Todd’s urgent dismissal of the documentary reads to Hoback like an attempt to throw Satoshi-hunters off the scent. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that Peter would go on the offense. He’s a master of game theory—it’s what he does. He has spent a lot of years now muddying the waters,” says Hoback. “He’s an unbelievable genius.”
I haven’t seen the docu, but I did like his (Hoback’s) docu about Qanon, Q: Into the Storm.
When someone says “He’s an unbelievable genius,” I now understand that the person speaking is either a con artist or a gullible idiot. Unbelievable geniuses don’t exist, there’s just specialists, people who get lucky, people who work hard. So if you’re saying someone is such a genius, either you have no metric by which to measure genius, or you’re selling something.
“I think Cullen made the Satoshi accusation for marketing. He needed a way to get attention for his film.”
Cullen is absolutely selling something: he’s selling his documentary.
The various denials and deflections from Todd, [Cullen] claims, are part of a grand and layered misdirection.
Smells 100% like bullshit. I had no take on this documentary one way or the other before, but now I’m very skeptical.
It’s almost certainly bullshit. This is the entry point to conspiratorial thinking; it’s a classic Argument from Silence.
“What is he trying to hide‽” I dunno, man. Maybe he recognizes that there’s a bunch of unhinged weirdos who are hellbent on stalking “Satoshi,” and he doesn’t want to be harassed? Seems like a pretty good reason to try to throw you off.
Also, who gives a shit who it is? Only people trying to make a buck or beg money off of that person care. Reveals a lot about the documentary director.
“What is he trying to hide‽” I dunno, man. Maybe he recognizes that there’s a bunch of unhinged weirdos who are hellbent on stalking “Satoshi,” and he doesn’t want to be harassed?
Forget being harassed. Honestly, being kidnapped is a serious concern. Whoever or whatever group Satoshi is, it’s estimated he, she, or they own something like a million bitcoins.
Kidnapping is normally a pretty poor choice of crime for a criminal gang to undertake. It had its heyday back in the early 20th century. But as the FBI really got going, and we got better at tracking down people across state lines and internationally, kidnapping became much more difficult to pull off. Kidnapping someone - physically abducting them - is the easy part. But actually sending their family a ransom letter and collecting the money in a way that can’t be traced back to you? That’s a whole different matter. Actually getting the ransom money and somehow getting it into a form you can spend, all without getting caught? That’s nearly impossible in this day and age.
But someone with a million Bitcoins? It’s entirely possible that everything needed to access those funds is entirely within that one person’s skull. Either the private keys themselves, or some way to access or generate them.
Someone with that amount of Bitcoins is actually at incredible risk for kidnapping by an organized crime outfit. We’re talking about $65 billion USD worth of assets that can be obtained by just kidnapping one person and torturing them until they give up their private keys. Then once you have them, the coins can be transferred to another account and washed through numerous transactions until they’re untraceable. And the poor bastard who gets kidnapped for this just never leaves their captors alive.
And even if they keep their keys in their home instead of in their head? Now they’re at risk of break-in, or being held hostage during a nighttime break-in.
Hell, even just being suspected of being Satoshi would be incredibly dangerous. That’s an even more horrifying scenario. Imagine an organized crime outfit thinks you’re Satoshi, they’re incorrect, and they abduct you and torture you, demanding you give them something you are simply incapable of providing…
Hoback argues
In any case, says Hoback, the identity of the real Satoshi is a matter of public interest. “This person is potentially on track to become the wealthiest on Earth,” says Hoback. “If countries are considering adopting this in their treasuries or making it legal tender, the idea that there’s potentially this anonymous figure out there who controls one-twentieth of the total supply of digital gold is pretty important.”
Currently bitcoin or any block chain based currency is more of a grift than financial freedom. However countries like El Salvador have taken it up as official currency, so real lives can be affected by whoever holds that bitcoin stockpile.
Sure. Counterpoint: there’s real billionaires with known identities fucking things up, and we aren’t doing shit about them.
Obviously, knowing the identity of one more isn’t that big of an issue.
I mean, I think people like Euler are geniuses. Dude created so many theorems that they had to start naming them after the second person to discover them.
Maybe, I don’t know enough about him, but I will say this: Nobody fits my definition of “people who work hard” better than Euler.
Unless somebody can “predict” (e.g. announce before executing) movement of coins from verified Satoshi wallets, I won’t believe any of these unmaskings.
I would love to know who Satoshi is, but that level of proof would require a willing Satoshi and they (singular or plural) appear to not be up for that.
Has there been any movement from those wallets in the years since Satoshi went dark?
My money is still on Paul Le Roux.
If countries are considering adopting this in their treasuries or making it legal tender, the idea that there’s potentially this anonymous figure out there who controls one-twentieth of the total supply of digital gold is pretty important.”
Governments in their current form don’t like legal tender they can’t inflate at will. Never going to happen. People have been saying this for 14 years now. It’s done, guys. Bitcoin has saturated the world as much as it ever will. It will now adopt the “Linux Desktop” status, being a small minority among every other electronic form of payment.
Bitcoin was never meant to be legal tender, and it still isn’t.
The fact that it’s now a regulated commodity is pretty antithetical to its original purpose, but still, it doesn’t make it legal tender.
But setting all that aside, you’re right, monetary controls are pretty important tools of a nation state… And your alternative is what? A digital gold standard based on Bitcoin…?
That idea is so idiotic, that I can’t even start to write out the problems with it, because I wouldn’t stop.
