I'm here because I have a lot of weird hobbies, and Bitcoin provides a lot of interesting
facets for research.
And like probably many of you in the audience, I find the myth of Satoshi to be a fascinating
aspect.
So who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
This mystery of Satoshi's identity has intrigued many people over the years, probably really
ever since the inception of this project in 2009.
Who the world wonders is so gifted that they could solve the Byzantine General's problem.
Who, we ask, is so altruistic that they could create an entire new monetary system from
scratch, but not do so to enrich themselves?
And who, we question, is such a privacy-conscious cypherpunk that their true identity remains
unknown to this day, 15 years later, despite massive resources being poured in to try to
hunt them down?
To be clear, the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is irrelevant to the security, ongoing
operation, and future evolution of Bitcoin.
But the speculation of Satoshi's identity has real-world consequences on those who end
up in its crosshairs.
For example, Dorian Nakamoto's life was upended in 2014 by Newsweek's baseless speculation.
Also, Hal Finney was swatted and extorted when he was in poor health and only had a
few months left to live.
On the opposite end, a multitude of scammers have taken this opportunity to leech off of
Satoshi's reputation by claiming to be him.
There are, in fact, several people at this very conference who have been accused of being
Satoshi Nakamoto.
Who do I think is Satoshi Nakamoto?
I have my theories, but I will not share them because it would be irresponsible for me to
do so.
I believe there is only one correct answer to this question.
Of course, we are all Satoshi Nakamoto.
And to point to any individual and claim that they are Satoshi Nakamoto is immoral because
it puts that person in grave danger.
I would argue to you that it is also detrimental to Bitcoin as a system.
I think that we ask ourselves the wrong question.
We should not ask, "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?"
We should ask, "What is Satoshi Nakamoto?"
Satoshi Nakamoto must not be a man.
Satoshi must be an idea because a man is fickle, finite, fragile.
An idea is bulletproof.
And that is why I am here to explain to you that Hal Finney, the man, was not Satoshi
Nakamoto.
Of course, his proximity to the project, being there at the early days, makes him a strong
contender.
He made a lot of great contributions.
But I will show that there was more than sufficient evidence to cast strong doubt that he could
have been Satoshi the man.
So let's get into it.
On April 18, 2009, Hal Finney, an avid runner, decided to go for a bit of a jog.
He participated in a 10-mile race in Santa Barbara, California, where he resided.
And in fact, we can see the results.
They are still published online to this day.
Why is this noteworthy?
Well, Satoshi Nakamoto was being a busy little bee at that same time.
You see, for the hour and 18 minutes that Hal Finney was running down this course in
Santa Barbara, we can be quite sure that he was not at a computer or other electronic
device where he would have been able to do what Satoshi was doing.
It turns out that Satoshi was exchanged in an email dialogue with early developer Mike
Hearn, who had been asking him some questions over the past week.
And this email dialogue had been going back and forth, back and forth.
But at one point, Satoshi says, "Hey, Mike, you send me an address, I'll send you some
Bitcoin."
And he did just that.
And this transaction is on the blockchain.
To this day, we can see that it was confirmed at 8.55 in the morning, Pacific time, on April
18th, 2009, when Hal Finney was in the middle of a 10-mile race.
And if we look at the other blocks in the blockchain, we can see that there was a block
about 25 minutes earlier at 8.30 in the morning.
So it's reasonable to conclude that this transaction was broadcast, it was created, signed, broadcast
out to the network sometime between 8.30 and 8.55 in the morning.
20 minutes after this transaction confirmed, Satoshi replied to that email chain with Mike
Hearn.
And I don't know if you can see, you may think it's a little weird that this says it's happening
at 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. in the evening.
Well, it turns out those timestamps were not Pacific time.
These emails came from Mike Hearn.
They were actually in Central European time.
How do we know that?
Well, we can actually see Mike Hearn gave his IP address to Satoshi.
At the time, that was one way of actually transacting Bitcoin.
And that IP address belongs to a Swiss internet service provider.
This also lines up with the well-established fact that Mike Hearn was working for Google
out of their Zurich offices at the time.
And just to be super-duper sure, I have confirmed this directly with Mike Hearn.
So the timeline basically breaks down like this.
You know, 8 a.m., HAL starts running.
