Bitcoin Page 11

  There was a Satoshi Nakamoto in Japan. He died in 2010. He was a concrete expert.

  There was also a Satoshi Nakamoto in Honolulu. He died in 2008. (There’s also an NSA station there, which has added to the theory that Bitcoin is actually the NSA and that the name was actually a tribute to a brilliant, dead, secret Japanese-American code-breaker.)

  And there was Newsweek’s Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, who thought Bitcoin was called ‘Bitcom’.

  A quick search on LinkedIn reveals some other living Satoshi Nakamotos (and a load of bogus ones) but none fit the profile even remotely. This implies that it’s a pseudonym – and this would tie in with the Cypherpunk traditions of anonymity.

  But perhaps Satoshi has left us some Easter eggs in his name. Many people have pored over it looking for clues.

  One poster by the name of jackofspades discovered shortened versions of leading tech companies – SAmsung, TOSHIba, NAKaminchi, Apple and MOTOrola – to make SA TOSHI NAK A MOTO.

  Others have found meaning in the Japanese. Satoshi is a Japanese boy’s name. It means ‘clear-thinking’, ‘quick-witted’ or ‘wise’. ‘Naka’ has various meanings – ‘medium’, ‘inside’, or ‘relationship’, while ‘moto’ means ‘origins’ or ‘foundation’. So his name might mean something like ‘wise relationship origin’, for example.

  There is always the possibility that Satoshi Nakamoto might just have been chosen, like Elton John or Michael Caine, because it sounded good.

  Then there are the initials – S and N – do they have any significance? We’ll come back to them.

  What about the registration of the website? Are there any clues there?

  Bitcoin.org was registered through the website AnonymousSpeech, which declares it ‘will not respond to inquiries made by foreign governments or private parties…Any inquiries regarding the identity of our subscribers are ignored. We do not respond to any of them.’110

  Nothing to be found there.

  It was registered to the following address: 133 Sakura House Nakano-ku Tokyo-to 164-0011.

  There is no such address.

  Sakura House is a chain of guesthouses in Tokyo – indeed Sakura is a common girls’ name. The Tokyo postcode 164-0011 is just down the road from Nakano station.

  So, despite there being no such address, there is some real-world knowledge behind it.

  I tried calling the registered number – +50.55396801 – with the Japanese dialling code +81. No such number exists – no surprise there.

  There is no country with the code +50 either. The code +505 is Nicaragua. When I tried calling that number in Nicaragua, I again found no such number exists.

  As late as 2011, there were still no Japanese translations of the primary documents or of the Bitcoin website. Even the address ‘bitcoin.jp’ (the Japanese version of bitcoin.org) was not registered until 2011, when Mike Caldwell claimed it – and he definitely isn’t Japanese.

  There is some affinity with Japan: the name and the website registration address. But my conclusion is that, in the search for Satoshi, Japan is a red herring.

  And, if he is Japanese, he doesn’t half speak good English.

  What nationality is Satoshi?

  In the three years Satoshi was active online he wrote over 80,000 words.

  There is barely a typo. He’s a more consistent writer than me and I’m supposed to be a professional.

  On one occasion he said, ‘a obvious’ instead of ‘an obvious’. On another he said ‘adminning’ instead of ‘administering’.111 (But this is acceptable coders’ abbreviation.)

  There is just one spelling mistake – ‘idealogical’ instead of ‘ideological’112 – an easy mistake to make. (If I could find ‘idealogical’ in the writings of one of the suspects, I might have a lead.)

  This is someone that is not just meticulous, but a practised and accomplished writer. It does not necessarily mean he has published books, but I would have thought he must at least have been active either in academic circles or on the blogosphere, or both. It does not necessarily mean his mother tongue was English, but it is indicative of considerable time spent in an English-speaking country.

  His style is calm, logical, unflustered, measured, careful and scientific. It is not flowery or emotional in any way. His writing can take some understanding at times on my part, but that is because the subjects he wrote about – computer code – are often alien to me. Those that the writing was intended for understood him.

