'Satoshi Nakamoto' Just Posted. WTF Is Going On?
> Few mysteries in the tech world surpass that of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin whose identity has not been discovered more than a decade after cryptocurrencies took off. So, when a Twitter account with the handle @Satoshi and calling itself “Satoshi Nakamoto” posted a tweet this week, it caused a bit of a stir.
“Bitcoin is a predicate machine. Over the following months, we shall explore different aspects that were not explicitly contained within the white paper,” the account tweeted on Monday. “These aspects are all parts of bitcoin, and are important. Some of these ideas were touched upon in the early years; now is the time to extrapolate and explain.”
The tweet was the @Satoshi account’s first since 2018—at that time, it posted the entire Bitcoin white paper—and instantly gained wide attention. At the time of writing, it has over 8,000 retweets and over 18,000 likes. But as with most things involving crypto and its pseudonymous creator, the situation is anything but clear-cut. In fact, there’s virtually no chance that the tweet came from the real Satoshi Nakamoto, and the possible identity of the person who did post it is a rabbit hole in its own right.
The @Satoshi tweet immediately picked up a community note claiming that the tweet was written by Craig Wright, an Australian man who has for years claimed to be the real Satoshi Nakamoto despite never presenting incontrovertible evidence. Motherboard has written about Wright’s debunked claims over the years and even spoken to him, including once when he sent us a photo of a luxurious-looking airplane bathroom in an effort to show he’s not bothered by people denying he’s Nakamoto. Despite a lack of concrete evidence and early supporters eventually backpedaling—including, this week, the former CEO of Wright’s blockchain company nChain—Wright maintains that he invented Bitcoin and has continued to build business ventures around the claim.
'Satoshi Nakamoto' Just Posted. WTF Is Going On?
The risk of working on social contracts and Bitcoin- Gregory Maxwell (2021)
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2014-May/005851.html
> I promise that if bad people show up with a sufficient pointy gun that
I'll do whatever they tell me to do. I'll make bad proposals, submit
backdoors, and argue with querulous folks on mailing lists, diverting
them from real development and review work, all as commanded. Maybe
I'll try to sneak out a warning of some kind, maybe... but with my
life or my families or friends lives on the line— probably not.
> ... and I think that anyone who tells you otherwise probably just
hasn't really thought it through. So what is the point of commitments
like that? People change, people go crazy, people are coerced. Crap
happens, justifications are made, life goes on— or so we hope.
> What matters is building infrastructure— both social and technical—
that is robust against those sorts of failures. If you're depending on
individual developers (including anonymous parties and volunteers) to
be somehow made more trustworthy by some promises on a mailing list
you've already lost.
> If you care about this you could instead tell us about how much time
you promise to spend reviewing technical work to make sure such
attacks cannot be successful, regardless of their origins. Where are
your gitian signatures? I think thats a lot more meaningful, and it
also improves security for everyone involved since knowing that such
attacks can not succeeded removes the motivation for ever trying.
> A lot of what Bitcoin is about, for me at least, is building systems
which are as trustless as possible— ruled by unbreakable rules
embodied in the software people chose to use out of their own free
will and understanding. Or at least thats the ideal we should try to
approximate. If we're successful the adhomenim you've thrown on this
list will be completely pointless— not because people are trusted to
not do evil but because Bitcoin users won't accept technology that
makes it possible.
> So please go ahead and assume I'm constantly being evil and trying to
sneak something in... the technology and security can only be better
for it, but please leave the overt attacks at the door. Think
gentleman spies, not a street fighting death match. The rude attacks
and characterizations just turn people off and don't uncover actual
attacks. Maybe the informal guideline should be one flame-out
personal attack per cryptosystem you break, serious bug you uncover,
or impossible problem you solve. :)
The risk of working on social contracts and Bitcoin- Gregory Maxwell (2014)
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2014-May/005851.html
> I promise that if bad people show up with a sufficient pointy gun that
I'll do whatever they tell me to do. I'll make bad proposals, submit
backdoors, and argue with querulous folks on mailing lists, diverting
them from real development and review work, all as commanded. Maybe
I'll try to sneak out a warning of some kind, maybe... but with my
life or my families or friends lives on the line— probably not.
> ... and I think that anyone who tells you otherwise probably just
hasn't really thought it through. So what is the point of commitments
like that? People change, people go crazy, people are coerced. Crap
happens, justifications are made, life goes on— or so we hope.
> What matters is building infrastructure— both social and technical—
that is robust against those sorts of failures. If you're depending on
individual developers (including anonymous parties and volunteers) to
be somehow made more trustworthy by some promises on a mailing list
you've already lost.
> If you care about this you could instead tell us about how much time
you promise to spend reviewing technical work to make sure such
attacks cannot be successful, regardless of their origins. Where are
your gitian signatures? I think thats a lot more meaningful, and it
also improves security for everyone involved since knowing that such
attacks can not succeeded removes the motivation for ever trying.
> A lot of what Bitcoin is about, for me at least, is building systems
which are as trustless as possible— ruled by unbreakable rules
embodied in the software people chose to use out of their own free
will and understanding. Or at least thats the ideal we should try to
approximate. If we're successful the adhomenim you've thrown on this
list will be completely pointless— not because people are trusted to
not do evil but because Bitcoin users won't accept technology that
makes it possible.
> So please go ahead and assume I'm constantly being evil and trying to
sneak something in... the technology and security can only be better
for it, but please leave the overt attacks at the door. Think
gentleman spies, not a street fighting death match. The rude attacks
and characterizations just turn people off and don't uncover actual
attacks. Maybe the informal guideline should be one flame-out
personal attack per cryptosystem you break, serious bug you uncover,
or impossible problem you solve. :)
