Bitcoin / Bitcoins / Crypto Currency

Sorry @hugo7 had a change of heart in keeping hold of mine for now

No worries.

It seems to be a massive pain to buy them now. Either swift charges plus admin fee on exchanges or localbitcoins with high prices for people without a track record.

I'm starting to think there's a nice side income in arbitrage if you have a root to cheap transfers.

I know very little about these things but I got mine from bitbargain

It would appear that the creator is actually from the penal colony like @hippy:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36168863

We are the smartest mofos on the planet (as well as the sexiest, fittest, strongest, bestest, bettererstetestest) so it stands to reason we'd do something useful once in a while.

Aiding and abetting crims?

Oh, and you forgot fattest in your list of ests...

Still quite a lot of debate about whether he is Satoshi. No proof publically available yet.

What, because cash never paid for anything illegal?

Fastest, yes, fastest. Thanks.

No proof publically available yet.

Indeed, there are many much easier ways for him to prove it but he's chosen not to do any of them.

From what I've read he's shown he has the keys used in the first bitcoin transaction. That's pretty decent evidence.

What are the easier ways to prove it?

Renowned cryptographer Hal Finney was one of the engineers who helped turn Mr Wright's ideas into the Bitcoin protocol, he said.

"I was the main part of it, but other people helped me," he said.

Soon after Mr Wright went public, Gavin Andresen, chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, published a blog backing his claim.

"I believe Craig Steven Wright is the person who invented Bitcoin," he wrote.

Jon Matonis, an economist and one of the founding directors of the Bitcoin Foundation, said he was convinced that Mr Wright was who he claimed to be.

"During the London proof sessions, I had the opportunity to review the relevant data along three distinct lines: cryptographic, social, and technical," he said.

"It is my firm belief that Craig Wright satisfies all three categories."

He's not Satoshi.

The proofs offered are inadequate, and it is more akin to an amateru magician putting on a controlled show for people who have already suspended disbelief.

https://www.nikcub.com/posts/craig-wright-is-not-satoshi-nakamoto/

So, are these guys agreeing its him in on the act to cover for someone else?

They're all muppets.

Except Gavin.

No-one knows what Gavin thinks as he's been silent since, but everyone knows he's intelligent... but on this occasion, his behaviour is not the behaviour of a cryptographer.

Worth noting that the Bitcoin team revoked his access yesterday due to the behaviour being so out of character: https://twitter.com/petertoddbtc/status/727078284345917441

As for the tech journalists... what do they know about encryption? Apparently not much when it would be trivial to really get a proof.

The press articles made it sound like they had seen a message hashed with the private key for block 0 but it turns out that this is not the case.

Its not him.

As for Gavin Anderson, I've had the privilege of collaborating with him on a few things over the last couple of years. Something doesn't add up here. Very out of character.

This is very telling.

Andreas Antonopoulos is one of the most respected cryptocurrency experts around. He's somewhat of an idol in the crypto scene.

Its interesting to see that he refused to take part in the "verification" of Wright.

"About two weeks ago I was contacted and asked to offer security
advice for a project. I was asked to sign an NDA in order to discuss
the project itself, something I am reluctant to do, in general. Once I
received the NDA however, it became obvious that the project was
related to verifying the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. I immediately
declined the offer, declined to participate and declined to sign the
NDA.

I'm sure many people will think I was wrong to decline the
"opportunity" to verify SN's identity. From my perspective, the
request for me to verify his/her/their identity is in itself an appeal
to authority. It is replacing public cryptographic proof with
endorsement by a third party. If SN wants to "prove" their identity,
they don't need an "authority" to do so. They can do it in a public,
open manner. To ask people in the space who have a reputation to stake
that reputation and vouch for SN's identity raises many red flags in
my mind. I don't know if Craig Wright is SN. I don't care and I don't
want to know.

As I have expressed many times in the past, I think the identity of
Satoshi Nakamoto does not matter. More importantly I think it serves
to distract from the fact that bitcoin is not controlled by anyone and
is not a system of Appeal-to-Authority. Identifying the creator only
serves to feed the appeal-to-authority crowd, as if SN is some kind of
infallible prophet, or has any say over bitcoin's future.

Identity and authority are distractions from a system of mathematical
proof that does not require trust. This is not a telenovela. Bitcoin
is a neutral framework of trust that can bring financial empowerment
to billions of people. It works because it doesn't depend on any
authority. Not even Satoshi's.

Back to work."

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4hj1xu/why_i_declined_to_verify_sns_identity_two_weeks/

Tech journalists in the mainstream media are not particularly knowledgeable when it comes to hard tech. Some of the magazine and online folk are extremely nerdy, but at newspapers not so much...

I also don't believe that this guy is Satoshi. Same as I didn't believe anyone else who's claimed to be him in the past. If I had to guess, I'd say we'll never find out.

On another note: why is this even news? I mean, why does anyone care who created bitcoins?

The tech is there, does it matter who wrote it? If they wanted to claim it they would've. Is it just the fact there's mystery and we like to solve mysteries or is there an important reason to find out? Taxman will probably love to know...

I'd be interested to know their intentions. Libertarian idealists? Japanese yakuza? Compusci thought experiment? Interesting stuff, imo.

Why is it news? An exciting new tech, which also happens to be a currency with a market cap of $7bn, is created by a mysterious person or persons going under a pseudonym? Now many large financial institutions and other organisations are building upon that tech to improve existing services?

Why wouldn't it be news? Who created this; what was their motivation; do they still have access to billions of dollars worth of bitcoin; will they ever reappear and spend it; what would happen to an economy based on bitcoin if this were to happen?

I mean, why does anyone care who created bitcoins?

The person who created it mined all of the first blocks and is sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars worth.

checks figures

Satoshi mined 7.5% of all bitcoins currently in existence so he could exert massive pressure on the exchange rates if he decided to dump a lot of that.

I thought it was the NSA? *Dons tinfoil hat and saunters to Conspiracy thread.

Yeah, and when the dude is revealed to be Brian Willis from High Wycombe, much like Banksy's reveal, everyone will be, "oh" and go back about their business.

If it was the NSA they should have included a variable block size algorithm in the original release. The plonkers.

@Sparky You're right about the interest of financial institutions. I'm working on a blockchain project for a larger Tier 1 bank at the moment. Everybody seems obsessed with the drop in value of BTC over the last two years when the last two years have actually been boom time for the technology.