Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, to reveal their real identity tomorrow. The news made it multiple media outlets from two sites that manage Bitcoin for Nakamoto.
The legendary Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto has said that they will reveal their true identity tomorrow. The announcement will be made on two sites that management Bitcoins; SatoshiNRH.com and Ivymclemore.com.
This news has thrown the crypto community in a tizzy. Many forum posts have blown up with scepticism about the announcement. On reddit, users said that they would only believe the announcement if Nakamoto actually moved certain Bitcoin from the 980,000 that they have and makes the announcement with the old handle. Many on the forums believe it is just a publicity stunt.
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the pseudonymous person or persons who developed bitcoin, authored the bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed bitcoin’s original reference implementation. As part of the implementation, Nakamoto also devised the first blockchain database. In the process, Nakamoto was the first to solve the double-spending problem for digital currency using a peer-to-peer network. Nakamoto was active in the development of bitcoin up until December 2010. This was according to Wikipedia.
Satoshi took part in discussions on the forums and helped to develop the Bitcoin Network in its infancy. He or She mined the first block or the Genesis Block of the Network. According to the Public Ledger of Bitcoin, they own 980,000 bitcoins. Whoever Satoshi is, s/he or they are billionaires.
The search for the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto was the favorite passtime of cryptographers and computer scientists. Because Satoshi used modern cryptographic techniques to hide their identity, it was an intriguing challenge for the community. While many speculate as to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, there is no consensus among the experts.
Did the NSA find Satoshi?
In an article on Medium, cryptomuse talks about the efforts of NSA to find Satoshi Nakamoto.
The ‘creator’ of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is the world’s most elusive billionaire (worth more than $7B as of November 2017). Very few people outside of the Department of Homeland Security know Satoshi’s real name. In fact, DHS will not publicly confirm that even THEY know the billionaire’s identity (they have refused my FOIA requests and those of other reporters). Satoshi has taken great care to keep his identity secret employing the latest encryption and obfuscation methods in his communications. Despite these efforts (according to my source at the DHS) Satoshi Nakamoto gave investigators the only tool they needed to find him — his own words.
Using stylometry one is able to compare texts to determine authorship of a particular work. Throughout the years Satoshi wrote thousands of posts and emails and most of which are publicly available. According to my source, the NSA was able to the use the ‘writer invariant’ method of stylometry to compare Satoshi’s ‘known’ writings with trillions of writing samples from people across the globe. By taking Satoshi’s texts and finding the 50 most common words, the NSA was able to break down his text into 5,000 word chunks and analyse each to find the frequency of those 50 words. This would result in a unique 50-number identifier for each chunk. The NSA then placed each of these numbers into a 50-dimensional space and flatten them into a plane using principal components analysis. The result is a ‘fingerprint’ for anything written by Satoshi that could easily be compared to any other writing.
The NSA then took bulk emails and texts collected from their mass surveillance efforts. First through PRISM (a court-approved front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts) and then through MUSCULAR (where the NSA copies the data flows across fiber optic cables that carry information among the data centers of Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Facebook) the NSA was able to place trillions of writings from more than a billion people in the same plane as Satoshi’s writings to find his true identity. The effort took less than a month and resulted in positive match.
