Topic: Could Satoshi Nakamoto be Mike Hearn? - page 4. (Read 2984 times)

Add this as another reason why Satoshi probably should be known, because of people like Jamie Dimon:

It's a mystery and we have curiosity. Are you not curious?

We should be thankful about him, he created an opportunity to all of us here. There are always possibilities but still I hope one day  he would go  on public. But still Satoshi Nakamoto's identity is still not revealed maybe due to security reasons or whatsoever, we should respect him.

First of all this is a really pleasent theory that i enjoyed reading, BUT, I don't understand the fixation that people have around unveiling the identity of satoshi, He/She/Them did a great job and we should be greatful but here we are not respecting his whishes to stay hidden.

Truly interesting topic, I did not know that Satoshi had an account on bitcointalk and even more than he was the creator ... Are we really sure it is indeed him? Forum administrators may have access to payments since the summer posted messages in their statistics? This would break many rumors!

Yes, I shouldn't have worded my post that way. Of course a cypherpunk doesn't mean cryptographer but it is someone who advocates cryptography.

Also Satoshi didn't even know who Wei Dai is or about his b-money nor did he know about Nick Szabo and bit-gold.

Being a cypherpunk does not always mean you are a cryptographer, just
as being a cryptographer does not always mean you are a cypherpunk.

When Satoshi provided his solution to one of the cypherpunk puzzles,
that alone proves that he is aligned with cypherpunk ideals, and grants
him the title of being a "cypherpunk". Why solve a puzzle, if the outcome
brings the destruction and disillusionment of your own beliefs.

Here was a Satoshi belief of his solution type, at the time:
"... we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory
of freedom for several years. Governments are good at cutting off the
heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks
like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own. " This Satoshi quote
is self evident as to what his ideals likely aligned to: financial choice.

Satoshi may have been a coder and activist more than an experienced
cryptographer, but that does not negate his cypherpunk nature. It is
clear that the creation of a Bitcoin like system, if successful, would
bring about changes to the outside world by providing the people a
choice that was forbidden to exist by the powers that be.

Update: To add my two bits as the OP theory, I agree with DooMAD's
reasoning above. Redlists are something that can not be ignored. It is
an insidious threat to Bitcoin and to the freedom our network provides.

Edit: added Update

Satoshi was not a cypherpunk. Even Gavin thought he was not a cryptographer, see here: https://cointelegraph.com/news/satoshi-was-not-a-cryptographer-says-gavin-andresen

I actually like that one - case closed.

In all seriousness, there is no point into speculating about who or what satoshi is - there is no way we will know for sure who or what is him, unless that entity actually signs from the address containing the first ever minted block reward. And even that for some people might not be a sufficient form of evidence - in that case there won't be anything that will ever point out who or what he is. Other than him being the master mind of Bitcoin, the misterious aspect that surrounds his character, and him supposedly holding close to a million coins, there is nothing of importance in Satoshi anymore. He left for a reason, and that's why I am inclined to think that he won't ever bother signing from whatever address to prove existence.

Interesting story, and taken together, one could posit that there is a connection between the two. However, it doesn't add up for me.

The biggest issue is that Satoshi was a cypherpunk. He posted the whitepaper on a crypto mailing list. I think that Hearn thought Bitcoin was really cool as a payment system, but never really appreciated the underlying security premises of a decentralized Bitcoin. As DooMAD mentioned, I also think Satoshi would have been staunchly opposed to Hearn's blacklisting/redlisting ideas.

Guys I am convinced. It does not make sense below if these two are different people

"Mike’s bitcointalk presence began 1 day 53 minutes and 13 seconds after Satoshi’s bitcointalk presence ended. Almost exactly 1 day separating their profiles seemed odd to me especially considering the impact Mike had in development later on."

