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Hal Finney as Satoshi. Interesting twitter thread and Marginal Revolution link.
https://twitter.com/adamscochran/status/1761111031928033749?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
I guess on an Occam’s Razor type analysis I have always thought Hal Finney was the creator. Key reasons:
The Occam’s Razor bit is it seems tough to believe there is some other guy out there who fits all these characteristics but chose to disappear and is now sitting on wealth that likely makes him the richest man in the world or close to it. Even true nerds at some point get bored and want the yacht and yacht girls.
This community specifically always had a few connections to the bitcoin community with SBF from the rationalist but less known George Mason and their bloggers were some of the first promoters of bitcoin outside of the small developer group. Hal Finney was a blogger with George Mason Economist Robin Hanson on Overcoming Bias. The SlateStar community seems to have had two feeding grounds either from fans of the George Mason blogging mafia or the rationalist community.
Here is a Hal Finney blogpost:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/overcoming-disahtml
Personally I knew about bitcoin from the George Mason guys back when you could mine coins for sub-pennies. I always liked the crypto punk guys who started bitcoin but dislike what it became as a gambling asset. Out of laziness I never mined it but I’m fairly certain I would have sold it for a nice profit at $50-100 if I had.
The one use case for crypto has always been the Argentina problem. My trad neoliberalism led me to want to fix Argentina with a little Milton Friedman got in the way of me being an early adopter and billionaire. Missed my shot like many others.
I am not sure I see a broader culture war angle but within Bitcoin there seems to be a dislike of Hal as Satoshi by the maxi community but I do not know most of that story. It’s also somewhat interesting of Bitcoin being Cal Tech built but most of the big promoters were East Coast Ivy/Finance.
I'm more persuaded to believe it was Len Sassaman. The background, experience, personal values, evident time zone... it's all there.
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Burning one's private key while Bitcoin was still in relative infancy is a pretty solid way to avoid temptation to spend it.
Or, perhaps, time-locking the key in such a way that the funds are only available if Bitcoin is still around in 20 years.
The guy came up with a technical solution to like half a dozen incentive problems all at once, having a technical solution to his own incentives seems trivial in comparison.
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Not mentioned, but more evidence for Finney.
Re
This includes committing code to it. Probably someone inclined could look at Finney's commits to see if they were a stylistic match for Satoshi's.
Ideally one could also see if he has other published work in C++ to compare to.
Western US, US waking hours, and experience with Visual Studio and C++ don't really narrow it down. Get all the tech workers from Seattle, the Bay Area, and LA together in a stadium or two and you can't throw a stone without hitting multiple people who meet those criteria.
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This is unpersuasive because a real living Satoshi wouldn’t reveal himself by living large, he could just be ‘another very early adopter from the cryptographic community who made a lot of money’. Death isn’t necessary for anonymity, all the viable candidates were well known in the niche digital cryptography / privacy world and so could plausibly have made a fortune on Bitcoin over the years; many of their peers did.
My guess is that Adam Back knows who it is.
The blockchain keeps track of who owns coins and Satoshi's coins have never moved. The original creator has never sold any.
(Although the original creator could have created other wallets with smaller amounts that have been spent).
My pet conspiracy theory is that aliens dropped the white paper and mined the original blocks.
I don't really know much about finance, but why couldn't Satoshi use his bitcoins as collateral to borrow money, just as super wealthy people whose money is tied up in stocks do?
It seems much easier for Satoshi to simply also have a second (or third fourth and fifth etc) wallet with enough millions in it that there's no need to touch the original for most values of living large.
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Would have to disclose/prove to the people involved that he is indeed Satoshi, which is hard to do. Also Satoshi actually moving his Bitcoins would cause massive reverberations throughout the Crypto economy so it isn't really just a matter of 'I am Satoshi, here is proof, I have 2 million Bitcoins give me a loan'.
It's like if you were in a gold-based economy and half of the Gold had been used to create the tomb of King Satoshi II, and there would be a Jihad upon anybody who actually touched said gold. Yes, King Satoshi II's heir would be wealthy in the sense of owning that gold, but actually moving it would be impractical.
On the contrary, Bitcoin makes proving ownership trivial: Satoshi only needs to disclose his public key (which can be verified using public information in the blockchain) and then sign a random challenge string provided by the lenders to prove that he has the corresponding private key. This proves that he has the ability to spend those coins.
(Technically, this doesn't prove he is Satoshi, original author of the Bitcoin whitepaper, per se, but rather that he has the cryptographic keys needed to spend millions worth of Bitcoin, but the latter is what the lender really cares about anyway.)
Yeah, but the act of spending those coins would cause severe reverberations throughout the Crypto economy which is what makes it tricky.
Then again a sufficiently large Crypto entity could lend him money so he doesn't move the Bitcoins.
There really is an interesting Catch-22 that is based off a meta-question:
Do people investing in Bitcoin believe that Satoshi's coins will EVER move, or that they're effectively 'burned?'
