Bitcoin Inventor Satoshi Nakamoto ‘Found’ in California

[Ares]

Ever since bitcoin was created five years ago, the crypto community has been trying to find out the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Many tried and failed, so eventually Satoshi Nakamoto became the Keyser Söze of the bitcoin world.

As the Söze saying goes, the biggest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist. Nakamoto’s biggest trick was convincing the world that his name was a pseudonym.

A new report claims it was not.
Newsweek scoop

Newsweek magazine is reviving its print edition this week and it came back in style, with one of the biggest scoops in bitcoin history (if it turns out to be true, that is). Newsweek’s Leah McGrath Goodman apparently managed to find the real Satoshi Nakamoto, and what’s even more surprising is that the humble man behind the cryptocurrency craze was hiding in plain sight.

The real Satoshi is not a Tokyo whiz kid, nor a spy or a group of developers – there was never any mystery, or pseudonym. He is 64-year-old Satoshi Nakamoto, a Californian with a love of math, encryption and model trains, McGrath Goodman claims. His background is not entirely clear, but he apparently worked on classified projects for major corporations and the US military.

He is not living out his days sipping cocktails and spending his bitcoin fortune on the French Riviera, either. Nakamoto lives in Temple City, California, in his humble family home. Not what you would expect from a man who is said to hold $400m in bitcoins.
Not too keen to talk

According to McGrath Goodman, Nakamoto was never after fame and was not thrilled when the Newsweek reporter showed up at his home. In fact, he called the police. The police officers were surprised to learn that the 64-year-old was the “real McCoy”.

He suggested he played a role in the development of bitcoin, but refused to say anything else.

“I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it,” he told the reporter. “It’s been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection.”

Nobody knew, not even his family, not even his friends or locals. His brother told Newsweek he is a “brilliant man”, but also a reclusive man who doesn’t like to talk about his work. He added that he would never acknowledge his involvement in bitcoin.

Newsweek tracked Nakamoto down through one of the companies he used to buy components for model steam trains. He gets the parts from Japan and England, he has been working with model trains since his teens and he does the machining himself.

He clearly does not want to spend his time talking to reporters, he has better things to do.

http://www.coindesk.com/bticoin-inventor-satoshi-nakamoto-found-california/

http://www.adweek.com/news/press/newsweek-relaunches-print-bitcoin-coup-156112

[chad]

he worked for the military and now "it's turned over to other people."

[Ares]

he worked for the military and now "it's turned over to other people."

Yeah if you want a list of the other people the project was turned over too, look no further than here: https://bitcoinfoundation.org/about/board

[EE_]

I saw the interview this morning.

How does anyone know he's holding $400m in bitcoins?

[Ares]

I saw the interview this morning.

How does anyone know he's holding $400m in bitcoins?

Speculation, Bitcoin wasn't premined. So it's ASSUMED that Satoshi left his computer on mining Bitcoins when the difficulty was really low and over a period of 6 months to a year was able to accumulate a good cache of coins. No one knows if he holds that many, or if he really mined them that long.

The first block is here:
https://blockchain.info/block-index/1/000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172 b3f1b60a8ce26f

The 50 bitcoins were generated and sent to this address here:

https://blockchain.info/address/1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa

There are 65 Bitcoins in that wallet. Most of which are people believing Satoshi himself controls the wallet. You can read through comments people have left attached to their donations. Some are funny.

[EE_]

Speculation, Bitcoin wasn't premined. So it's ASSUMED that Satoshi left his computer on mining Bitcoins when the difficulty was really low and over a period of 6 months to a year was able to accumulate a good cache of coins. No one knows if he holds that many, or if he really mined them that long.

The first block is here:
https://blockchain.info/block-index/1/000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172 b3f1b60a8ce26f

The 50 bitcoins were generated and sent to this address here:

https://blockchain.info/address/1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa

There are 65 Bitcoins in that wallet. Most of which are people believing Satoshi himself controls the wallet. You can read through comments people have left attached to their donations. Some are funny.

