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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.
This is unpersuasive because a real living Satoshi wouldn’t reveal himself by living large, he could just be ‘another very early adopter from the cryptographic community who made a lot of money’. Death isn’t necessary for anonymity, all the viable candidates were well known in the niche digital cryptography / privacy world and so could plausibly have made a fortune on Bitcoin over the years; many of their peers did.
My guess is that Adam Back knows who it is.
The blockchain keeps track of who owns coins and Satoshi's coins have never moved. The original creator has never sold any.
(Although the original creator could have created other wallets with smaller amounts that have been spent).
My pet conspiracy theory is that aliens dropped the white paper and mined the original blocks.
I don't really know much about finance, but why couldn't Satoshi use his bitcoins as collateral to borrow money, just as super wealthy people whose money is tied up in stocks do?
Would have to disclose/prove to the people involved that he is indeed Satoshi, which is hard to do. Also Satoshi actually moving his Bitcoins would cause massive reverberations throughout the Crypto economy so it isn't really just a matter of 'I am Satoshi, here is proof, I have 2 million Bitcoins give me a loan'.
It's like if you were in a gold-based economy and half of the Gold had been used to create the tomb of King Satoshi II, and there would be a Jihad upon anybody who actually touched said gold. Yes, King Satoshi II's heir would be wealthy in the sense of owning that gold, but actually moving it would be impractical.
On the contrary, Bitcoin makes proving ownership trivial: Satoshi only needs to disclose his public key (which can be verified using public information in the blockchain) and then sign a random challenge string provided by the lenders to prove that he has the corresponding private key. This proves that he has the ability to spend those coins.
(Technically, this doesn't prove he is Satoshi, original author of the Bitcoin whitepaper, per se, but rather that he has the cryptographic keys needed to spend millions worth of Bitcoin, but the latter is what the lender really cares about anyway.)
Yeah, but the act of spending those coins would cause severe reverberations throughout the Crypto economy which is what makes it tricky.
Then again a sufficiently large Crypto entity could lend him money so he doesn't move the Bitcoins.
There really is an interesting Catch-22 that is based off a meta-question:
Do people investing in Bitcoin believe that Satoshi's coins will EVER move, or that they're effectively 'burned?'
I have no doubt that the price would move down heavily if the Satoshi wallet showed any activity, but to what extent is that possibility already 'priced in.'
And indeed, to what extent is the fact that Satoshi would know moving the coins would disrupt the markets a sufficient reason to not try to move them?
Realistically, the ultimate win condition for Satoshi is for Bitcoin to become a universally accepted currency so integrated into the global economy that he can start purchasing whatever he wants with his bitcoin directly, rather than having to convert.
The more integrated BTC is into the global economy the bigger a deal the Satoshi coins moving would be, though. It does feel unlikely that a hypothetically alive and healthy Satoshi's participation in Crypto is exclusively limited to those coins, though, so he's likely not struggling for money.
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