I think there's a pretty good chance Adam Back is Satoshi, but I don't think this is a great article. Perhaps he's rendering a careful scientific process in a way that makes for a readable narrative, but as written, it sounds like a lot of gut feel and confirmation bias.
The biggest new contribution to the Satoshi question seems to be ad hoc stylometry. To have faith in his methodology, he should be testing it on identitying other people. If he were to show me that a repeatable methodology that doesn't require hand tuning can identify other people with low error rate, and it said Back=Satoshi, that would be much more convincing.
Like so much tech writing done by non engineers, there are many places where mundane things are made to sound remarkable (e.g. Black's thesis used C++, the "heated debate").
It seems very unlikely to me. I've had personal correspondence with Satoshi, and met Adam Back in person, and I can't see it.
Actually I don't see how anyone involved with Blockstream could be identified as Satoshi. They never believed in what Satoshi was doing and built their whole company around the claim that Satoshi had screwed up the core of the system's design, despite that nothing about the design or its assumptions had changed. They spent years raising investor capital (why would you do that if you were rich?) specifically to build a system designed to replace Bitcoin for end users.
The last time I met Adam he was trying to convince me to not continue working on Satoshi's original design, and none of his arguments were technical. Satoshi had a totally different approach.
I have no idea about any of this stuff - but if I were trying to hide my identity I would go out of my way to misalign my real self with my hidden identity.
e.g. Pick a name that puts people on a false trail.
Satoshi can't spend any of his bitcoins without tanking bitcoin's price. So Satoshi needs to find some other way to support himself. Creating bitcoin related companies is one way.
Nobody knows which coins Satoshi owns, it's just a guess for the very early coins and that guess gets progressively less accurate as time goes by. And this was a long time ago. There was no particular reason to think back then that Satoshi spending his coins would tank the price. Everyone back then was spending Bitcoins because that was the only way to build the economy. The idea that if his coins move everyone would panic is a post-2015 idea when Blockstream killed Bitcoin as a genuine means of exchange and it became all about sitting on them as a speculative "investment".
But if he did want to spend he could just start from his last coins backwards.
This [1][2][3] seems to have a methodology for identifying Satoshi's coins, mined from 2009 to May 2010. But yes, for coins mined after May 2010, he likely can spend without scrutiny.
>The idea that if his coins move everyone would panic is a post-2015 idea
Here are 2 people in 2013 expressing that idea: [4][5].
There's ambiguity here. When people talk about crashing the market they mean if he attempted to sell every last coin he owns for dollars all at once. Of course that would be a signal of lost confidence. What I mean is the more likely scenario of spending coins to achieve some specific goal or project.
It would also seem likely that if he at any point was alive and realised he wouldn't be able to touch his original wallets, he'd still get in early enough to be rich from subsequently crested wallets nobody would suspect.
I find it likely that someone who realised that if they were to touch that paper fortune the Bitcoin price will totally crater would have made additional billions they could actually access by mining more bitcoin at a point where the difficulty was still ridiculously low.
The value of the bitcoins in those early wallets isn't real, because they are the most watched bitcoin wallets in existence, and any movement there would send shockwaves through the crypto space.
First, they could just liquidate all their other BTC before moving the Satoshi coins.
Second, even with a significant price impact, the net worth of an additional 1M BTC would surely outweigh any realistic price slippage.
Third, the price probably wouldn't even crash that much. We're talking about a 5% increase in supply... which rationally, should result in a ~5% dip in price. I know the market would overreact, but I doubt it would be by much more than say 20%.
The volume would involve a crazy increase in the actual float, but the bigger issue is that everyone watching knows this is Satoshi, and any sudden move to sell would be a massive shock to the market because the current presumption is that those coins are off the market for the long term. If they are not, it changes a lot of calculations.
And assuming they have lots of other bitcoin to liquidate first, the reasons to liquidate the early coins are basically gone. If they believe the price will continue to rise, and have enough wealth from later coins, they'd have little reason to rock the boat.