So they figure he might have 600,000 bitcoins. Once bitcoin gets to $100,000 each, he will be worth $60 billion dollars.

[Ares]

So they figure he might have 600,000 bitcoins. Once bitcoin gets to $100,000 each, he will be worth $60 billion dollars.

Not sure how though. The math doesn't add up, as the FBI currently holds the largest number of Bitcoins from Ross Ulbricht at 144,000 bitcoins. (http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/12/fbi_wallet/)

So if Satoshi has 600,000 Bitcoins somewhere, the blockchain isn't showing it.

He could of used a new address per block generation, meaning that each address would only have 50 Bitcoins. But with 600,000 coins he would have 12,000 different wallet addresses to keep track of. Could probably do it with a MySQL database. 12,000 addresses is a bit much for Excel :)

[palani]

he will be worth $60 billion dollars.
Kindly fill me in please? What is the definition of ONE dollar? Would that be ONE dollar is 1/100,000th of a bitcoin? If so would you be proclaiming that a 15 trillion dollar national debt is equal to 150,000,000 bitcoins?

[EE_]

Kindly fill me in please? What is the definition of ONE dollar? Would that be ONE dollar is 1/100,000th of a bitcoin? If so would you be proclaiming that a 15 trillion dollar national debt is equal to 150,000,000 bitcoins?

Definition of one dollar

On April 2, 1792, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton reported to Congress the precise amount of silver found in Spanish milled dollar coins in common use in the States. As a result, the United States dollar was defined[17] as a unit of pure silver weighing 371 4/16th grains (24.057 grams), or 416 grains of standard silver (standard silver being defined as 1,485 parts fine silver to 179 parts alloy).[18] It was specified that the "money of account" of the United States should be expressed in those same "dollars" or parts thereof. Additionally, all lesser-denomination coins were defined as percentages of the dollar coin, such that a half-dollar was to contain half as much silver as a dollar, quarter-dollars would contain one-fourth as much, and so on.

In an act passed in January 1837, the dollar's alloy (amount of non-silver metal present) was set at 15%. Subsequent coins would contain the same amount of pure silver as previously, but were reduced in overall weight (to 412.25 grains). On February 21, 1853, the quantity of silver in the lesser coins was reduced, with the effect that their denominations no longer represented their silver content relative to dollar coins.

Various acts have subsequently been passed affecting the amount and type of metal in U.S. coins, so that today there is no legal definition of the term "dollar" to be found in U.S. statute. Currently the closest thing to a definition is found in United States Code Title 31, Section 5116, paragraph b, subsection 2: "The Secretary [of the Treasury] shall sell silver under conditions the Secretary considers appropriate for at least $1.292929292 a fine troy ounce."

Silver was mostly removed from U.S. coinage by 1965 and the dollar became a free-floating fiat currency without a commodity backing defined in terms of real gold or silver.

I'd have to do some math to answer the rest of your question. :)

[Ares]

Here's a video interview of the woman who tracked him down.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101469309

Family and friends said he's (Satoshi) always had a large mistrust of governments and authority.

[Horn]

“I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it,” he told the reporter. “It’s been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection.”

6090

[Horn]

Family and friends said he's (Satoshi) always had a large mistrust of governments and authority.

Goes to show Japanese families really know nothing about each other,

as he was a U.S. military sub-contractor between sitdown meals.

[chad]

i know that whenever i have a general distrust for the military industrial complex and the government behind it, i go to work for them.

[Ares]

i know that whenever i have a general distrust for the military industrial complex and the government behind it, i go to work for them.

If you had an advanced understanding of mathematics and encryption, and they offered you a couple million?

[Horn]

i know that whenever i have a general distrust for the military industrial complex and the government behind it, i go to work for them.

As a backdoor double agent, or only as a backdoor agent.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVIA1n5ng4Y

[Ares]

Goes to show Japanese families really know nothing about each other,

as he was a U.S. military sub-contractor between sitdown meals.