Just look at their profiles. It is really odd. These two guys emailed each other and had connection, but just Satoshi left the site and Mike registered. That does not make sense. We now know who Satoshi Nakamoto is

I'm inclined to agree there's no point in trying to identify someone against their wishes when they want to remain anonymous.  That said, I'm fairly confident Mike Hearn isn't Satoshi purely on the basis of his ideas about "redlists" alone.  Satoshi seemed quite conscientious about matters of fungibility.  The concepts of any kind of blacklist/whitelist/redlist or any other colour list you care to name simply isn't compatible with fungibility.

SAmsung, TOSHIba, NAKAmichi, and MOTOrola

There ya go.

What's the difference who is this Satoshi Nakamoto? You from if you know who this man is? If you do this it will be easier then may think that it's me. Lol! The main thing that you in their hands received the lever is able to turn the whole world dreamed of Archimedes.

Nice finds.

Man, if Google could lay claim to bitcoin and the blockchain, that would be very interesting to watch. We'd find out how decentralized bitcoin could really be!

Is Satoshi Nakamoto Mike Hearn?
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There are many coincidences involving a Mike Hearn and Satoshi Nakamoto connection.   Though many of you will automatically reject the notion because you dislike Mike Hearn, I would suggest you at least entertain the idea’s possibility. I have seen Mike Hearn on the long list of “Satoshi candidates” posted on bitcointalk but I have never seen anyone explore the idea.

Besides Mike being British and Satoshi using British English my first inclination to even consider Mike Hearn as being Satoshi Nakamoto was that Mike’s bitcointalk.org profile was created 1 day after Satoshi last logged in to the forum.

Satoshi’s profile:  https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/satoshi-3
Mike’s profile:  https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/mike-hearn-2700

Mike’s bitcointalk presence began 1 day 53 minutes and 13 seconds after Satoshi’s bitcointalk presence ended. Almost exactly 1 day separating their profiles seemed odd to me especially considering the impact Mike had in development later on.
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Why would Satoshi Nakamoto hide his real identity?

The people who created the precursors to Bitcoin were not anonymous. Satoshi even referenced multiple influences by name in his whitepaper like Wei Dai, Ralph Merkle, and Adam Back. So why did the person behind Satoshi feel the need to remain anonymous? There doesn’t seem to be any precedent in the small niche of people who attempted to make digital/electronic cash. A lot of people are constantly regurgitating the idea that Satoshi knew how big Bitcoin would become and that Governments or nefarious people would want to hunt him down for his bitcoin holdings or for simply inventing bitcoin.
In reality, Satoshi didn’t even know if his invention would gain traction. Satoshi didn’t know he would be one of a handful of users running bitcoin in the first year which would allow him to mine as many blocks as he did. Satoshi didn’t know how much bitcoin would actually be worth.

So I think the better question is why would Mike Hearn hide is identity?

Mike Hearn in mid August 2006 was hired on by Google as a Site Reliability Engineer (http://web.archive.org/web/20090514053312/http://mikehearn.wordpress.com:80/2006/08/)

Why would an employee of Google secretly develop something? Well, Google themselves sum it up pretty nicely here: “As part of your employment agreement, Google most likely owns intellectual property (IP) you create while at the company. Because Google’s business interests are so wide and varied, this likely applies to any personal project you have. That includes new development on personal projects you created prior to employment at Google.“ (https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/ )

Here Mike was indeed fully aware of Google’s policy when he released bitcoinj as a Google copyrighted project under the Apache 2 license: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.61438
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.61658

Then here he is emailing Satoshi (himself ) a few hours after the bitcointalk announcement:
https://pastebin.com/JF3USKFT

I have no idea how long it takes Google to vet an employee project and license it, but combine that with building bitcoinj and doing that all under 3 months seems fast. What do I know, maybe bitcoinj was a pretty simple project.

I wonder what Google would have done with Bitcoin had Satoshi been an employee of Google?

