Topic: How did Satoshi managed to stay anonymous? (Read 2903 times)

He probably was already quite wealthy or be a bit older and wiser. I don't see a broke twenty year old not touching a quarter billion dollars.

If he wasn't Hal finney then yeah he is definitely and he probably isn't dead.

All of those are excellent points. Obviously Satoshi is brilliant, knows what he's doing, and had the foresight to know that his creation -- in spite of all of the good it can do -- had the potential to ruffle some very powerful feathers who may not like the idea of decentralized currency.

I suppose one could have approached this from a project management perspective and planned backwards from the main milestone. Some of the dependencies in the plan of reaching the main milestone would have been "how to remain anonymous."

Santoshi is not from earth, he/she used his advance knowledge of mathematics and stuff to replicate hi/her home world currency. Bitcoin is an idea from out of this world. 

Probably the best tip to not be recognized is don't be an attention whore. This is basic and includes not bragging even tho if you could. Satoshi could as the mega millionaire genius he is, but he doesn't, that's the main secret.

I believe he used a reasonably well known anonymous email provider and domain registrar who are based in Japan. I can't remember where but there was a definite link.

This one : https://www.anonymousspeech.com/Default.aspx

I've used the above company myself in the past with good results.

They have always accepted cash by post payments for anonymous email accounts, domain registration and hosting and of course these days you can pay using Bitcoin.

Once you're registered with a service like the above accessing it via TOR keeps you hidden.

I think he wasn't discovered because by the time Bitcoin gained more attention and traction, he was already gone with most trails(if any) of him had already disappeared.

I mean think about it. In 2008 he posts a paper discussing decentralized electronic cash, but nobody believes him or interest is too low. At this point nobody is really trying to figure out who he is. By the end of 2010 Bitcoin does gain more attention than in the beginning, but...was it enough to have CIA,NSA,FBI after him? Doubt it. Today though, different story.

In my small research Satoshi was from Europe maybe a university professor because of his timeline post pattern

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/satoshi-nakamoto-is-from-europe-913318

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/the-timestamps-of-satoshis-posts-802869

I have a feeling that he is still active in this forum. The most logical step from him is to have two accounts in this forum and i think his second account is still very active until today. I am sure that Satoshi has never left the community but he simple "kill" his first character

Satoshi had extensive knowledge and well developed skills in cryptography. He obviously had a long-standing interest in it, and by extension in enablers of secrecy and anonymity. So it's not surprising that among the repertoire of skills be brought with him was a pre-developed capability to cover his tracks and behave in such a way as to avoid dropping any real clues to his identity.

Like others I doubt Satoshi is more than one person:

1. Multiple people increases the risk of someone slipping up and leaving clues to at least their own identity.
2. Multiple people would be more likely to reveal conflicting goals, motives, internal dissension and so forth in "Satoshi" posting, for which I see no evidence.
3. Increased odds that one of the Satoshi team would have broken ranks at some point and spoken up.
4. I believe the whole working concept of bitcoin had to be contained within one mind to thoroughly understand and initially conceptualize it and make sure there were no fatal errors in it. I tend to believe an effort to create something new on the scope of bitcoin would have gotten "hung up in committee" if multiple people had tried to work on different aspects of it. The end product would have been slow in coming, and would not have worked cleanly until after a lot of bug fixes, emergency changes and optimization. Not that bitcoin was perfect out of the gate, but on the whole there was a cohesiveness and refinement to it that makes me suspect a single diligent mind put a lot of mental effort into it, anticipating and resolving problems with it before they became a reality.

Numerous threads with the same idea had been created ages ago. People wanted to know who was the real "Satoshi Nakamoto" and some had even pursued deeper and came up with a man with the similar name. His/her identity is indeed really hard to know, but somewhere or somehow, he/she might be discovered. As for being silent through all this times, given that his/her work now costs billions of dollars, one thing that comes into my mind is that he/she sees that there is something beyond the ATH; he/she knows that something bigger would happen in the future that's why he/she doesn't sold those coins. Well idk, I'm not Satoshi, but if you look into it closely, if he/she knows that bitcoin will somehow fail, he/she should have sold off his/her coins back in November 2013. But he/she didn't, so that leaves me into a conclusion that he/she knows that there is something more. Lost privkeys? I don't think so. Why would a genius lose his/her obra maestra in the first place? That doesn't make any sense at all.

We can only conclude one thing about Satoshi Nakamoto or whoever there is behind that pseudonym: he/she is definitely a genius.

The blockchain disagrees with you.

That would have only worked if from the beginning the coins were worth what they are now or were at the ATH. Maintaining a secrecy by threatening they will lose their pennies is not enforcing anyone

And if they were early adopters, they would have mined and gained their own coins, just to see how it worked. Losing a funds in a stored multisig wallet which you probably never get to maintain the anomity is a too little incentive to keep your mouth shut.

Satoshi is a group of people. Satoshi's coins are stored in multisign wallets. If one of the group starts talking or by accident revealing his identity, the others will move the coins to new multisign wallets, excluding the 'traitor'. Thus, there's a lot of interest and pressure among the members of Satoshi to remain the anonymity.

This is not true. If satoshi was really a group of people then it would be more difficult to keep their collective identity secret (not to mention the fact that it would be a poor security practice for a group of people to share a PGP key) because it would only take one person to 'spill the beans' and the whole group's cover would be revealed. Also a group of people is likely to communicate with eachother regarding creating bitcoin which would leave open potential ways that such communication could be intercepted and their identity revealed.

This is not true. Theymos keeps IP addresses out of public view, however he does comply with legal requests for information (eg search warrants). Satoshi most likely used a combination of tor and other IP address masking services/tools so even if his IP address(es) were revealed, it would probably not allow anyone to come any closer to determining satoshi's identity

Everything one needs to know to evaluate Bitcoin's investment worthiness is in the public domain, it's an open-source protocol. 

Identity politics is of little concern in matters of science.

I wonder if he ever said that he was from japan or his IP revealed his location? did he use Tor or something??

He could not have believed it would get this big early on and could have made slipups then. There is no full copy of the original sourceforge forum. He might have deleted it to remove any early slipups he made.

Not hard at all. Especially when you see what Bitcoin currently look like compared to the early years. He can easily stay in the background and see his wealth grow through the roof.

Satoshi as being a group definitely would make it a lot harder to stay fully anonymous as there might be a person in the group getting jealous and extort the others in order to get a financial gain.

I think Satoshi is a 1 man show, but we will probably never know. For me it doesn't matter really if he's planning to reveal his identity at some point or not. He's a legend without a doubt.

I also believe being a group of people doesn't make much sense. Sooner or later, someone would slip and talk.

However, the fact that he didn't even talk to anyone who knew him about this impresses me. And he probably had to work on this for years so he probably lived alone? Or someone else could have spotted what he was doing during that time interval. I don't know, he had the capacity of not ever talking about that to the people close to him. I mean, for someone to start such a project he probably had discussed it with people way before he even started, possibly giving some hints! That leads me to think satoshi was such a bright mind, but unfortunately a very lonely person.

Would like to know what he is up to right now. Just continuing with his daily routine like nothing happened? I mean, it's hard for me to believe after someone created a project like this, that person could just abandon his "baby". A person with such revolutionary thoughts, it's hard to believe they're quiet and will ever be. Maybe he is just doing some upgrades, planning new stuff~? ahah impossible to know but i'd love to know it. Satoshi must be one of the most, if the person with most self control and discipline i've ever heard of