It's hard to say what his reasons were. He obviously isn't talking, the only thing we have to go on is what was in the white paper. Where he laments about the abuses banks perpetuate with their monopoly on money as well as governments abuse of power in bailing them out.

Looking at the encryption used, and the hashing function it's easy to tell he had an advanced understanding of encryption techniques and mathematics. Maybe it's just his own personal social experiment?

[chad]

If you had an advanced understanding of mathematics and encryption, and they offered you a couple million?

well...

[Horn]

If you had an advanced understanding of mathematics and encryption, and they offered you a couple million?

6091

[Horn]

the only thing we have to go on is what was in the white paper.

That and Ares' nose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_off_the_nose_to_spite_the_face

[Ares]

well...

With my current level of disdain for this government I'd probably do the job that they wanted so that I could "retire" from having to go to a 9 to 5 every day. Also take the proceeds and invest where I see fit.

Might also explain why he chose the hashing functions that he did. A lot of people wondered if it was luck or genius that he chose a particular hash that couldn't even be cracked by a quantum computer..

[Ares]

Full Newsweek Article:

Satoshi Nakamoto stands at the end of his sunbaked driveway looking timorous. And annoyed.

He's wearing a rumpled T-shirt, old blue jeans and white gym socks, without shoes, like he has left the house in a hurry. His hair is unkempt, and he has the thousand-mile stare of someone who has gone weeks without sleep.

He stands not with defiance, but with the slackness of a person who has waged battle for a long time and now faces a grave loss.

Two police officers from the Temple City, Calif., sheriff's department flank him, looking puzzled. "So, what is it you want to ask this man about?" one of them asks me. "He thinks if he talks to you he's going to get into trouble."

"I don't think he's in any trouble," I say. "I would like to ask him about Bitcoin. This man is Satoshi Nakamoto."

"What?" The police officer balks. "This is the guy who created Bitcoin? It looks like he's living a pretty humble life."

I'd come here to try to find out more about Nakamoto and his humble life. It seemed ludicrous that the man credited with inventing Bitcoin - the world's most wildly successful digital currency, with transactions of nearly $500 million a day at its peak - would retreat to Los Angeles's San Bernardino foothills, hole up in the family home and leave his estimated $400 million of Bitcoin riches untouched. It seemed similarly implausible that Nakamoto's first response to my knocking at his door would be to call the cops. Now face to face, with two police officers as witnesses, Nakamoto's responses to my questions about Bitcoin were careful but revealing.

Tacitly acknowledging his role in the Bitcoin project, he looks down, staring at the pavement and categorically refuses to answer questions.

"I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it," he says, dismissing all further queries with a swat of his left hand. "It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection."

Nakamoto refused to say any more, and the police made it clear our conversation was over.

But a two-month investigation and interviews with those closest to Nakamoto and the developers who worked most frequently with him on the out-of-nowhere global phenomenon that is Bitcoin reveal the myths surrounding the world's most famous crypto-currency are largely just that - myths - and the facts are much stranger than the well-established fiction.

Far from leading to a Tokyo-based whiz kid using the name "Satoshi Nakamoto" as a cipher or pseudonym (a story repeated by everyone from Bitcoin's rabid fans to The New Yorker), the trail followed by Newsweek led to a 64-year-old Japanese-American man whose name really is Satoshi Nakamoto. He is someone with a penchant for collecting model trains and a career shrouded in secrecy, having done classified work for major corporations and the U.S. military.

Standing before me, eyes downcast, appeared to be the father of Bitcoin.

