[Cryptography] Satoshi's Trump Card

[Ray Dillinger]

On 07/03/2017 08:13 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:

> It is assumed that he has the wallets with the coins in. But I suggest that
> being a hairshirted ideologue, he thought he should not profit personally
> and mined the genesis blocks into the bit bucket.

I would not say hairshirted ideologue - he actually talked more about
engineering than ideology. But yes, I would agree that he seemed
profoundly uninterested in personal wealth.  He mentioned the topic of
money seldom outside of technical writing about Bitcoin, but when he did
it was never in terms of personal wealth. Money only mattered to him in
the abstract - in terms of its effect on society and economics and the
interaction between wealth and power.

I doubt that he is the sort who would have mined the blocks into the bit
bucket.  I remember him once responding to someone who had deleted an
expired key with evident near-disbelief saying "why would anyone ever
delete a key?"

> I am pretty certain this happened because otherwise Satoshi would have
> moved the genesis block around precisely to avoid the risk of extortion etc.

I don't understand.  Nobody knows who Satoshi is.  Moving his known
blocks would risk someone finding out.  He's not vulnerable to extortion
etc until someone finds out who he is.  And of course the instant any of
his known coins move, a thousand alarms go off across the world, causing
a disruptive effect I bet he'd rather avoid.

> Given the circumstances, I think it most likely Hal Finney was Satoshi and
> he mined the genesis block into the bit bucket. Then when he needed the
> money, he didn't have it.

Everyone is allowed a theory.  But it's likely that we will never know
for sure.

Hal expected to wake up from cryogenic suspension a decade or a century
from now; if he *were* Satoshi, why would he spend a Bitcoin fortune to
wait through an agonizing few extra weeks, which is all that the most
expensive currently available treatments in the world could have provided?

Right now, I think the biggest risk that Hal faces (if Hal can be said
to even exist) is that people who believe he's Satoshi will block his
resuscitation in order to prevent the possible financial panic when
Satoshi's coins start to be spent. If resuscitation turns out to be
possible in the first place.  I expect that risk is not very great,
because it's predicated on Bitcoin solving its scale problem.

				Bear




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