On HN I left a reply that I thought might be worth repeating here,
> Do you support unmasking Satoshi if it is possible?
No.
The only argument I've heard to justify this which is at all credible is that the ownership of a particular pool very early coins may be a matter of significant public concern. I'm dubious of this argument given that it's a couple percent of the total and people seem to not care at all about other similar consolidations in Bitcoin. And it's normal for very wealthy people to be largely unknown e.g. in the US we have absolutely no idea who most billionaires are, a lot of the supposed lists are just speculation and nonsense. (
a fun related story )
But for the purpose of this discussion I'll accept that ownership of those coins matters. (I don't think we'd make any progress on debating that)
But if the motivation is those coins, we're not even sure they belong to Satoshi. And to the extent there is a concern it's a concern that their use could be disruptive to the economy, their identity alone is unlikely to help -- like why would Adam Back vs Petertodd matter for that question?
So what I think is that if we think carefully about what all this means and we're honest about it-- this demand for their identity is so that the public can use coercion to make them destroy their coins. The author of the documentary said the quiet part out loud in a surprisingly extortionary sounding tweet: "
Satoshi, if you have access, you could burn the stash. Bring an end to this. Protect yourself, protect the network."
I think that kind of coercion would be immoral. But worse than immoral it would be unnecessary:
If the users of Bitcoin feel so threatened by these unmoved early coins that they're willing to ungratefully violate privacy of Bitcoin's creator, a person who might not even own those coins, in an act which might harm the creator seriously but not even address the concern ... they could instead just adopt a fork that makes those early unmoved coins forever inaccessible. -- and perhaps let whomever owns them come out to argue against it.
(Heck, people have already created such forks though that wasn't their motivation-- some forks have diverted all not-recently moved coins to the forks creators, as a kind of premine).
The fact that they haven't indicates that they don't feel that way. To summarize, I think trying to pursue Satoshi's identity is:
An ungrateful attack on someone who gifted the world with something new and interesting and whom wronged no one, motivated by fear of some trove of coins that may not even belong to the target, a fear which would not be addressed by merely knowing their identity (even assuming the coins were theirs), and if it does address it-- it would probably be through coercively depriving them of their coins by subjecting Satoshi to threat and attack... when all along the people supposedly being protected could, if they cared about it enough, simply neutralize "the threat" themselves by adopting a version that didn't have it, or by just not using Bitcoin at all. Clearly they don't feel that strongly.
But attacking someone elses privacy and safety is something many people don't consider much of a cost, I guess.
I just don't buy it.
If it sounds like I've made up my mind on the issue, remember that I've had some 14 years to think about this question.
And because I answered elsewhere on HN: The petertodd claim is unjustified, grasping at unsurprising coincidences. I'm personally pretty confident that Peter isn't Satoshi, as much as it's possible to be without knowing who Satoshi is. I've never heard *any* credible claim or rumor that *anyone* knows. And because Satoshi was clearly trying to conceal their identity and clearly pretty good at it I think it's likely we'll never know. The issue is that any bit of information you find might be real, it might just be a coincidence, or it could be a false signal Satoshi left to mask their identity. Because of this we know practically nothing about Satoshi other than that they were able to do the things we know they did at roughly (not even exactly) the times they were done. Because of this there are probably hundreds of thousands of people who could be Satoshi or more, most of whom we've never heard of, and so confirmation bias and coincidences will utterly dominate any attempt at reasoning it out.
Especially with crypto-related kidnappings and torture on the rise, speculating about Satoshi's identity could get the targets killed. Even if you reject my above argument against identifying Satoshi, any kind of argument for there being a public interest in the subject only applies when when actually know who Satoshi is. It doesn't apply for people who kinda sorta may be because there is some weak sauce evidence that only seems like something at all given the almost total lack of actual evidence. And having your privacy invaded *sucks* even when it doesn't immediately cause you or your family to get kidnapped and extorted.
