My money (er, bitcoin) is on Hal Finney. I knew Hal from occupying the dorm room next to mine at Caltech. Being Satoshi is just the kind of elaborate prank Hal would have loved. Besides, I've never met anyone as smart as Hal, and I've met a lot of smart people.

In his last interview (when he could no longer speak) he was asked if he was Satoshi, and he just grinned.

As for where the missing bitcoins are, my bitcoin is placed on the wallet just being thrown out with an old computer, discarded on a floppy disk, etc.

It‘s a pretty strong case for Len to be Satoshi, admittedly. And it would explain the mysterious silence from Satoshi Nakamoto - he's dead.

Of course one could argue that Satoshi is alive and choses to be silent on purpose, since being worth tens of billions of dollars might come with some strings attached, ie kidnappings, black mail, extortions etc.

But one would have to have a rather strong personality to not give in and become a public and admired figure.

Then again, cypherpunks might just be that breed...

Pretty sure Len thought Bitcoin was a profound abortion of an idea:

https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/77358901774917632

> Right; why would they [mention Bitcoin in the cypherpunk panel on digital currencies], though? Bitcoin pretty much fails as a cypherpunk protocol.

https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/81121594373709825

> That only works if you want to leave the inflated value of Bitcoin on the table; otherwise you must cash out before the crash.

https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/80748374386679808

> Oh, where's #infoanarchy when you need it? I mean, we could do a serious take and do BitCoin right, you know. (P.S.: CloudCoin™)

Also, Len was a Unix guy, and whoever wrote Bitcoin was a Windows programmer, though not an incompetent one.

(And, as pointed out in other comments below, Satoshi came out of his seclusion in 02014, three years after Len killed himself, writing only one short email, to rebut Newsweek's article claiming he was Dorian Nakamoto.)

I actually met Len in 2010/2011 when he was visiting the Dartmouth cs dept! We talked about noodlers being an excellent fountain pen ink and some stuff around functional programming that overlap with the language base security ideas Sergey Bratus and Meredith Patterson went on to popularize.

I also have a distinct memory that he had a very well decorated walking cane.

Edit: I do think that this post, while having valid circumstantial evidence, is at best circumstantial. And it’s more valuable to celebrate those who have passed by way of recognizing the achievements we can genuinely attribute to them

Edit edit: http://langsec.org/

This article has several inaccuracies

1) "blockchain inventor David Chaum"

Chaum developed methods to do blinded ecash, there's nothing "blockchain" about a central database checking blinded signatures for double spends.

D. Bayer, S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, and N. Szabo were working on methods of how to distribute property titles and timestamp data to reduce trust requirements of the data through out time.

Chaum's design never solved the problem of how to create bits that people can inherently reason about how much they trust them as money/scarcity. He was ardent about turning fiat currencies into digital tokens -- drastically different than making bits into money.

2) Does it make much sense for Bitcoin's author to be, as the article claims, highly experienced with asymmetric cryptography but also soliciting advice from "real cryptographers" on the cryptography mailing list? Sassaman's archived site doesn't show much cryptography work (but much cypherpunk work)

3) "Len joined Network Associates to help develop the PGP encryption central to Bitcoin"

The curves used in bitcoin's -- and very limited amount of -- cryptography aren't used in PGP.

4) "the remailer technology that was a precursor to Bitcoin."

Much of this article seems to be straining to make connections. Remailers don't have anything to do with Bitcoin. If anything remailers are the precursors to Tor / i2P. Identification of bitcoin nodes in the early version of bitcoin code was as shockingly easy as... joining an IRC channel.

Having known Len I'd be surprised if he was Satoshi, but its possible as some have speculated that Satoshi was a collaboration from a number of people then I could definitely see him being a part/organizer of it.

> But with Craig Wright fraudulently claiming credit and invoking a copyright claim to take down the Bitcoin whitepaper, we’re forced to revisit the topic and recenter the discussion around the Cypherpunks who actually built Bitcoin.

No, we're not. We can dismiss the fraudulent claims of Craig Wright without being "forced" to do anything else.

