After doing extensive research and a lot of reading I'm almost 100% (CPU) certain that these are the initial 'creators' of bitcoin.
The only real alternative is that another genius individual or group used extensive knowledge of their work to hide behind their collective identity.
Who are they ?
Yossi Matias - "is an Israeli computer scientist, entrepreneur and Google executive."
See:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Yossi_Matias and
http://research.google.com/pubs/YossiMatias.htmlDaniel A.
Nagy - "a telecommunications engineer with a strong interest in mathematics and its various applications."
See:
http://www.epointsystem.org/~nagydani/homepageMoti Yung - "is an Israeli-American cryptographer and computer scientist, an employee of Google Research."
See:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Moti_Yung and
http://research.google.com/pubs/author3060.htmlThese are computer scientists with the desire, knowledge and expertise to create bitcoin. They are respected academics of the highest level and experts in the fields of privacy, security, anonymity, cryptography and electronic money systems. Historically, I believe, that they were also in the right places at the right time. They have access and knowledge of LaTeX (
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX ), popular with academics, who also use double spacing. LaTeX was used to publish the bitcoin white paper.
I believe that Mordechai (Moti Yung) used the Tor network to bootstrap bitcoin to the wider internet, although perhaps someone else just chose this name for an unrelated reason. There was a Tor node called 'Mordk' ? (I don't recall the exact name of the Tor relay / exit server). I believe that the IP address used to release the bitcoin white paper from Helsinki? is also conducive to this.
Yossi has clearly worked extensively with Moti and Moti has also met with Nagy on more than one occasion. The internet does the rest.
See:
https://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/cat_conference.htmlFebruary 14, 2008 - FC2008 -- report by Dani Nagy
"This was my first time [writes Dani Nagy] at the annual Financial Cryptography and Data Security Conference, even though I have extensively used results published at this conference in my research. In short, it was very interesting from both a technical and a social point of view (as in learning new results and meeting interesting people from the field). And it was a lot of fun, too.
Pairing based cryptography seems to be all the rage in the fundamental crypto research department. Secure Function Evaluation seems to be slowly inching from pure theory into the realm of applicable techniques. But don't hold your breath, yet.
In between theory and
practice, was
Moty Yung's very entertaining invited talk about Kleptography -- using cryptographic techniques for offensive, malicious purposes, rather than defenses, typically against other cryptographic systems. As an example, he gave a public-private RSA key generation algorithm, which is indistinguishable from an honest, random one in a black box manner, and even if reverse engineered, the keys generated with it can be factored only with the effort of factoring a key half that long. The attacker, however, that pushes this key generation algorithm on unsuspecting victims, will be able to factor their keys with very little effort."
"By sheer accident, I found myself on the panel about e-cash. The topic was the gap between real-life electronic cash and academic research.
One rule was not to speak about one's own work. The participants were selected from different parts of the world and different walks of life. For me, the biggest news was that credit cards are not common at all in Japan..."
...
In short, I stopped asking who is 'Satoshi', but instead asked how and why.
To understand bitcoin, you have to understand
cryptovirology - See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptovirology"Cryptovirology is a field that studies how to use cryptography to design powerful malicious software..."
Bitcoin is in fact a 'crypto-virus'. If you think I'm saying that bitcoin is a 'virus' and that it is
bad, then you have clearly not yet read and understood about cryptovirology! Find another e-cash system (or pc program) in 2008 - 2009 to use 100% CPU, by necessity. Any other program to do this was / is a 'virus' or 'malware'.
On this basis, I don't think that they themselves thought that bitcoin could really work due to public reaction. Bitcoin was basically a P2P botnet where you earned 'worthless' coins for using 100% CPU. Only geeks and hackers would ever consider such a program, right? The only way to know for sure was to release this genius cryptographic P2P e-cash 'virus' into the wild and to see what happened...
Everyone should read as many of the papers published by Moti and Adam L. Young as can be found on their website
http://www.cryptovirology.com/You should also download / watch a talk by Moti at 26C3
See:
http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/26C3/mp4/26c3-3702-en-yes_we_cant_-_on_kleptography_and_cryptovirology.mp4Other interesting papers and related works can be found via the google research pages for Yossi and Moti.
Research papers in 2002 by Moti and Shouhuai Xu are of interest.
Shouhuai Xu - See:
http://scholr.ly/person/4633379/shouhuai-xu...
It is impossible to say that any of these individuals are 'Satoshi Nakamoto'. It is also wrong to do so. I myself am an advocate for online privacy, security and anonymity. However, I also believe strongly in openness and transparency.
Yes (you can't
). You can combine the elements of both, for example, an activist in an oppressive regime can use Tor to reach twitter over https to inform the world of a fellow citizens plight. In a way, this too is 'cryptoviriology' or crypto-anarchism, just like bitcoin.
Lets all stop looking for 'Satoshi' and instead learn how to make the world a better place for everyone!
There are many individuals and works of note that I believe have contributed to the core of 'Satoshi'. I'm off to start reading every one of those papers.
We are all 'Satoshi'.