Not even his family knew.
http://cdn.newsweek.com/data/images/full/2014/03/04/3670-3-7-fe0108-bitcoin-04.jpg

There are several Satoshi Nakamotos living in North America and beyond - both dead and alive - including a Ralph Lauren menswear designer in New York and another who died in Honolulu in 2008, according to the Social Security Index's Death Master File. There's even one on LinkedIn who claims to have started Bitcoin and is based in Japan. But none of these profiles seem to fit other known details and few of the leads proved credible. Of course, there is also the chance "Satoshi Nakamoto" is a pseudonym, but that raises the question why someone who wishes to remain anonymous would choose such a distinctive name. It was only while scouring a database that contained the registration cards of naturalized U.S. citizens that a Satoshi Nakamoto turned up whose profile and background offered a potential match. But it was not until after ordering his records from the National Archives and conducting many more interviews that a cohesive picture began to take shape.

Two weeks before our meeting in Temple City, I struck up an email correspondence with Satoshi Nakamoto, mostly discussing his interest in upgrading and modifying model steam trains with computer-aided design technologies. I obtained Nakamoto's email through a company he buys model trains from.

He has been buying train parts from Japan and England since he was a teenager, saying, "I do machining myself, manual lathe, mill, surface grinders."

The process also requires a good amount of math, something at which Nakamoto - and his entire family - excels. The eldest of three brothers who all work in engineering and technical fields, Nakamoto graduated from California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, Calif., with a degree in physics. But unlike his brothers, his circuitous career path is very hard to trace.

Nakamoto ceased responding to emails I'd sent him immediately after I began asking about Bitcoin. This was in late February. Before that, I'd also asked about his professional background, for which there is very little to be found in the public record. I only received evasive answers. When he asked about my background, I told him I'd be happy to elaborate over the phone and called him to introduce myself. When there was no response, I asked his oldest son, Eric Nakamoto, 31, to reach out and see whether his father would talk about Bitcoin. The message came back he would not. Attempts through other family members also failed.

After that, Nakamoto disregarded my requests to speak by phone and did not return calls. The day I arrived at his modest, single-family home in southern California, his silver Toyota Corolla CE was parked in the driveway but he didn't answer the door.

At one point he did peer out, cracking open the door screen and making eye contact briefly. Then he shut it. That was the only time I saw him without police officers in attendance.

"You want to know about my amazing physicist brother?" says Arthur Nakamoto, Satoshi Nakamoto's youngest sibling, who works as director of quality assurance at Wavestream Corp., a maker of radio frequency amplifiers in San Dimas, Calif.

"He's a brilliant man. I'm just a humble engineer. He's very focused and eclectic in his way of thinking. Smart, intelligent, mathematics, engineering, computers. You name it, he can do it."

But he also had a warning.

"My brother is an asshole. What you don't know about him is that he's worked on classified stuff. His life was a complete blank for a while. You're not going to be able to get to him. He'll deny everything. He'll never admit to starting Bitcoin."

And with that, Nakamoto's brother hung up.

His remarks suggested I was on the right track, but that was not enough. While his brother suggested Nakamoto would be capable of starting Bitcoin, I was not at all sure whether he knew for certain one way or the other. He said they didn't get along and didn't speak often.

I plainly needed to talk to Satoshi Nakamoto face to face.

Bitcoin is a currency that lives in the world of computer code and can be sent anywhere in the world without racking up bank or exchange fees, and is then stored on a cellphone or hard drive until used again. Because the currency resides in code, it can also be lost when a hard drive crashes, or stolen if someone else accesses the keys to the code.

"The whole reason geeks get excited about Bitcoin is that it is the most efficient way to do financial transactions," says Bitcoin's chief scientist, Gavin Andresen, 47. He acknowledges that Bitcoin's ease of use can also lead to easy theft and that it is safest when stored in a safe-deposit box or on a hard drive that's not connected to the Internet. "For anyone who's tried to wire money overseas, you can see how much easier an international Bitcoin transaction is. It's just as easy as sending an email."

Even so, Bitcoin is vulnerable to massive theft, fraud and scandal, which has seen the price of Bitcoins whipsaw from more than $1,200 each last year to as little as $130 in late February.