A quick look at Len's public Twitter discussions of Bitcoin makes this seem unlikely. Yes, yes, long con, deep cover, etcetera, not totally impossible. But still.

https://twitter.com/search?q=bitcoin%20from%3Alensassaman

I felt a tinge of sadness reading this. Len may or may not be Satoshi, and the article makes a strong case that he may be, after all. But it's really sad to lose such extraordinary people to mental health related issues, especially when we can do much better, with little effort.

It’s kind of hard to believe that given the amount and technical forensic evidence that must have been left by Satoshi we don’t know who they are.

Coding style and mannerism. Windows, Mac, Linux? IP addresses or user agent logged anywhere (mailing list)? Comment structure and style. Git / SVN commits. English writing style and mannerism. Digital fingerprints.

Surely there must be a technical trail to investigate.

Pretty awesome article. Certainly as good as any other 'proof' I've seen.

I got a kick out of a quote Sassaman had in his Orkut profile, circa 2005:

"Some day, I will invent a machine that turns all marxists into ants. Then, we will all be happy."

My Bitcoin is on the government(s) and their security agencies. Satoshi is just a moniker they concocted in order to hide the fact that this is a government project through and through to be able to move fund around into and out of various economies and destabilize weaker ones. Also as a result of beng there in the beginning they have a huge amount of currency to do stuff with that will never be accounted for. Only reason it makes sense in our world as to why this stuff has not yet been banned and why Satoshi's identity is so well hidden.

Len is a good candidate, but here's one problem: Satoshi spoke up in 2014 on a long-dormant account[1] to say "I am not Dorian Nakamoto." This was a response to a Newsweek article that claimed to have found his identity.

So maybe someone hacked that account-- but then, why didn't we get any more Satoshi activity? Or maybe Len (who took his own life in 2011) isn't Satoshi after all!

[1] http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topic/listForContributor...

Satoshi's silence period began at the same time that Gavin Andressen went to the CIA (at the CIA's invitation) to present about Bitcoin. It is widely assumed that it was caused by Andressen's decision to accept the invite.

Just because Satoshi went silent for a while doesn't mean that he/they are dead.

It's worth mentioning that those 10s of billions have never been touched.

This is a very strong case for Len to be Satoshi.

I've never bought the argument about kidnappings etc, with billions of dollars you can hire people with lots of guns

> It‘s a pretty strong case for Len to be Satoshi, admittedly. And it would explain the mysterious silence from Satoshi Nakamoto - he's dead.

I think it's pretty likely that the person (or people) who went by Satoshi is dead, and probably died before their Bitcoin hoard was worth much.

If not, you'd have to explain why someone is giving up the opportunity to never have to work for someone else to support themselves ever again. And those are less believable to me: e.g. 1) already having so much FU money they're secure in their lifestyle w/o the Bitcoin, 2) being either extremely ascetic or happy to work for someone else to support themselves, 3) deliberately choosing to destroy it for some reason, 4) losing the all keys in an accident (more understandable for a rando playing around than the creator), etc.

None of those tweets point to anything close to a "profound abortion of an idea" - in fact, I think these are almost supporting the claim. "we could do BitCoin right" and "it fails as a cypherpunk protocol" could be simple self-critiques or misdirections or even sly jokes. Saying bitcoin has an inflated value also doesn't mean this person didn't create it. Didn't Elon just recently say Tesla is way overvalued?

The Unix vs Windows argument is pretty silly. And as mentioned in other comments, the 2014 email is generally regarded as not legitimate.

I'd argue that none of these are mutually exclusive with Satoshi's own beliefs.

Satoshi seemed to think BTC was getting too much attention too fast. They were unhappy about WikiLeaks accepting it thinking it was far too premature for that.

They also were clear that it did NOT yet provide full anonymity. The whitepaper admits that and Satoshi advised precautions like using Tor and not reusing wallets until there was better privacy. They never claimed it was mature for privacy use cases.

> whoever wrote Bitcoin was a Windows programmer, though not an incompetent one.

It's worth pointing out that code of the first version was organized in a ridiculous way, even pro Windows programmers do not dump everything into one directory. So a widespread opinion is that it was written by an amateur without professional programming experience, albeit extremely bright, as organization aside, code worked very well.

That's true about Windows. And that's why I believe Paul Le Roux is Satoshi.