Sometime, 8.25, 8.55, this Bitcoin transaction gets broadcast out on the network.
9.14, Satoshi replies.
And then four minutes later, HAL actually crosses the finish line.
Now there are, of course, plenty of potential objections.
This is not a bulletproof piece of evidence.
I think it's fairly strong evidence.
You might say, "Oh, this Mike Hearn guy is very untrustworthy.
He published these emails in their entirety in 2017 after a lot of people already hated
him due to disagreements and the block-size wars.
Turns out he actually started sharing snippets of them back in 2012, and he shared a number
of other excerpts over the years.
I think it would have been very difficult for him to have put this conspiracy together
over the period of many years."
You could also say, "Well, Satoshi had the technical capability to script, you know,
sending emails and transactions," and that's certainly true.
I'm not sure it makes sense from a sort of Occam's Razor perspective.
You know, why go to such lengths to sew disinformation and a private communication, an email?
And of course, you could always say, "Well, there could have been just some other guy
that was a part of the Satoshi group."
That's also plausible.
In all of my research that I've done into Satoshi over the years, I've yet to find anything
pointing to Satoshi being a group of people.
If it was a group of people, they were in very good sync with their sleep schedules
from looking at all of the timestamps of all of the GitHub commits, emails, forum posts,
so on and so forth.
They all seem to be operating on the same time schedule if it was a group.
Still possible.
You could also say, "Well, the early blockchain could have been rewritten.
We can't know for sure, but there were multiple back and forths, multiple transactions, and
all of these timestamps within the emails and the blockchain line up perfectly.
I haven't found any that are out of sync."
You could also say, "Well, why do we even trust this website with this race information
on it?"
Somebody else could have been running and said that they were Hal Finney, and that's
how Hal was sewing this information.
This is a third-party photo taken by photocrazy.com, which was a well-established service that
took a lot of photos of racers back then.
We can even verify number 591 matches the entry on the website for the race results.
Just for fun, yet another photo taken actually by Hal's wife.
We've got some decent evidence, but this is not all.
Hal also attended the Singularity Summit on August 14th and 15th of 2010.
I found a post by his wife a day or two after they got back in which she said, "Since his
diagnosis in August of 2009, Hal has physically changed in very obvious ways.
His speech has become slow, quiet, and labored.
His typing has gone from a rapid-fire 120 words per minute to a sluggish finger peck.
His weekly running has stopped being possible since November 2009, and now he gets around
in a motorized wheelchair."
What was Satoshi doing on August 14th and 15th of 2010?
Once again, a busy little bee.
Satoshi made four code check-ins and 17 forum posts during this two-day period in which
Hal was scooting around at a conference, once again, not at a computer.
I verified this with the conference organizer.
Of course, none of this is bulletproof.
We're just sowing more and more reasonable doubt here.
On January 10th, 2009, Hal submitted a bug report on SourceForge, and he included his
node's debug logs.
It turns out this debug log file shows his node booting up three different times.
Each time the node does that, it connects to IRC.
IRC was how early nodes received IP addresses for other nodes on the network so that they
would know what to connect to.
This log file is also available on an archive of that mailing list.
Could other people have been running nodes, sir?
Sure.
I mean, we can't necessarily say it was a specific identity, but I will say this log
shows three reboots, and it only ever receives two IP addresses in the log every time.
It was unlikely that there were more than two nodes running on the network at that time.
It's a very verbose log.
I won't dig into too much of the minutiae, but suffice to say we see two IP addresses.
One of them is Hal Finney.
Why can we say that we know that that's Hal Finney?
Well, we can actually do a reverse lookup on that IP address, and we can see that there
were several domains hosted there, finney.org, privacyca.com, fran4fitness.com.
This is almost undoubtedly Hal Finney's IP address.
What's the other IP address?
Probably Satoshi.
I mean, this is the second day of operation of the network.
Could be someone else, but that IP address was on a very different internet service provider,
and it was also in California, which is, I think, interesting, but it was not the same
provider that Hal Finney was using.
Was it a Tor node?
We can't know for certain.
I haven't been able to find any evidence that that IP address was running a Tor node.
The history doesn't really go back that far.