  There were just one or two exclamation marks – a ‘Thanks guys!’ or a ‘Hurray!’ (unusual, though not incorrect, spelling of hooray) when a bug was fixed.

  His language is often colloquial. He uses common internet parlance – expressions like ‘sweet’, ‘+1’, ‘kinda’ and ‘OP’. ‘WTF?’ he declares, ‘How did we get on that? AFAIK, the only e-mail is if you tell the forum to do notifications, and I guess the wiki registration’.113 By the way, the phrase ‘do notifications’ is American; the British would tend to say ‘make notifications’.

  Satoshi tends to use British spellings – so the American ‘labor’ or ‘flavor’ will be ‘labour’ and ‘flavour’; the American ‘modernize’ or ‘formalize’ will be ‘modernise’ and ‘formalise’114 – although he is inconsistent in this regard. For example, ‘decentralized’ is sometimes spelt with a ‘z’. In UK English, either is acceptable.

  Several times he refers to a ‘mobile’ rather than the American ‘cell phone’. For example, ‘The cash register displays a QR-code encoding a bitcoin address and amount on a screen and you photo it with your mobile.’115

  He says ‘maths’ not the American ‘math’.116 He refers to ‘flats’ rather than ‘apartments’.117

  Consider the following quote from Satoshi: ’Sorry to be a wet blanket. Writing a description for (Bitcoin) for general audiences is bloody hard. There’s nothing to relate it to.’118

  The use of ‘bloody’ as an expletive is common in Britain, Australia and even parts of Canada, but it is not so common in the United States, except among Anglophiles. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the use of word ‘bloody’ as an expletive, ‘spread to most other parts of the English-speaking world, with the notable exception of the United States, where it has apparently only ever achieved limited currency’.

  Finally there is that reference to the English newspaper, The Times, in the code of the first block of bitcoins that were mined.

  This all places him on the European side of the Atlantic – unless this was a deliberate trick to throw people.

  It might well have been.

  The American blogger Gwern writes, ‘It’s perfectly easy to pick up Briticisms if you watch BBC programs or read The Economist or Financial Times (I do all three and as it happens, I use “bloody” all the time in colloquial speech – a check of my IRC logs shows me using it 72 times, and at least once in my more formal writings on gwern.net, and “mobile phone” pops up 3 or 4 times in my chat logs; yet I have spent perhaps 3 days in the UK in my life.’119

  In other words, the British spelling – like the Japanese name and perhaps even the German email address – might be another red herring.

  In one of his early replies on the cryptography mailing list, Satoshi wrote the following: ‘The send dialog is re-sizeable and you can enter as long of a message as you like’.120 We see a definite non-English-ism – ‘as long of a message’. The phrasing is also common in the US and Ireland, but not in the UK.

  Satoshi often describes things as ‘neat’.121 That is common in the US. It is rare in Britain and Ireland.

  He mentions ‘pocket change’. Again that is not an expression you hear this side of the Atlantic – but one that you do hear in the US.

  Satoshi refers to ‘heating oil’.122 The expression is also uncommon in the UK, where most homes are heated with gas. When referring to heating oil, we tend to call it paraffin. Again, that places him on the American side of the Atlantic.

  Another observation: at one point Satoshi says he is ‘Not s
ure what it should be named.’123 An Englishman might say, ‘not sure what it should be called’.

  This all indicates, contrarily, that his English was learnt on the other side of the Atlantic. Confusing. It might be, of course, that he learnt his English on both sides of the Atlantic.

  There is one final quirk that I’ve noticed. Satoshi says, ‘At some point I became convinced there was a way to do this without any trust required at all and couldn’t resist to keep thinking about it’.124

  The use of the word ‘to’ stood out for me – ‘couldn’t resist to keep thinking about it’. That does not sound like a native English speaker. I would say, ‘I couldn’t resist thinking about it’ or ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about it’. The use of the ‘to keep’ sounds foreign to me – like somebody translating literally from one of the Latin, Germanic or Scandinavian languages.