The currency has attracted the attention of the U.S. Senate, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Reserve, the Internal Revenue Service, the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which in October shuttered the online black market Silk Road and seized its $3.5 million cache of Bitcoin. "The FBI is now one of the largest holders of Bitcoin in the world," Andresen says.

In recent weeks, a revived version of Silk Road as well as one of Bitcoin's biggest exchanges, Tokyo-based Mt. Gox, shut down and filed for bankruptcy after attacks by hackers drained each of millions of dollars.

Andresen, a Silicon Valley refugee in Amherst, Mass., says he worked closely with the person "or entity" known as Satoshi Nakamoto on the development of Bitcoin from June 2010 to April 2011. This was before the rise of today's multibillion-dollar Bitcoin economy, boosted last year by the unexpected, if cautious, endorsement of outgoing Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke, who said virtual currencies "may hold long-term promise."

Since then, Bitcoin ATMs have been cropping up across North America (with some of the first in Vancouver, British Columbia; Boston; and Albuquerque, N.M.) while the acceptance of Bitcoin has spread to businesses as diverse as Tesla, OkCupid, Reddit, Overstock.com and Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's aviation company, which has said it will blast people into space if they cough up enough Bitcoin.

"Working on Bitcoin's core code is really scary, actually, because if you wreck something, you can break this huge $8 billion project," says Andresen. "And that's happened. We have broken it in the past."

For nearly a year, Andresen corresponded with the founder of Bitcoin a few times a week, often putting in 40-hour weeks refining the Bitcoin code. Throughout their correspondence, Nakamoto's evasiveness was his hallmark, Andresen says.

In fact, he never even heard Nakamoto's voice, because the founder of Bitcoin would not communicate by phone. Their interactions, he says, always took place by "email or private message on the Bitcointalk forum," where enthusiasts meet online.

"He was the kind of person who, if you made an honest mistake, he might call you an idiot and never speak to you again," Andresen says. "Back then, it was not clear that creating Bitcoin might be a legal thing to do. He went to great lengths to protect his anonymity."

Nakamoto also ignored all of Andresen's questions about where he was from, his professional background, what other projects he'd worked on and whether his name was real or a pseudonym (many of Bitcoin's devotees use pseudonyms). "He was never chatty," Andresen says. "All we talked about was code."

Andresen, an Australian who graduated from Princeton with a Bachelor's in computer science, eventually became Nakamoto's point person on a growing team of international coders and programmers who worked on a volunteer basis to perfect the Bitcoin code after its inauspicious launch in January 2009.

Andresen originally heard about Bitcoin the following year through a blog he followed. He reached out to Nakamoto through one of the Bitcoin founder's untraceable email addresses and offered his assistance. His initial message to Bitcoin's inventor read: "Bitcoin is a brilliant idea, and I want to help. What do you need?"

Andresen says he didn't give much thought to working for an anonymous inventor. "I am a geek," he says simply. "I don't care if the idea came from a good person or an evil person. Ideas stand on their own."

Other developers were driven by "enlightened self-interest," profit or personal politics, he says. But nearly all were intrigued by the promise of a digital currency accessible to anyone in the world that could bypass central banks at a time when the global financial system was on life support. In this respect, the launch of Bitcoin could not have been better timed.

In 2008, just before Bitcoin's official kickoff, a somewhat stiffly written, nine-page proposal found its way onto the Internet bearing the name and email address of Satoshi Nakamoto.

The paper proposed "electronic cash" that "would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution," with transactions time-stamped and viewable to all.

The masterstroke was replacing the role of banks as the trusted middlemen with Bitcoin users, who would act as sentinels for the integrity of the system, verifying transactions using their computing power in exchange for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin production is designed to move at a carefully calibrated pace to boost value and scarcity and remain inflation proof, halving its quantity every four years, and is designed to stop proliferating when Bitcoins reach a total of 21 million in 2140. (Bitcoins can be divided by up to eight decimal places, with the smallest units called "satoshis.")