It's not something that you can be completely sure about, but once again, we have to ask
ourselves, if Hal was Satoshi and Hal was privacy conscious, first of all, why publish
this debug log out into the public?
Why not send it as a private email between Satoshi and Hal?
If Hal was Satoshi and wanted to sow disinformation, why put in an IP address that was in the same
state as Hal?
Why not sow further disinformation, put it in a different state or even a different country?
So many other options here.
There's also some claims out there that people have done stylometric analysis of Hal's public
writings and said that they look kind of like Satoshi.
I'm not an expert in that, so I won't comment, but I can say I'm a software engineer.
I know code, and their code was not the same, and, in fact, we can look at Hal's reusable
proof-of-work code.
We can compare it to the very first release of the published code for Bitcoin, and several
large differences are immediately apparent.
For example, Hal liked to use tabs for his spaces, whereas Satoshi seemed to prefer using
regular spaces.
This is a massive debate between software developers, of which is superior.
Hal also preferred for his debug statements to have different levels of indentation than
the rest of the code that they were in, whereas Satoshi had everything lined up nice and neat.
Hal liked to make block-style code comments, whereas Satoshi preferred to have a double-slash
comment on every line.
Finally, Hal liked to use a snake case with underscores for his function names, and Satoshi
preferred to use camel case, where you change the upper and lower case of the words that
are in the code.
These are just a few things that were apparent within five minutes of looking at the code.
I'm sure there are many more stylistic differences that are more nuanced if you really wanted
to dig into it.
These are just a few points of why Hal and Satoshi seem to be different people.
There's also differences just in their characters, and their personas, and the narratives, and
the things that they seem to know, their perspective of Bitcoin itself.
Early in January of 2009, Hal said, "I'm thinking about how to reduce CO2 emissions from mining."
Are we supposed to believe that Satoshi, who had been working on Bitcoin for probably a
year, if not several years, was now suddenly concerned about CO2 emissions?
I mean, it's possible.
Just seems a little weird.
We also can see that from one of Hal's very early responses on the cryptography mailing
list, where Satoshi was announcing Bitcoin, is that he actually seemed to educate Satoshi
that Bitgold was a thing.
Satoshi didn't seem to know that that existed.
This level of character development, I think it's highly implausible for anyone other than
perhaps the most experienced fiction writer to come up with these different personas and
narratives.
In general, one of the reasons I was even able to do this type of research is that it
seems like Hal Finney was not a particularly privacy conscious person.
From speaking to his family, obviously he was a huge privacy advocate.
He was a cypherpunk, but remember that privacy is the ability to selectively reveal yourself
to the world, and Hal was quite open about his dealings.
In terms of this persona attribute of being privacy conscious, I would say, in fact, many
of the other Satoshi candidates were much stronger with regard to that attribute.
To recap, we have some pretty strong evidence that Hal was not at a computer on several
occasions when Satoshi was quite active.
We have these debug logs that show some other IP address running a node on the network.
Their coding styles were quite different, and in general, their personas were quite
different.
Now, this is not by any means meant to diminish the idea of Hal.
Hal was a legend, and he contributed to many things other than just Bitcoin.
He created Remailer software.
He created a number of the functionality around PGP 2.0, and of course, reusable proof of
works, many other projects.
Hal was the type of person that I think we should all aspire to be.
I do believe everyone should go and read the original announcement thread where Satoshi
revealed this Bitcoin idea to the cryptography mailing list, and look at their responses.
The first one said, "Your system doesn't scale."
The next says, "The honest nodes will never control the network."
The other person's talking about intrinsic value and proof of work value, and then Hal
comes in, and he's the first one who actually has an optimistic take on it.
He's talking about this notion of the power of the long tail, which he also thought would
never work, but then he saw that it worked for Wikipedia, and so he was able to apply
some of the logic and learnings from that.
My point being, we should slay the myths of Satoshi Nakamoto, the man.
This is good for Bitcoin, because it's like a never-meet-your-heroes type of thing.
Men have problems.
They are not perfect.
They will be picked apart.
They make mistakes.
It is better for Bitcoin if we want this to be robust, for Satoshi to be the idea, and
it's better for all of us that we can contribute and be a part of this idea.
From that perspective, it is best to kill Satoshi Nakamoto so that Satoshi Nakamoto
may live.
Thank you.