  But this is one small thing in 80,000 words or more. It probably means nothing.

  The words are disappointingly inconclusive. But the punctuation is much more intriguing.

  The curious case of the spaces after full stops

  My publisher, Dan Kieran, says that if he reads manuscripts that have been submitted to him with two spaces after a full stop, he knows the author has not had books published before, because two spaces are no longer used in print. Typographers and just about every widely used style guide seem to agree on this.

  The practice of using two spaces seems to have been born because of the shortcomings of early printers. Two spaces were used to make the break from the previous sentence clear. Those who learnt to type on typewriters would have been taught to use double spacing for this reason. As space came to have more of a premium in printed media, and with the improved clarity of modern printing, the convention of single-spacing took over.

  The practice of double-spacing is known as ‘English spacing’ – single spacing is known as ‘French spacing’. Ironically, English spacing seems to be more common in America – particularly in academic circles.

  But here is an interesting contradiction that nobody has picked up.

  In his Bitcoin white paper (November 2008), in his posts on the cryptography mailing list (January 2009), on Sourceforge (January 2009 to December 2010) and in his posts on the Bitcoin forum (November 2009 to December 2010) Satoshi uses two spaces after each full stop.

  But in his announcement of Bitcoin to the P2P Foundation (February 2009), and in the subsequent discussion there, he only uses one space after each full stop.125

  It is possible that the P2P forum software used to collapse double-spacing if you cut and paste. But I found this was not the case when I tried it out more recently.

  What can we deduce from this?

  Assuming the P2P software hasn’t compressed his spacing, the first possibility is that that the P2P Foundation announcement was written by someone else.

  Another is that Satoshi submitted his white paper with the correct, academic English spacing, while his announcement to the P2P Foundation with the non-academic single-spacing was appropriate for that circle. In other words, he was aware of both conventions.

  But in that case he should have continued using single spacing. He didn’t. Elsewhere, he went back to double. Perhaps the spaces-after-full-stops side of Satoshi’s persona was not yet fully formed.

  As I study the rest of Satoshi’s punctuation in search of clues, I find that it, like his English, is consistent and uncomplicated.

  There is the occasional loose apostrophe. He writes 90’s, rather than 90s or ’90s – but (though grammatically incorrect) this is generally accepted as it’s so common.

  He uses double inverted commas or speech marks. These are more common in the US, Canada, Australia and continental Europe, while single quotation marks are more common in the UK and South Africa.

  Finally, his use of the hyphen: good but not impeccable. He will use it when two or more words are put together to make an adjective – ‘it is a piece of open-source software’, for example. But long-term future is ‘long term future’, pseudo-code is ‘pseudocode’, account-based commands becomes ‘account based commands’.

  Why Bitcoin is not a product of youth or old age, but of middle age

  There is something we can learn from his double-spacing.

  I was born in 1969. The first word-processors were coming out in the mid-1980s, when I was in my teens, and I learnt to type on them. Despite going to an academic school, I never even knew about double-spacing. However, my mother, who learnt to type on a typewriter, practised this convention and insists on it even now.

  So, Satoshi’s double spacing suggests someone who is a little older – probably born before 1975 – when he says he was born.126 There are plenty of academic coders younger than that who write with two spaces – so this is not conclusive.

  But Bitcoin isn’t a product of youth like Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat. It’s not enough to be a whizz on computers. It requires knowledge of so many other areas, which would have taken years to accumulate. The language in which Bitcoin is written – C++ – is also regarded by coders as ‘old school’.

  All in all, I dismiss the idea that Satoshi was in his twenties when he created Bitcoin.

  On the other hand, I cannot see that he was born before that key period of 1955–56 – i.e. older than 54 in 2009. He would have missed the computer revolution and been too old to learn the code he would have needed. What’s more, ambition fades with age. Much older than that and he would have lacked the drive.