"I got the impression that Satoshi was really doing it for political reasons," says Andresen, who gets paid in Bitcoins - along with a half-dozen other Bitcoin core developers working everywhere from Silicon Valley to Switzerland - by the Bitcoin Foundation, a nonprofit working to standardize the currency.

He doesn't like the system we have today and wanted a different one that would be more equal. He did not like the notion of banks and bankers getting wealthy just because they hold the keys," says Andresen.

Holding the keys has also made early comers to Bitcoin wealthy beyond measure. "I made a small investment in Bitcoin and it is actually enough that I could now retire if I wanted to," Andresen says. "Overall, I've made about $800 per penny I've invested. It's insane."

One of the first people to start working with Bitcoin's founder in 2009 was Martti Malmi, 25, a Helsinki programmer who invested in Bitcoins. "I sold them in 2011 and bought a nice apartment," he says. "Today, I could have bought 100 nice apartments."

Communication with Bitcoin's founder was becoming less frequent by early 2011. Nakamoto stopped posting changes to the Bitcoin code and ignored conversations on the Bitcoin forum.

Andresen was unprepared, however, for Satoshi Nakamoto's reaction to an email exchange between them on April 26, 2011.

"I wish you wouldn't keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure," Nakamoto wrote to Andresen. "The press just turns that into a pirate currency angle. Maybe instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to your dev contributors; it helps motivate them."

Andresen responded: "Yeah, I'm not happy with the 'wacky pirate money' tone, either."

hThen he told Nakamoto he'd accepted an invitation to speak at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters. "I hope that by talking directly to them and, more importantly, listening to their questions/concerns, they will think of Bitcoin the way I do - as a just-plain-better, more efficient, less-subject-to-political-whims money," he said. "Not as an all-powerful black-market tool that will be used by anarchists to overthrow the System."

From that moment, Satoshi Nakamoto stopped responding to emails and dropped off the map.

Nakamoto's family describe him as extremely intelligent, moody and obsessively private, a man of few words who screens his phone calls, anonymizes his emails and, for most of his life, has been preoccupied with the two things for which Bitcoin has now become known: money and secrecy.

For the past 40 years, Satoshi Nakamoto has not used his birth name in his daily life. At the age of 23, after graduating from California State Polytechnic University, he changed his name to "Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto," according to records filed with the U.S. District Court of Los Angeles in 1973. Since then, he has not used the name Satoshi but instead signs his name "Dorian S. Nakamoto."

Descended from Samurai and the son of a Buddhist priest, Nakamoto was born in July 1949 in the city of Beppu, Japan, where he was brought up poor in the Buddhist tradition by his mother, Akiko. In 1959, after a divorce and remarriage, she immigrated to California, taking her three sons with her. Now age 93, she lives with Nakamoto in Temple City.

Nakamoto did not get along with his stepfather, but his aptitude for math and science was evident from an early age, says Arthur, who also notes, "He is fickle and has very weird hobbies."

Just after graduating college, Nakamoto went to work on defense and electronics communications for Hughes Aircraft in southern California. "That was just the beginning," says Arthur, who also worked at Hughes. "He is the only person I have ever known to show up for a job interview and tell the interviewer he's an idiot - and then prove it."

Nakamoto has six children. The first, a son from his first marriage in the 1980's, is Eric Nakamoto, an animation and 3-D graphics designer in Philadelphia. His next five children were with his second wife, Grace Mitchell, 56, who lives in Audubon, N.J., and says she met Nakamoto at a Unitarian church mixer in Cherry Hill, N.J., in the mid-1980s. She recalls he came to the East Coast after leaving Hughes Aircraft, now part of Raytheon, in his 20s and next worked for Radio Corporation of America in Camden, N.J., as a systems engineer.

"We were doing defensive electronics and communications for the military, government aircraft and warships, but it was classified and I can't really talk about it," confirms David Micha, president of the company now called L-3 Communications.