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Mike claiming he supposedly “coined the term SPV”.  Or, did he?
Here is Peter Todd https://twitter.com/petertoddbtc/status/649413412158599168 and here is the reddit thread to go along with it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3n1ydp/peter_todd_on_twitter_mike_hearn_claiming_he/

The term “SPV” does not appear in the whitepaper but its meaning does. Simplified Payment Verification is section 8 of the whitepaper.  Did Mike slip and just inadvertently hint to him being the real Satoshi? Upon further investigation Mike had claimed months earlier that he coined the term “SPV wallet”.  https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-capacity-cliff-586d1bf7715e So he could have meant to say SPV wallet when Peter Todd was calling him out or maybe he did mean to say just “SPV”. Still not the smoking gun but interesting that he would throw that around knowing full well that Simplified Payment Verification was in the Whitepaper.

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[After writing this up, Mike just released all his private Satoshi Emails through a user named CipherionX. Mike did show up in a reddit thread to confirm that they came from him and are indeed not fake. Bitcointalk link: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/new-satoshi-emails-2080206
Reddit link to Mike’s post: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6t2ci2/never_before_seen_mike_hearn_satoshi_nakamoto/dliizv6/ ]
It is very plausible that in order to remain separate from something, that someone would in fact have email conversations between himself and an alias as “proof” that they are completely different independent people. Of course this would only make sense if the emails were made public at some point. Well guess what?  Mike just made them public and Mike also attempted to divulge them to Charles Hoskinson in 2013 who did not release them to the public.

If the dates can be trusted, Mike’s email leak serves as proof that he was there early on even if he was corresponding with himself Besides the new email dump the only known public involvement that I could find was here on the sourceforge forum in October 2009: https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/bitcoin-list/thread/f4cd80640910240804m64ba45f1g216905fc9db16a2%40mail.gmail.com/#msg23827020 . 

Why did Mike not use Sourceforge as he posted openly so frequently in other project lists or forums? Are there posts that I haven’t seen from early on?


Mike did produce an email he sent to Satoshi In April of 2009 here in this thread: https://bitcoinfoundation.org/forum/index.php?/topic/54-my-first-message-to-satoshi/ which does correspond with the new email dump.  An interesting thing I noticed in the above link is that Mike stated, But Mike continued to capitalize Bitcoin as BitCoin not just in that email but until May 14, 2011. Why is that interesting? Well, every thread and post he responded to that mentioned the word bitcoin didn’t capitalize the “C” ever. It would seem like he was almost doing it on purpose to show what a noob he was to the project. Oh then he of course points out the fact that he was a newbie for capitalizing bitcoin that way. It is odd that he continued to use that spelling without regard to how everyone else was spelling it and then later direct people’s attention to the fact that he use to spell it that way early on.
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Also, what is odd about Mike’s involvement early on is that it doesn’t really parallel with his natural online demeanor. He is very vocal and has an involved online presence yet he just really isn’t vocal during the early stages of Bitcoin. Even his personal blog posts came to a halt in early 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20111130084418/http://mikehearn.wordpress.com:80/ For someone who is  generally very active online before Bitcoin and then after Satoshi’s disappearence, I find it peculiar that there is a dead silence period from Mike Hearn while Satoshi existed online.
Mike went Facebook silent from July 23, 2007 to March 8, 2011 which also coincides with Satoshi’s existence and pre-release development of Bitcoin. https://www.facebook.com/i.am.the.real.mike?lst=662933243%3A61203304%3A1502324015

The next step in my exploration of this idea was to create a calendar of time periods where Satoshi was silent on the forums. For example, Satoshi was silent on the forum from March 24, 2010 until May 16, 2010. I am guessing this is a period when Satoshi was away from his home travelling or vacationing. I was wanting to then correspond them with known dates when Mike was on vacations or at a conference, but as I stated above MIke wasn’t very public during Satoshi’s presence. If anyone knows of any of the potential Satoshis that were vacationing, hospitalized (Hal?), or travelling during that March to May gap in 2010, it would be a good link to the real Satoshi.