  Martti Malmi tells me, ‘I feel like he is maybe in his 30s or 40s, I’ve never met him – nobody’s ever met him – by the name Satoshi of course – all my contact with him was by email and in the forums.’

  I’m inclined to agree. I suggest he was born somewhere between 1955 and 1975 – most probably between 1960 and 1970.

  How rich is Satoshi?

  Satoshi says he had been coding Bitcoin for some 18 months before announcing it in January 2009.127 He would then spend another two years working on it publicly before he left the Bitcoin forums in December 2010, and at least another few months working with core developers after that.

  Even if he lived the most frugal of lifestyles, over four years working on the project without pay suggests he must have had some other form of income. Perhaps he came from a rich family, or he had some kind of grant, fellowship or sponsorship. Perhaps he had another job or freelanced. Speculation aside, he must have had some other form of income or capital to draw on. I believe that it was a significant figure – enough to give him the confidence to begin work on a project that could last any number of years without any guarantee of return at the end.

  A coder and independent security researcher named Sergio Lerner conducted a detailed analysis of the block chain at the time Satoshi was still mining. He concluded that Satoshi had mined at least one million bitcoins – more precisely 1,148,800. Lerner felt that if any of these coins had been spent, it would not be difficult to work out Satoshi’s identity – the recipient of the coins would know, unless the sender had sent the coins anonymously. But it appears that none of them were ever spent.

  My own basic analysis shows that of the 1,624,250 bitcoins that were mined by December 31st 2009 with the completion of block 32485, only 27% have been moved. Somebody – or bodies – in the small circle of early miners has kept around 1.2 million.

  It is, of course, yet another gold star to Satoshi. He was aware of Bitcoin’s lack of anonymity (he had sacrificed it in order to improve its performance and reduce bandwidth needed), so even here he left no clues.

  But that also means, using a $500 bitcoin price, that there is a fortune worth over half a billion dollars he has left untouched.

  It would take someone with extraordinary willpower, which we know Satoshi has, not to spend a penny of that. An amazing fortune, many years in the making, taking genius, application, good fortune and everything else you need to have uncommon success – and he barely touches a penny of it.

  If Satoshi was very
poor, I do not believe such levels of willpower would be possible. The more comfortably off he is, the more likely it is he would be able to resist the temptation to dip into his fortune.

  It all makes me think that Satoshi had money.

  However, he may not have a particularly powerful computer – which suggests he did not have that much money. Yet another contradiction.

  In addition, his use of AnonymousSpeech to register and host the Bitcoin domain was not cheap. It would have cost about a $1,000 for a service he could have had elsewhere, but less anonymously, for about $50.

  The inference is that he did not invent Bitcoin for the money, nor does he particularly value the things many of us lesser mortals might spend our fortunes on – houses, cars and gorgeous watches. But if he did have money, how did he come by it? Was it perhaps for some other coding work he had done in the past? Such work can be very well paid.

  Whether as a writer or coder or something else, I’m convinced there must be examples of Satoshi’s other work on the internet. Is he hiding in plain view?

  The one-man-band who was an old-school coder

  On top of everything else, Satoshi was, as Gavin Andresen, says a ‘brilliant programmer’.128

  ‘When there was a problem with the protocol,’ says Martti Malmi to me, ‘he fixed it in one day or something like that, when it would take someone else weeks. If he is just one person, he did an amazing job with the code.’

  It seems he was just one person. Teams tend to leave notes for each other explaining why they’ve done certain things. There were none of these in Bitcoin, only notes to self. The consistency of style also indicates the coding of one man working alone. It seems, until a few months before he left, ‘almost all modifications to the source code were done by Satoshi – he accepted contributions relatively rarely’.129

  The actual codebase was not so sophisticated from the point of view of software engineering principles. It was ‘both elegant and inelegant, written neither by a total amateur or a professional programmer’.130 What was exceptional was its robustness.