I have no doubt that the price would move down heavily if the Satoshi wallet showed any activity, but to what extent is that possibility already 'priced in.'
And indeed, to what extent is the fact that Satoshi would know moving the coins would disrupt the markets a sufficient reason to not try to move them?
Realistically, the ultimate win condition for Satoshi is for Bitcoin to become a universally accepted currency so integrated into the global economy that he can start purchasing whatever he wants with his bitcoin directly, rather than having to convert.
The more integrated BTC is into the global economy the bigger a deal the Satoshi coins moving would be, though. It does feel unlikely that a hypothetically alive and healthy Satoshi's participation in Crypto is exclusively limited to those coins, though, so he's likely not struggling for money.
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I agree with all of this. And yet, Elon Musk borrows silly money off the strength of his Tesla stock, even though it could not be easy for him to move it.
It would of course, be hard to verify that you were Satoshi, but Satoshi is a talented cryptographer. He would be able to do it if anyone is.
My guess is banking regulations would prevent loaning billions to an anonymous person. You could do it outside the US but even the the long arm of American financial regulations goes to a lot of places.
Like maybe Russia would lend to an anonymous US person backed by bitcoin. But then you also become public enemy to the deep state.
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Completely trivial actually. You only need to sign a message with the same keys used to generate any of his known wallets. This is such a common thing that we're developed a protocol for exchanges to do it called "proof of reserves". Satoshi could prove he is himself with total certainty in a matter of seconds.
This is what makes the claims of impersonators like Wright so ridiculous and funny, because any story of someone that want to claim to be Satoshi has to start with "I lost access to all the information Satoshi would know to store extremely carefully, but it is really me I swear".
The hard part would be to provide a proof and keep that a secret. Since Satoshi's identity is such a notorious secret.
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Hal has been floated as a candidate for years and the evidence never bears out. Why would Satoshi create a Hal persona? Whoever Satoshi is, he took meticulous steps to not be found , and probably never will. If I had to guess he is a non-native person living in England. It's probably not Nick Szabo or Lens either.
again, to the media, it's evident they are different people
https://coingeek.com/the-running-bitcoin-challenge-in-hal-finney-memory-is-on-again/
I think you are confusing consequent and antecedent, if you instead ask "why would Hal create a Satoshi persona?" the answer becomes obvious. If the goal is to remain hidden it will always be more difficult to find something that does not exist than something that does.
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There have been other possible candidates, but Finney or a Finney led cabal was always the most plausible. And these new documents only strengthen that theory. Satoshi being dead or having his keys destroyed (which is the same thing) makes the most sense, I doubt even the most principled libertarian would be able to resist spending tens of billions of dollars forever.
Of course this is the boring rational theory. What is the most fun outlandish one that's still remotely plausible?
I think my favorite one is that it actually is Craig Wright and that he's just trying to convince us all he had nothing to do with it with his antics, after all who do you suspect least?
Some of the most principled libertarians worked in academia or were writers, the opposite of or private enterprise or cutthroat corporate capitalism. So it does not seem implausible the most principled libertarians would not spend the money.
I'm not saying this to impugn on the morality of principled libertarians rather than the weakness of men in general. Anyone with a button they could press to instantly become a multi-billionaire is subject to temptation. If Satoshi is smart he threw away the keys long ago to secure himself from his own temptation. But death is certainly the most final way of doing so.
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Hal Finley is the Bruce Kent to Satoshi's Masculine Mongoose. He's the subject of (and a willing participant in) an elaborate frame-job that links him to Satoshi, which provides investigators a convenient excuse to stop looking.
I don’t think Masculine Mongoose fully works. If I’m understanding it correct Masculine Mongoose and Bruce Kent really are different people.
This would fail with Hal because the naming of Satoshi seems to have come from a neighbor of Hal. Which implies he was involved before Satoshi was even created and in fact named Satoshi. Which gets to a point where it sounds like a small group had someone created the final code, someone ran the code and do first mining, and then worked together to create a mythological founder most likely so no one would take the heat if used for criminal purposes or so no one person would be the creator of the money.
I feel like this train of thought only moves Hal from sole creator to a co-creator. I think it’s tough to deny he had some role in creating the Satoshi character. The real code creator would have had to been talking to Hal, had Hal review the code and say this is it, then together work on creating the founding story.
I'm suddenly reminded of scenario in the Moon is a Harsh Mistress where the alleged founder and public-face of the lunar Independence movement is actually an AI-generated amalgam of multiple people.
"Adam Selene" does ring a lot like "Satoshi Nakamoto" as an obvious archetypal pseudonym.
The Bourbaki option is tempting, but if you read through Satoshi's correspondence he maintains a style and demeanor that I think precludes the possibility of there being multiple people behind his online presence. Multiple people behind the work is a possibility, but there was a Satoshi.
Though it strikes me that with the advent of LLMs, it would be a lot easier now to make a synthetic person.
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