Recently, some rather dodgy youtube video was released, pointing at yet another person as being the real Satoshi Nakamoto (the founder of #bitcoin for those unfamiliar).
The claim, is based on a whole series of assumptions and unrelated facts, but is mostly debunked by now, mainly by Tone Vays, who went over all the arguments on his youtube channel (subscribing to his channel must if you’re in bitcoin, check it here).
This video was making me reminiscent of the old days… the 1998 to 2005 timeframe more or less, when I was working together with some people that actually knew a thing or two about cryptography.
Before I begin about where you have to situate the real Satoshi Nakamoto, I want to state that this hunt is fun, but irrelevant to bitcoin. If he ever makes himself known or not, doesn’t matter. The system is there, and it works without him, which is one of the many genius things about bitcoin, you don’t need a leader, an Elon Musk-type figure selling you on his dreams and products, it just runs on its own without a HQ or “leader” tweeting his own company’s stock price up or down.
My background
Without posting a whole resumé here, first a bit of a background:
I’ve been born somewhere around 1975 and been around computers my whole life as my dad actually sold computers (my first one was a Sharp with a chrome tape bay and was used as a typewriter).
I’ve worked at a very early internet provider who later become part of a bigger company and went bust in the dotcom bubble. I’ve worked in a department that dealt with abuse and spammers on a regular basis, although we got a separate unit for that around mid 2000. I was online in my free time of course as well, connecting to BBS servers remotely at first, using dial-up and later went on to be part of an anti-spam group of all kinds of people. The core of this group were 4 people who themselves worked at an abuse-department of other providers, and were sick and tired of the big companies looking the other way for the big spammers, … we wanted to do something to hit them back. The group existed from 1999 to somewhere in 2009 or 2010.
The digital coins idea
I’ve learned about bitcoin in juli 2010 this way. As some of the people saw a possibility to charge legit mail senders with a small sort of captcha-system with a calculation. If you would send millions of spam messages out, the costs would far outweigh the benefits and profit. That idea failed for many reasons, but the basic idea of solving a small mathematical calculation in order to send mail, soon was spreading to other forums. I don’t say we invented it, we only had that idea as well as other in the digital cash space and some cyberpunk forums.
The idea to couple this math-calculation with a real distributed system came much later, with a group releasing a distributed system of an auto-attacking tool against spammers.
In short, BlueFrog was released around 2005 I believe, and was the magic bullet against spammer back when the internet was much more simple.
The idea, in short was the following: you take the headers of a spam mail, analyse it automatically and then start intructions for the the blue frog client to attack the main offending ip-addresses in a DDOS attack, together with all other blue frog clients.
This idea went live, was distributed and was soon shut down after the gangs behind the spammers identified the blue frog founders, who were soon shutting down the service in fear of getting “hurt”.
They had found a way however to attack spammers, distributed… the anonymity of the founders however was the achilles heel of this system.
“someone” must have followed this story rather closely and learned from the mistakes made here… that “someone” was Satoshi Nakamoto in my opinion, who learned not to get his name attached in any way to a system that attacked or could disrupt an existing system (central banking or the monetary system).
That “someone” also had to have a deep interest in anti-spam systems, as no other person would have known about this spam-war going on at that time.
The little group we had (an e-mail list on yahoo groups), slowly dissolved after that. In 2009 the last messages were sent and the leaders all went on to do other stuff, ‘with cryptography’.
If anyone want to known where bitcoin came from, and who Satoshi is… you’ll have to look in that direction. I’m also sure enough that this person is very, very good in hiding his identity and staying underground. That’s something you just did in the ’90s if you were into this.
just my 2 cts.
PS: I hope you’re safe my friend, “keep hammering away”.
