Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto 172
wabrandsma writes "Two Israeli computer scientists say they may have uncovered a puzzling financial link between Ross William Ulbricht, the recently arrested operator of the Internet black market known as the Silk Road, and the secretive inventor of bitcoin, the anonymous online currency, used to make Silk Road purchases."
Weasel Words: (Score:5, Interesting)
A link between DPR and an early Bitcoiner (Score:5, Interesting)
tl;dr: At least one person who used Bitcoin in the first month also used Silk Road, so we made a news story about it. Could be DPR himself, who knows.
Re:A link between DPR and an early Bitcoiner (Score:2, Interesting)
There's a comment on TFA that says:
"It is well documented in the bitcoin blockchain that Satoshi Nakamoto famously gave away most of the early bitcoins to encourage adaptation."
Re: The interesting question (Score:2, Interesting)
seems an apt guess given the greatest trick he ever pulled was to convince the world that his hard to find digital apples were worth money (after picking all the low hanging fruit for himself first).
Not the person, it's the office (Score:5, Interesting)
What's this got to do with Cary Elwes character from "The Princess Bride"?
In the novel (and movie), it was discovered that the "Dread Pirate Roberts" was not a single person.
One person started the legend, got rich and retired. His replacement kept the name in order to take advantage of the reputation, got rich, and retired... and this continued for several generations of the name.
From Wikipedia: "It is revealed during the course of the story that Roberts is not one man, but a series of individuals who periodically pass the name and reputation to a chosen successor. Everyone except the successor and the former Roberts is then released at a convenient port, and a new crew is hired. The former Roberts stays aboard as first mate, referring to his successor as "Captain Roberts", and thereby establishing the new Roberts' persona. After the crew is convinced, the former Roberts leaves the ship and retires on his earnings."
The original SilkRoad founder used the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts", got rich, and turned over the name to his successor (who was sloppy and got arrested). The original founder's choice of name was probably an homage to a popular character, but it has mirrored the backstory of the book character with some measure of irony. (Or maybe it's not irony, it's just unexpected - I can't really tell.)
Re: The interesting question (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I cashed out several times, like when it hit $6, then again at $20, then again at $110, a few at $210, then more at $140ish a couple months ago, at which time I gave up on mining and mostly stopped trading. We were all optimistic but few of us were patient enough to really amass huge wallets for the long term, nor did most of us really see the huge recent price spike coming, unfortunately. If there is any evidence that Satoshi somehow took advantage of BTC in a secretive, underhanded way, please enlighten us.
Just for shits and giggles, what if DPR and Satoshi were indeed in cahoots at the beginning, with DPR having the balls and skills to build a huge black market and Satoshi providing him with the means to make it work? Sounds unlikely to me, but it is conceivable that Satoshi created bitcoin not only knowing that it would be abused for illegal transactions, but also intending it to be used as such. Hmm...
Re:Correct Me If I'm Wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not like Satoshi is controlling the system from the shadows or something - Bitcoin is open-source. You don't need to trust its creators.
The only thing that Satoshi controls in the protocol is a hash code which would allow somebody to insert a broadcast message to all "standard" clients. This was presumably done to broadcast something like "the Bitcoin client has been compromised... please upgrade to version x.x!"
Of course it could have any sort of message including publishing a URL, a political message, or even just "Satoshi lives!". Without the hashcode, clients (this isn't even miners) are not supposed to pass on the message in the network. The core group of developers supposedly received this hash code from Satoshi and is guarding its use for things deemed appropriate for all Bitcoin users.
The interesting thing is that this is a distributed network messaging protocol, so such a message could conceivably be inserted by any computer on the network and would in theory be untraceable as well. Other miscellaneous data could also conceivably be put into Bitcoin, but Satoshi deliberately put in some poison pills to keep that from happening in the protocol.
Re: The interesting question (Score:4, Interesting)
Mostly tulips. I still wait for the day when someone tries to cash in a sensible amount of money. Not some 100s but rather some 100,000s. If that holds, the currency will hold water. If that doesn't go down well and causes the price to plummet, it's a tulip.
Well, as long as the FBI keeps taking money out of circulation in busts, it just might work out too...
Re:every transaction can be analyzed (Score:5, Interesting)
A currency where every transaction can be analyzez and data mined by anyone... That puts everyone on a level playing field.
With traditional currency only a small group of organisations can get access to transaction data, which includes the NSA but doesn't include you.
Re: The interesting question (Score:3, Interesting)
sure.
as long as you steal the solar panels.
Re: The interesting question (Score:4, Interesting)
Hasn't this happened several times already? Someone sells a large number of Bitcoins, the market crashes, then recovers in hours or days.
The thing is, unlike tulips Bitcoins have utility (easy value transfer over long distances), so the "natural" price tends to go slowly up as the market and with it that utility grow. With tulips that never happened, so once the bubble burst the price plummeted back to "pretty decorative flower" level.
Compare with gold, which is basically a 10,000 year bubble: people hoard it because they expect other people to hoard it too. Most of the utility comes from this speculation; while there's some utility beyond that, it accounts for a tiny fraction of the price. Yet gold is usually considered a safe investment, and that very belief makes it so.