Brace yourself for a fresh round of fake Satoshi's

in bitcoin •  7 years ago  (edited)

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Episode #359 of the Let's Talk Bitcoin! podcast — my favorite cryptocurrency-related podcast — was released yesterday (2018-03-11). It was a conversation between Stephanie Murphy, @aantonop, and Adam B. Levine titled All Satoshis are Fake Satoshis. Start listening at 25:20 to learn about a fresh round of Satoshi imposters.

From Adam:

Every now and then I get emails from people who say they are Satoshi. And I once had Satoshi buy me dinner in Nashville. I have a good relationship with Satoshi. ... In the last two weeks, I was contacted by, a very, not necessarily convincing, but a very detail-oriented Satoshi, who is getting ready to release a book about how Satoshi created Bitcoin.

However, this satoshi couldn't provide cryptographic evidence that he possessed private keys believed to have been created by Satoshi. Adam was thus immediately skeptical:

Satoshi set it up in such a way so that if Satoshi were to come back it would be basically impossible to tell unless he could do certain cryptographic things, which so far no one has been able to do.

It's worth noting that having Satoshi's keys doesn't necessarily prove someone is Satoshi (although it would be more plausible). However, if Satoshi deleted his private keys, then he made an irrevocable decision to never be able to cryptographically assert his identity as Satoshi. I think this is highly probable as the keys would be a liability for remaining anonymous.

Adam continues with the story of the fresh fake Satoshis:

I had a Satoshi reach out to me, who said that he was writing a book. And I was like alright prove you're Satoshi to me. Sign something with a Satoshi key. And he was like, "yeah, I can't do that, but take a look at this narrative". And so I read this narrative and it's from this developer who claims that he's one third of the satoshi pair with Craig Wright and Dave Kleiman being the other ones. … I get to the end of the narrative and I find this one part I really can fact check, which is a connection to Zachtronics Games. And I contact the founder of Zachtronics Games and he's like this is nonsense … so I reach out to this Satoshi... and he tells me that actually this isn't his story. That that story was written by someone else who's claiming to be Satoshi, incorrectly, and that person accessed Satoshi's emails and used those emails to reverse engineer … all of this stuff.

Adam nicknames these two new imposters as Scrontee and Fauxtoshi.

Craig Wright

The podcast briefly discusses an ongoing Satoshi imposter, Craig Wright. From @aantonop:

Craig Wright did produce proof and it was forged. The only proof he produced was a fraud.

You can read more about Craig Wright's misleading claim of Satoshi's signature in Craig Wright's New Evidence That He Is Satoshi Nakamoto Is Worthless. My favorite quick from that article is from Peter Todd:

It would be like if I was trying to prove that I was George Washington and to do that provided a photocopy of the constitution and said, look, I have George Washington's signature.

What motivates fake Satoshi's?

Recently, Dave Kleiman's estate has sued Craig Wright, seeking 1,100,111 BTC. So claiming he was Satoshi really backfired for Craig Wright. Adam speculates fake Satoshi's may be motivated by increasing their credibility (perhaps as marketing for a book or ICO scam). @aantonop thinks it's more likely Narcissistic Personality Disorder:

This behavior craves the attention, even the negative attention that declares them to be lairs and frauds. That drives it even more than the possibility of profit. This is the expression of mental illness in a public forum.

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Didn’t Craig Wright claim that Satoshis bitcoin stash was held in trust to be released in 2020? If so that would substantially help in his claim, but Iam with you. I don’t believe he is Satoshi!

Apparently that's the claim, at least per this Wired article titled Bitcoin’s Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Is Probably This Unknown Australian Genius:

There’s also a PDF authored by Kleiman, who died in April of 2013, in which he agrees to take control of a trust fund, codenamed the "Tulip Trust," containing 1.1 million bitcoins. The PDF is signed with Kleiman’s PGP signature, a cryptographic technique that ensures it couldn’t have been altered post-signature.

Yeah cause Satoshi used law firms and not cryptography to secure his bitcoin... what a joke. In the podcast, @aantonop discusses how scammers use appeals to authority to overcome doubt (since they cannot use appeals to cryptography, of course). Craig Wright takes appeals to authority to an extreme with his "wheelbarrow of degrees" stunt:

Real Satoshi is sleeping on bed made of money, why would he come forward?

Is he? Certainly, Satoshi mined many coins in the first year of Bitcoin (see here and here). However, trying to spend any of those bitcoins now would likely unmask Satoshi. Therefore, Satoshi's bitcoins aren't spendable money if he'd like to remain anonymous. As I mention in the post, it's possible Satoshi purged the keys to his addresses, as a security measure.

The market considers those coins as dead. The second they moved, btc would crash through the floor.

Eh. I'm more of the opinion that the price is set not by traders doing market cap calculations, but just based on the supply and demand on exchanges at any given point in time. So yeah, selling 1 million BTC via an exchange is going to move the price down, no matter how you structure it.

It's an interesting question how sentiment would react to Satoshi's stash moving. I think you're right it'd create a sell off, since it could make investors nervous. Not sure if this has any historical merit... one possibility would be to see whether the price has reacted in the past to bitcoin days destroyed:

bitcoin-days-destoyed.png

BTW, the data in that chart is from https://blockchain.info/charts, which no longer provides this chart (too bad). However, it looks like https://oxt.me/charts has a more up to date chart of BDD.

Bollocks! I'M the REAL Satoshi Nakamoto!

Wow! This is going to be my favorite place to keep myself updated about Bitcoin. Much thanks upvoted!

Amazing

We could all use something positive. Here is a FUD bustin Hip Hop track to dispel negativity and bring excitement into the long view specifically for Steemit crypto insiders. I think you'll dig it, a lot! And this is the only way I know of to stop it from slipping into obscurity...