This 5% increase is actually huge, because the amount of bitcoins in actual free float is very small. The same coins get traded over and over while the vast majority sits in cold storage. A 5% supply sell off would eat up all of the order books, and that's before everyone else starts selling off.
Do note that the selloff would be automatic, huge wallets are monitored 24/7.
If I was Satoshi, I would go a to big bank and sell the private key directly for huge discount. Still a billionaire, no trace.
1. Someone so purely interested in the tech and not money they'd give up the wealth
2. Governments, specifically the ones that don't consider a few billion to be a lot
3. Someone who's dead
Why is being dead a convincing idea? How old do you think he is/was, and why would it be likely that he would die? When do you think he died? The idea that he died doesn't explain how he came out of hiding twice.
Losing access by intentionally deleting the keys? That agrees with my point that he knows it would cause problems to spend them, and decided not to spend them.
Losing access by accidentally deleting the keys? Would Satoshi really be that careless?
He lost access to the wallet either by mistake (never even saved the key) or because he willingly destroyed the key for philosophical reasons. Or he is just dead.
Depends on what you mean by "win". It would be possible to go in, topple the regime and secure the nuclear material. But only at astronomical cost and years of blowback
"Regime Change" has become a modern term for vassalization. We should not be surprised that countries with no reason to be a US vassal, and no long-term ties to the US refuse to remain vassals.
So then what would we achieve? nuclear material is cheap (10s of billions) relative to a multi-decade occupation (single digit trillions). It's undoubtedly true that Iran would revert to it's preferred form of government, geopolitical orientation, and nuclear capability once the US left.
Winning a war means achieving your political goals while preventing the enemy from achieving theirs. Most of the time, you've won the war when the enemy effectively admits they lost.
The lack of will to use sufficient force to win a war is fundamentally no different from not having that force in the first place. Both are equally real constraints on your ability to win the war.
How’d that plan work out in Iraq or Afghanistan, both much smaller, less armed countries? Decades and trillions spent, and what exactly did the US “win”?
Probably a risk worth taking; defending a pipeline is much easier than escorting huge, slow-moving ships through a 24km-wide Strait laced with mines and peppered by artillery and missiles.
Pipelines can be protected. Just putting it in the ground for example. Or you build a "bomb" proof shelter over it - Iran's missiles are not bunker busters, we know how powerful they are and can design for that. Air defense systems are getting better too.
I did one of these experiments around 2011, and because it was so obvious that the experiment was contrived, there was a lot of misdirection around the actual experiment, which was testing something totally different from the pretense. Like different responses to font color or something like that.
I lost an audio mixer to a bad surge last year. I don't know whether it was additional load or just really bad fluctuations that damaged the device. Nothing else bit the dust, but the, digital board in this mixer got bricked.
Just saw this days later - I'm not sure if it was a surge specifically, but it got bricked after a really wacky power swing. So maybe not a surge, exactly.
It essentially depends on how many back-and-forth calls are required. If the model returns a request for multiple calls at once, then the reply can contain all responses and you only pay once.
If the model requests tool calls one-by-one (e.g. because it needs to see the response from the previous call before deciding on the next) then you have to pay for each back-and-forth.
If you look at popular coding harnesses, they all use careful prompting to try to encourage models to do the former as much as possible. For example opencode shouts "USING THE BATCH TOOL WILL MAKE THE USER HAPPY" [1] and even tells the model it did a good job when it uses it [2].
Not necessarily, take a look at ex OpenApi Responses resource, you can get multiple tool calls in one response and of course reply with multiple results.
The biggest new contribution to the Satoshi question seems to be ad hoc stylometry. To have faith in his methodology, he should be testing it on identitying other people. If he were to show me that a repeatable methodology that doesn't require hand tuning can identify other people with low error rate, and it said Back=Satoshi, that would be much more convincing.
Like so much tech writing done by non engineers, there are many places where mundane things are made to sound remarkable (e.g. Black's thesis used C++, the "heated debate").
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