedent where inventors or developers of decentralized technologies could be targeted, even if they've done nothing inherently wrong. If interested you can learn more here: https://wewantjusticedao.org/
Oh this is bullshit and you know it. Another example of "we didn't call it a security so it's not a security"
They weren't arrested for the code. They were arrested for actively participating and profiting off money laundering with North Korea being a customer.
Zero-knowledge proofs are different from public ledgers. That's where the issue comes in to play. The Treasury Department has already given guidance that cryptocurrency mixers fall under Know Your Customer laws and the Bank Secrecy Act, and are required to know who exactly is using their services and how.
It's not "Criminalizing Open Source". You live in a society with laws. Obfuscating classic financial products with tech jargon worked for the first half of the decade.
Y'all are just mad it doesn't work anymore and claim "You just don't understand the technology. You haven't issued guidance on specifics of crypto currency. You can't use hundred year old laws"
Yes, you can use 100 year old laws. At the end of the day, the financial shenanigans of most crypto, exchanges, and tokens are fundamentally the same things that have already been regulated. You just have new words.
Tornado Cash is a protocol which can be used by both good and bad actors. Saying TC was responsible for bad actors laundering their crypto through the protocol is like saying auto makers are responsible for car crashes or Bob Kahn is responsible for all the illegal activities on the internet.
The technology behind Tornado Cash could also be used for instituting something like truly fully anonymous group surveys (such as those employee surveys big companies always ask you to take that they claim are "anonymous")
It doesn't have to be used for money laundering, and even if using it to move funds anonymously, that doesn't mean you're money laundering. There are good reasons to not want individuals and state actors whose jurisdiction you're not under to track your financial movements, even if you are reporting your income accurately with your own government.
> even if using it to move funds anonymously, that doesn't mean you're money laundering
The whole point of tornado cash is to "pool" funds to obfuscate who owns what. If your funds get "pooled" with funds from a criminal enterprise, then you become an accessory to that crime. Good luck using your hypothetical to convince a court otherwise.
"I didn't ask where the (other) money came from" is no defense.
“ In August 2022, the U.S. Department of the Treasury blacklisted the service, making it illegal for US citizens, residents and companies to use.” [0]
Regardless of how you feel about it, you can’t deny that they were doing something illegal under US law, and a consequence of that is that the Feds can come down on you, even if the law seems ad hoc and unfair.
> ISPs wouldn't just dish out private info like that without a warrant.
ISPs routinely sell such information for money en masse. Police departments are a major buyer, but also ad agencies and others. Plus, bribing a low level employee for access to such records, or directly infiltrating the ISP to get access yourself, is child's play to any determined group.
It is extraordinarily naive, especially in a post-Snowden world, to think that any and all information available to a private company is not also available to, at least, spy agencies of the parent state.
> Did the inventor of Bitcoin do something wrong to allow for a judge to violate their privacy in a court case? That's the only way I see the info getting out, but is there a crime to allow that situation to arise?
This feels like wrong framework/approach. Fundamentaly question here: “is it worth it for somebody?” Economists path to an answer: If for somebody[3], profit[1] of identifying satoshi outweighs the cost[2], it will be done.
[1] profit in very abstract sense. E.g. elimination of (perceived?) threat, aquisition of credible threat to other enemies, political points, money, making an example for others, showing off skills.
[2] “cost” is also used in very abstract sense. E.g. Favor from a known(or compromised) judge, man hours dedicated by FBI/MI6, money, negative press budget after “bending” some rules, risk of getting caught by supriors/underlinglins/press/constituents.
[3] “somebody” - to no surprise - can be anybody/anything. E.g. A corporation, a government, maybe single branch or department, maybe sole individual able to use his government position for personal gain, an employee of ISP, a blockchain historian, most likely Satoshi’s ex.
Important to note: both individuals and governments do break the law when they think it is necessary.
I find at least two credible incentives to find satoshi:
- bitcoin can be used to lounder money, circumvent financial sanctions, so governments want to stop that and make example of it.
- Satoshi, has 1 000 000 bitcoins. That’s a lot of money. a) banal roberies are done for far less. b) CIA or similar might want to know who wields this much resource, friend or foe (especially if its value would grow even more)
How Satoshi can be uncovered I have no idea, but the story of Silkroad owner shows, that minor slipups can be revealed after number of years.
It only takes one person at an ISP to steal and leak the data. I mean, an IRS employee leaked the president's tax returns and is currently in federal prison for it. I imagine the stakes are much lower for just stealing some IP address assignment data from an ISP archive(if such an archive exists).
