So: someone created a website called "Nakamoto Family Foundation" only three days before posting there a 21 page essay that purports to be an excerpt from a forthcoming book, or series of books, to be called Duality. It isn't obvious why that was the chosen frame for getting the message out. There were plenty of other ways in which he/she/they could have gone about this. Contacting Wired, for example. The folks at Wired have covered the whole Who-and-where-is-Satoshi question for a long time, with some intensity. They would have published this 'excerpt' in a heartbeat. In fact, somebody (an alleged "proxy" for the alleged Satoshi) did contact Wired around the time the publication appeared, apparently to make sure they knew about it and would spread the word. But if they had wanted Wired to publish it, then the editors might have had questions that the pseudo-Satoshi didn't want to answer. So: what IS the message? Apparently, the message is...
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Those of us who care about the identity of the mysterious fellow, or combine, known as Satoshi Nakamoto have had something new to talk about in recent days. For those who don't care, you may be excused. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, here are the basics in one graf: From October 2008 to December 2010 a person or persons calling himself/themselves Satoshi Nakamoto developed bitcoin, authored a paper explaining it to the world, and engaged in discussions about it with a (then small) circle of interested parties. This was the start of something big. Bitcoin gave rise to a slew of other cryptos, and the underlying tech, the blockchain, has found and is still finding uses far beyond the issue of cryptocurrency use or value. Some people believe that the creation of Bitcoin was and is as big a deal as, say, the creation of the worldwide web. So who is he? And might he be planning a comeback in some form? Or has the comeback itself already happened and fi...
So: now that Wired and Gizmodo have outed Australian Craig Wright, and Wright has owned up to it...is he really Nakamoto? Has the question of the origins of bitcoin been put to rest? Dan Kaminsky, a computer security researcher, has said that he and other researchers who've looked into this "have got him dead to rights." That is: that Wright is pulling a con. Jerry Brito, the executive director of a nonprofit research organization that studies currency issues, agrees. Wright has "provided no cryptographic evidence verifiable by the public, and many of his answers sound plain fishy." Even Wired seems to have changed sides. The cryptographic evidence adduced one way or the other is difficult for a non-expert to follow. Here is a simple point, though. Wright's company, Cloudcroft, a data analytics concern, has claimed to own two supercomputers, one of which was manufactured by SGI, the company formerly known as Silicon Graphics. But ... SGI denies i...
As you probably know, dear reader, the crypto-currency Bitcoin, the first and so far most successful of the world's crypto-currencies, is generally described as the invention of one Satoshi Nakamoto. And that name is generally understood as a pseudonym for a more shadowy person or group. About the actual identity of whom a variety of theories have bloomed. Why care? Other than the possibility that you love a recent-history puzzle, you might care because whoever that person is, or whoever they are, "Satoshi" holds a heck of a large cache of personal bitcoins. If he sold them in a single blow, he'd render the currency near worthless. His cache is called the Tulip Trust, and it consists of 1.1 million bitcoins. A few months ago (December 2015) a couple of magazines simultaneously and independently declared that they knew who Satoshi was/is. Their accounts differed in some details but had a lot of overlap. Wired and Gizmodo both said that bitcoin was the creatio...