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Hal Finney was also involved at the start only to leave and eventually return. He came back a month before Satoshi departed though.  Hal was the recipient of bitcoins first transaction and helped Satoshi troubleshoot early problems [Suspicious link removed]j.com/public/resources/documents/finneynakamotoemails.pdf

Their correspondence lead me to believe that Satoshi may have had either a rapport or at the least some familiarity with Hal. I decided to search Mike Hearn and Hal Finney together which turned up a nice find. Here, https://sourceforge.net/p/tboot/mailman/tboot-devel/?style=threaded&viewmonth=200807 Mike and Hal are talking about Trusted Computing back in July 2008, just months before the bitcoin whitepaper surfaced. Unfortunately I don’t quite fully understand Trusted Computing and the reason Mike Hearn was inquiring about a trusted web browser or how it would relate to Bitcoin, However, I did also find this thread from Mike Hearn that Hal Finney later resurrected about TC: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/avoiding-theft-using-trusted-computing-67508 And even more interesting, Hal Finney later wrote in his brief memoir of bitcoin, “Bitcoin and Me”, posted on the bitcointalk forum (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-and-me-hal-finney-155054)  that he was currently “working on something Mike Hearn suggested, using the security features of modern processors, designed to support "Trusted Computing", to harden Bitcoin wallets.” Was Mike Hearn originally researching a use for trusted computing in Bitcoin but never implemented it only to later pass it on to Hal FInney as a “suggestion”?  Mike on Google+ posted a link to Hal’s TC project when he learned Hal passed away and linked to Hal’s post on BTCtalk (https://plus.google.com/+MikeHearn ; https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ann-bcflick-using-tpms-and-trusted-computing-to-strengthen-bitcoin-wallets-154290 )

So,

here is Satoshi stating he started working on bitcoin in 2007 https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1617,
here Satoshi said he was done writing Bitcoin by July 2008 because that is when Google protocol buffers was made public”I looked at Google protocol buffers when they were released last year, but I had already written everything by then.” https://pastebin.com/Na5FwkQ4
and then above Mike Hearn in July 2008 is seeking guidance from Hal about trusted computing and then Hal working on trusted computing application on the suggestion of Mike for bitcoin. Ok why? Well bitcoin was done by July 2007 when Mike was inquiring about TC and Hal was working on a TC application later, meaning that TC has some application not related to the core of bitcoin but rather to a peripheral of bitcoin.
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[Weak] Searching for more clues about Satoshi I came across a colloquial/slang term that he used. “Hack on” was used by Satoshi in the context of “work on”. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13206
I found multiple instances where Mike Hearn used the same exact term in the same context: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-April/007779.html
http://bitcoin-development.narkive.com/hczWIAby/bitcoin-development-cartographer
https://web.archive.org/web/20170628004052/http://www.advogato.org/person/mikehearn/
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-March/msg00031.html
I do admit the “hack on” argument is lame evidence as it is somewhat common term. However, not everyone used it in that context (like Hal Finney didn’t) and it does add to the list of coincidences.
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[Warning: Reaching] Another super weak semi-coincidence is Mike Hearns birthday. Mike’s birthday is April 17th, 1984. Satoshi’s birthday was chosen as April 5th, 1975. I don’t know about you, but a lot of times when I have to enter a birthday in a service where I don’t want them knowing the truth, I usually always use my real birth month with fake day and year. [More reaching] adding 1975’s digits equal adding 1984’s digits/ 7+5=12 and 8+4=12.

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According to Mike Hearn, Satoshi “communicated with a few of the core developers before leaving. He told myself and Gavin that he had moved on to other things and that the project was in good hands.“ https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1558053 This is also backed up by the new email release here:
https://pastebin.com/syrmi3ET   
Mike- “I had a few other things on my mind (as always). One is, are you planning on rejoining the community at some point (eg for code reviews), or is your plan to permanently step back from the limelight?”
Satoshi- “I've moved on to other things.  It's in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”
The above communication is supposedly the first time anyone heard that Satoshi was leaving for good and it was none other than Mike Hearn as the recipient. Then a few days later Satoshi told Gavin the same thing.

None of these things points or alludes to Mike being Satoshi by themselves. But I do think that all these things together do paint a possible connection. Mike denied being Satoshi when I emailed him and also didn’t seem to care that I would post these things online attempting to connect him to Satoshi.