> as ISPs wouldn't just dish out private info like that without a warrant
ISPs regularly sell private data to the highest bidder. Similarly with payroll providers and whatnot (a non-trivial fraction of my paystubs -- not just salary, but withholding, exempt tax status, ... -- are available to anyone with a few dollars; historically, it _seems_ like the only buyers have been employers trying to see if their salary offers aligned with my expectations).
They sell "anonymized" data, not just "aggregated". The only missing link is tying that back to a real person (i.e., they haven't solved differential privacy; they've just given the illusion that they're not selling personal data). Tying it back to a real person is easy though because the non-anonymized fields (age, gender, salary, zip-code, ...) are uniquely identifying for most individuals and are available for sale tied back to a real human from other sources which you can fuzzily join the ISP data into.
It's similar to how bitcoin transactions (before mixers and whatnot) were de-anonymized. You have the secret information (an identity), the public information (transaction history), and you're able to fuzzily join that public information to other public sources containing the secret information to also have secret information tied with the original "anonymous" source.
Just to re-emphasize, because I think it's really poorly understood: most "anonymized" data is a few additional data points away from being re-identified.
Data re-identification was already happening in 2006 (just one example below). And now there's exponentially more data available to use for this purpose.
>We apply our de-anonymization methodology to the Netflix Prize dataset, which contains anonymous movie ratings of 500,000 subscribers of Netflix, the world’s largest online movie rental service. We demonstrate that an adversary who knows only a little bit about an individual subscriber can easily identify this subscriber’s record in the dataset. Using the Internet Movie Database as the source of background knowledge, we successfully identified the Netflix records of known users, uncovering their apparent political preferences and other potentially sensitive information.
Yes you can, companies have deals with ISPs for individual real-time mobile and home browsing data. If you pay enough it has real names, otherwise it has person id and household id along with other data that makes it easy to associate with the real person or household.
American ISPs injected tracking codes into their user’s HTTP traffic so they could get paid by advertisers. I would not speak in absolutes about that, especially because anonymizing data is a hard problem which even we’ll-intended people have made mistakes with.
The USG seems pretty intent on implementing KYC across the entirety of the financial system, so it wouldn't really surprise me if they aimed to identify wallets holding large (say, $100 million USD or more) amounts of Bitcoin.
Would this not be self reported by wallet owners? Because if each transaction uses a unique wallet address, funds are very difficult to connect to an owner. Until they’re connected to a sale to fiat at least?
Dark sarcasm take: there's a large volume of early bitcoin that may or may not be lost forever. The risk of addresses that have gone dark a long time ago lighting up again must have a big influence of any bitcoin evaluation that is at least in part based on reason. Fossilized coins could hugely change the supply/demand dynamic. The documented death of a person believed to be Satoshi would significantly shift that risk assessment. Nobody would know wether the person took meaningful keys to their grave or not, but the risk equation would contain one scenario less than before in the category of old coin flood.
Idolization of Satoshi is strong. For that reason alone, if I were him/her, I would disappear. The work is self-evident and the idea a dime a dozen. The execution of it and the fact that it was accepted is what we should be idolizing. Which is exactly what happened. BTC became a thing and was no longer an idea. I reject anyone claiming to be Satoshi because Satoshi would never claim to be Satoshi. ;)
That's why I hope the truth comes out. If say, Satoshi is Len, then Satoshi is no longer a god. He's a regular dude, that suffered like many people and tragically took his own life. There's a lot to unwrap there.
Maybe, we are better off NOT knowing. Having closure could mean the end of BTC. It could mean the end of a lot of things. It could also be beginnings, no doubt. However, like Schrödinger’s cat, it’s best if it’s kept in a state of quantum entanglement.
I think people who follow / read up on the thing have a pretty good idea who it is but as you say he didn't really do anything wrong. Reasons for anonymity include not having criminals try to extort you and maybe some government having a go over money laundering or people suing for this of that so I think people with a good idea stay quiet to respect Satoshi's desires.
I've got a theory he may come out and donate to a charitable foundation when he's old and near the end.
My understanding is conspiracy people want to know if it was an alphabet agency that developed bitcoin to push a new world order of cashless currency. Or a new way to move money around anonymously and make it easier for governments and their agencies to stay anonymous.
Based on how I understand it, if the person did nothing wrong by inventing Bitcoin, no investigation will occur and no judge will sign off on a search warrant to get the ID data. No private investigator will be able to obtain the data either, as ISPs wouldn't just dish out private info like that without a warrant.
Did the inventor of Bitcoin do something wrong to allow for a judge to violate their privacy in a court case? That's the only way I see the info getting out, but is there a crime to allow that situation to arise?
What other (legal or illegal) path is there to identify a person who posted something online?