Mitchell says her husband "did not talk much about his work" and sometimes took on military projects independent of RCA. In 1987, the couple moved back to California, where Nakamoto worked as a computer engineer for communications and technologies companies in the Los Angeles area, including financial information service Quotron Systems Inc., sold in 1994 to Reuters, and Nortel Networks.

Nakamoto, who was laid off twice in the 1990s, according to Mitchell, fell behind on mortgage payments and taxes and their home was foreclosed. That experience, says Nakamoto's oldest daughter, Ilene Mitchell, 26, may have informed her father's attitude toward banks and the government.

A libertarian, Nakamoto encouraged his daughter to be independent, start her own business and "not be under the government's thumb," she says. "He was very wary of the government, taxes and people in charge."

She also describes her father as a man who worked all hours, from before the family rose in the morning to late into the night. "He would keep his office locked and we would get into trouble if we touched his computer," she recalls. "He was always expounding on politics and current events. He loved new and old technology. He built his own computers and was very proud of them."

Around 2000, Nakamoto and Grace separated, though they have never divorced. They moved back to New Jersey with their five children and Nakamoto worked as a software engineer for the Federal Aviation Administration in New Jersey in the wake of the September 11 attacks, doing security and communications work, says Mitchell.

"It was very secret," she says. "He left that job sometime in 2001 and I don't think he's had a steady job since."

When the FAA contract ended, Nakamoto moved back to Temple City, where for the rest of that decade things get hazy about what kind of work he undertook.

Ever since Bitcoin rose to prominence there has been a hunt for the real Satoshi Nakamoto. Did he act alone or was he working for the government? Bitcoin has been linked to everything from the National Security Agency to the International Monetary Fund.

Yet, in a world where almost every big Silicon Valley innovation seems to erupt in lawsuits over who thought of it first, in the case of Bitcoin the founder has remained conspicuously silent for the past five years.

"I could see my dad doing something brilliant and not accepting the greater effect of it," says Ilene Mitchell, who works for Partnerships for Student Achievement in Beaverton, Ore. "But I honestly don't see him being straight about it. Any normal person would be all over it. But he's not totally a normal person."

Nakamoto's middle brother, Tokuo Nakamoto, who lives near his brother and mother, in Duarte, Calif., agrees. "He is very meticulous in what he does, but he is very afraid to take himself out into the media, so you will have to excuse him," he says.

Characteristics of Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin founder, that dovetail with Dorian S. Nakamoto, the computer engineer, are numerous. Those working most closely with Bitcoin's founder noticed several things: he seemed to be older than the other Bitcoin developers. And he worked alone.

"He didn't seem like a young person and he seemed to be influenced by a lot of people in Silicon Valley," says Nakamoto's Finnish protégé, Martti Malmi. Andresen concurs: "Satoshi's style of writing code was old-school. He used things like reverse Polish notation."

In addition, the code was not always terribly neat, another sign that Nakamoto was not working with a team that would have cleaned up the code and streamlined it.

"Everyone who looked at his code has pretty much concluded it was a single person," says Andresen. "We have rewritten roughly 70 percent of the code since inception. It wasn't written with nice interfaces. It was like one big hairball. It was incredibly tight and well-written at the lower level but where functions came together it could be pretty messy."

Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 online proposal also hints at his age, with the odd reference to "disk space" - something that hasn't been an issue since the last millennium - and older research citations of contemporaries' work going back to 1957.

The Bitcoin code is based on a network protocol that's been established for decades. Its brilliance is not so much in the code itself, says Andresen, but in the design, which unites functions to reach multiple ends. The punctuation in the proposal is also consistent with how Dorian S. Nakamoto writes, with double spaces after periods and other format quirks.

In the debate between those who claim Nakamoto writes curiously "flawless English" for a Japanese man and those who contend otherwise, writing under both names can swerve wildly between uppercase and lowercase, full spellings and abbreviations, proper English and slang.

