Satoshi left the scene without ever cashing anything out, and before blockchain analysis really became a thing. He's not relevant to modern bitcoin at all outside of having been a founder of it a long time ago.
If he were spending bitcoin today, he could be found and identified easily, which is likely why he (actually the conglomerate that posed as him, Satoshi isn't likely a person) left once he achieved his goals.
Of course. Various people have claimed to be Satoshi over the years, but failed to provide any sort of proof. Satoshi could either actually be one of those people, or realize that without proof he would be subject to the same fate.
I'm not trying to imply that I know who Satoshi is. More that I have a hypothesis, and I'm not really too sure how to test it.
I'm not entirely sure that I would/should/could investigate it further anyway. Satoshi seems to value his or her privacy, and even if anyone had information that could piece that shield I'm not sure they should.
But meh.. like you say. I'm probably wrong anyway. OTOH.. how would someone verify something like this? As far as I can see there is no compelling way to do it, without Satoshi deciding to unmask themselves.
Yes, especially if he's been accused of being Satoshi previously and doesn't want the world to know that. What better way for the real Satoshi to throw people off his trail than to claim to be Satoshi and offer up proof that you know will eventually be debunked?
If your goal is to eventually start spending the large quantity of initially-mined Bitcoins, it seems like the first step would be to ensure that they're never traced back to you, especially if you don't want to pay taxes on the proceeds. And getting crossed off the list of potential Satoshis is a good first step.
It no longer really matters who Satoshi is. He doesn't participate in Bitcoin development. He isn't that wealthy, yet at least.
Nor his character assassination can affect Bitcoin much, while it could a few years ago. He was pretty smart staying anonymous, he realized he would be targeted and smeared.
He's just one of several candidates[1], although I think the late Hal Finney is more likely to be Satoshi.
Another theory is that the Satoshi persona was created by a group of individuals (cypherpunks) who were involved in the early Bitcoin community, including Hal Finney and Nick Szabo.
I'm being tongue in cheek here, but to support your point a little, if Bitcoin was not generally anonymous in nature, we'd know who Satoshi is.. no? :-)
"he's enjoying dragging it out and watching all these doubters post their reasons why it's not him."
Then, as Satoshi, who is the founder of BitCoin and owner of quite a lot of them, who must be quite intelligent to be able to have created the system in the first place, he must also be quite colossally stupid and bereft of self-interest to not realize that proving the founder of BitCoin deliberately generated that much drama is likely to significantly negatively affect his substantial BitCoin holding by making a lot of people reassess the stability of BitCoin if the creator is suddenly proved to be this drama-prone.
We must also hypothesize a very rapid flip between someone who has successfully hidden the identity for this many years, the very definition of Minimum Drama, suddenly flipping to Maximum Drama.
It's not an impossible theory... which I mean, it's not impossible, and should it prove to be true, I won't apologize for this analysis because I think it'll still hold.... but it's an awfully precise one.
If by some extremely small chance he is Satoshi And his identity was close to being revealed (I think his name was first lingering in the ether around August), this could be a truly beautiful sleight of hand.
Purposely release 'proof' you know could be quickly refuted. Get the papers covering you with lots of photos and unnecessary blurb about companies you have been involved in. Drag the whole ordeal out over a week or two. Would come across as a complete loony, attention seeker in the tech community no? Quickly forgotten about and dismissed as Satoshi for a long time.
Do note! I do not imagine this is the case, but wouldn't it be great if it was?
Using any of his Bitcoin would attract far more attention than any dubiously sourced article though, and could risk proving both that he is Satoshi and still has access to an enormous amount of money. (For all we know right now he could have lost/destroyed all of his private keys).
I've been asked this a lot, especially since I also research and teach cryptocurrency technology [1]. I haven't personally tried to do that. Satoshi clearly wished to maintain their pseudonymity, and I'd rather respect that. I also think Satoshi's pseudonymity is a powerful statement about decentralized cryptocurrencies, namely that their viability rests on their technical merits, with no need to know or trust their creators.
That said, I don't blame people for trying to uncover Satoshi's identity, and it's possible that the techniques in our paper can help. The big caveat, of course, is access to a corpus that includes Satoshi's code labeled with their true identity.
Satoshi invented Bitcoin and worked on it for 3 years. Sometime in 2010, just as Bitcoin was gaining traction, he* withdrew from the project and no one has been heard from him since.
There have been many attempts to discover the real identity of this person/group/company/government but to no avail.
I believe the focus of this new analysis technique, whilst interesting in its own right, was done for the primary purpose of trying to identify Satoshi. The analysis technique purports to show that certain bitcoins were generated by the same person/computer. This information may assist the tracing of historical bitcoin transactions to their original sources. At the top of the tree is the 'genesis' block - the source of the very first bitcoins. Its reasonable to think that Satoshi mined this block considering he invented the system.
There is a thread in the Bitcoin forums[1] discussing whether the initial blocks (up to around 50) were mined by an individual or a group. There is heated debate about what, if any, facts can be concluded by analysing the early blockchain events to discover how many (and what type) of CPUs were involved in this early stage.
Chainalysis does it all the time.
Satoshi left the scene without ever cashing anything out, and before blockchain analysis really became a thing. He's not relevant to modern bitcoin at all outside of having been a founder of it a long time ago.
If he were spending bitcoin today, he could be found and identified easily, which is likely why he (actually the conglomerate that posed as him, Satoshi isn't likely a person) left once he achieved his goals.
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