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Notes -
Hal Finney as Satoshi. Interesting twitter thread and Marginal Revolution link.
https://twitter.com/adamscochran/status/1761111031928033749?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
I guess on an Occam’s Razor type analysis I have always thought Hal Finney was the creator. Key reasons:
The Occam’s Razor bit is it seems tough to believe there is some other guy out there who fits all these characteristics but chose to disappear and is now sitting on wealth that likely makes him the richest man in the world or close to it. Even true nerds at some point get bored and want the yacht and yacht girls.
This community specifically always had a few connections to the bitcoin community with SBF from the rationalist but less known George Mason and their bloggers were some of the first promoters of bitcoin outside of the small developer group. Hal Finney was a blogger with George Mason Economist Robin Hanson on Overcoming Bias. The SlateStar community seems to have had two feeding grounds either from fans of the George Mason blogging mafia or the rationalist community.
Here is a Hal Finney blogpost:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/overcoming-disahtml
Personally I knew about bitcoin from the George Mason guys back when you could mine coins for sub-pennies. I always liked the crypto punk guys who started bitcoin but dislike what it became as a gambling asset. Out of laziness I never mined it but I’m fairly certain I would have sold it for a nice profit at $50-100 if I had.
The one use case for crypto has always been the Argentina problem. My trad neoliberalism led me to want to fix Argentina with a little Milton Friedman got in the way of me being an early adopter and billionaire. Missed my shot like many others.
I am not sure I see a broader culture war angle but within Bitcoin there seems to be a dislike of Hal as Satoshi by the maxi community but I do not know most of that story. It’s also somewhat interesting of Bitcoin being Cal Tech built but most of the big promoters were East Coast Ivy/Finance.
There have been other possible candidates, but Finney or a Finney led cabal was always the most plausible. And these new documents only strengthen that theory. Satoshi being dead or having his keys destroyed (which is the same thing) makes the most sense, I doubt even the most principled libertarian would be able to resist spending tens of billions of dollars forever.
Of course this is the boring rational theory. What is the most fun outlandish one that's still remotely plausible?
I think my favorite one is that it actually is Craig Wright and that he's just trying to convince us all he had nothing to do with it with his antics, after all who do you suspect least?
Some of the most principled libertarians worked in academia or were writers, the opposite of or private enterprise or cutthroat corporate capitalism. So it does not seem implausible the most principled libertarians would not spend the money.
I'm not saying this to impugn on the morality of principled libertarians rather than the weakness of men in general. Anyone with a button they could press to instantly become a multi-billionaire is subject to temptation. If Satoshi is smart he threw away the keys long ago to secure himself from his own temptation. But death is certainly the most final way of doing so.
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