Did Satoshi Nakamoto write this book excerpt? A cable investigation

There are many who claim to be Nakamoto;
online conspiracy theories and journalistic investigations have
(19659005) During all this time, no one has proved to be Nakamoto to the satisfaction of the cryptographic community members who helped to give birth to Bitcoin. As has repeatedly stressed the skeptics of the cryptography community, the real Satoshi should have access to the cryptographic keys that control the first bitcoins – pieces that have remained for a decade. If someone claiming to be Nakamoto had to move one of these pieces to a different address or sign something with keys that only Satoshi possesses, it would be a very good form of verification.

This new Nakamoto – who still does not want his real identity revealed – refused to move coins or sign anything with his own keys. "It" (if it's him) is not, according to information provided to WIRED, one of Nakamoto's three main suspects: Wright, Nick Szabo, or Dorian Nakamoto, the identified person previously by Newsweek.

WIRED reached out to several members of the first bitcoin community to try to verify the authenticity of the extract – and came back, as every time Satoshi Nakamoto is seen in the wild, with inconclusive answers.

BITCOIN, HE WROTE

The extract, which Nakamoto describes as a "short story," includes a cryptogram that he says reveals the title of his next book. The simple substitution of numbers for the letters gives the words "Honne and Tatamae", a transliteration of a Japanese phrase intended to express the contrast between a person's private feelings and his public behavior. Similarly, the excerpt is entitled "Duality".

The text of the extract contains a handful of potentially new identification details. Nakamoto describes her mother as an author ("albeit a small print") and her grandmother as the founder of a very small publishing house. At 14, he wrote, he was drawn to the cypherpunk community, "where anonymity was as fundamental as breathing." He says he was in his twenties when he started publishing articles on Bitcoin while he was working as a university researcher in a lab. he invented the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto because it was the Japanese equivalent of "John Smith" – although he almost confirms that it is not Japanese.

The author devotes considerable space to the new excerpt to explain his desire for privacy, describing how he ran the network on his own computers using anonymous software. He notes, however, that he forgot a detail by protecting his identity: timestamps. "Some were quite intuitive to graph the times I would post on the forums and would engage in the repository and form a literal" map "of when I was awake and when I was asleep." , he writes, a map that identifies him as pretending to keep somebody's hours on the east coast of the United States.

Most of the excerpt offers a history of the origins of bitcoin by detailing the alleged correspondence of the author with other prominent members of the cryptographic community: Adam Back, Wei Dai, Gavin Andresen, and Hal Finney. Bitcoin, he writes, "was born from the many failed attempts of many groups, and the only reason he was successful was because he was in the right place, at the right time."

The document is full unverified details on the first days of the project. The chain of blocks, he writes, was originally called the "time chain." A fork, the mechanism by which cryptocurrency projects separated, originally called a "connection point". bitcoins as he did, he proposes this explanation: "Why 21 million? The truth is that it was an enlightened guess."

The extract also refers, obliquely and mysterious, to the possibility that Satoshi Nakamoto is, or at some point was, a group of people. This seems to be the subject of one of the most enigmatic sentences of the document, which is written in italics: "I will say this though, consider for a moment the distinction; as to whether I had any help or if I was part of this creative help, and then separate that from the person who was following, which was very consistent for the most part.

The success of bitcoin, says the author, completely by surprise. "It would work very well and stand out, or fail spectacularly, and although I've seen many uses of bitcoin out of the mainstream, like narrow niches where traditional currency does not really match reward points, to the donation chips, to the game currency, I never expected that Bitcoin "

The new so-called Nakamato devotes almost a whole page of the extract to Harold" Hal "Finney, a computer scientist who received the very first Bitcoin transaction and who He died in 2014. Nakamoto calls Finney "the first believer in what I was trying to do" and "one of the most intellectually intelligent minds with whom I've had the opportunity to talk. "Finney, he writes, was" essential "at Bitcoin, he was the first to report a bug in the system:" Until now, I always think about the quality of a person and the question of knowing how, if it was not for him, Bitcoin would not have succeeded like that. When I did not have support, when it was just me, Hal was the only other person who believed. "

Given that much of the excerpt describes the correspondence between the crypto pioneers, it is striking that Nick Szabo, one of the leading members of the cryptographic community who worked on the Bitcoin precursors – and a character often suspected of being Nakamoto.

Adam Back, another pioneer of crypto-money widely quoted in the new excerpt, says that it's very possible that all the verifiable details of the History already exist in the public domain, making it difficult to determine whether the writings reflect true knowledge, first-hand or simply thorough research by a hoaxer.The new Nakamoto was unable to answer the specific questions posed by Back, through WIRED, regarding their first correspondence, saying that this had happened ten years ago and that he had wiped the contents of this email server when he had left the Bitcoin project

. details in history already exist in the public domain,
which makes it difficult to determine if the writings reflect true,
In the new document, he says that he left the Bitcoin project before Christmas 2010, rather than the long-standing publicly acknowledged date of his departure, April 2011. As he explains, "I've doing my best to leave no claim that I've ever existed, and all that put me in relation, I put in a series of files, so in case I'm party, no matter who could take the character.There are other more serious reasons to leave that I will not include here but will be mentioned in the book. "

Gavin Andresen, one of early pioneers of the project that could presumably check if Nakamoto's anticipated departure date was accurate, refused to speculate on the authenticity of the document, saying by email, "No comment – I am removed from the game & # 39 who was Satoshi & # 39 ;.

The game "who was Satoshi" is more than a nice online salon exercise The researchers think that the person or people who invented Bitcoin still hold more than 900,000 Bitcoins, a fortune that, even at depressed prices, is down about 70% from its maximum value of US $ 22,000. By the end of last year, Nakamoto would have about $ 5.8 billion, roughly the equivalent of Ralph Lauren's fortune and enough, if it's American, to place Nakamoto am. Nakamoto says in the extract, continuing: "Because the truth is too special to give, ask for a long answer, which will be in the book."

Additional reportage by Andy Greenberg

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