In his correspondences and writings, it has widely been noted that Satoshi Nakamoto alternates between British and American spellings - and, depending on his audience, veers between highly abbreviated verbiage and a more formal, polished style. Grace Mitchell says her husband does the same.

Dorian S. Nakamoto's use of English, she says, was likely influenced by his lifelong interest in collecting model trains, many of which he imported from England as a teenager while he was still learning English.

Mitchell suspects Nakamoto's initial interest in creating a digital currency that could be used anywhere in the world may have stemmed from his frustration with bank fees and high exchange rates when he was sending international wires to England to buy model trains. "He would always complain about that," she says. "I would not say he writes flawless English. He will pick up words and mix the spellings."

Eric, Nakamoto's oldest son from his first marriage, says he remains torn over whether his father is the founder of Bitcoin, noting that messages from the latter appear more "concise" and "refined than that of my father's."

Perhaps the most compelling parallel between the two Nakamotos are their professional skill sets and career timeframes. Andresen says Satoshi Nakamoto told him about how long it took him to develop Bitcoin - a span that falls squarely into Dorian S. Nakamoto's job lapse starting in 2001. "Satoshi said he'd been working on Bitcoin for years before he launched it," Andresen says. "I could see the original code taking at least two years to write. He had a revelation that he had solved something no one had solved before."

Satoshi Nakamoto's three-year silence also dovetails with health issues suffered by Dorian S. Nakamoto in the past few years, his family says. "It has been hard, because he suffered a stroke several months ago and before that he was dealing with prostate cancer," says his wife, who works as a critical-care nurse in New Jersey. "He hasn't seen his kids for the past few years."

She has been unable to get Nakamoto to speak with her about whether he was the founder of Bitcoin. Eric Nakamoto says his father has denied it. Tokuo and Arthur Nakamoto believe their brother will leave the truth unconfirmed.

"Dorian can just be paranoid," says Tokuo. "I cannot get through to him. I don't think he will answer any of these questions to his family truthfully."

Of course, none of this puts to rest the biggest question of all - the one that only Satoshi Nakamoto himself can answer: What has kept him from spending his hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin, which he reaped when he launched the currency years ago? According to his family both he - and they - could really use the money.

Andresen says if Nakamoto is as concerned about maintaining his anonymity as he remembers the answer might be simple: He does not want to participate in the Bitcoin madness. "If you come out as the leader of Bitcoin, now you have to make appearances and presentations and comments to the press and that didn't really fit with Satoshi's personality," he says. "He didn't really want to lead it anymore. He was pretty intolerant to incompetence. And he also realized the project would go on without him."

On the other hand, it is possible Nakamoto simply lost the private security keys to unlock his Bitcoin and cash in on his riches. Andresen, however, says he doubts it. "He was too disciplined," he says.

If Nakamoto ever sells his Bitcoin fortune, he would likely have to do so at a legitimate Bitcoin bank or exchange, which would not only give away his identity but alert everyone from the IRS to the FBI of his movements. While Bitcoin lets its users conduct transactions anonymously, all transactions can be viewed transparently online - and everyone is watching Nakamoto's Bitcoin to see if he spends it, says Andresen.

For his part, Andresen says he is inclined to respect Nakamoto's anonymity. "When programmers get together, we don't talk about who Satoshi Nakamoto is," he says. "We talk about how we should have invested in more Bitcoin. I mean, we're curious about it, but honestly, we really don't care."

Calling the possibility her father could also be the father of Bitcoin "flabbergasting," Ilene Mitchell says she isn't surprised her father would choose to stay under cover if he was the man behind this venture, especially as he is currently concerned about his health.

"He is very wary of government interference in general," she says. "When I was little, there was a game we used to play. He would say, 'Pretend the government agencies are coming after you.' And I would hide in the closet."

http://mag.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto.html

[palani]

Definition of one dollar

On April 2, 1792, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton reported to Congress the precise amount of silver found in Spanish milled dollar coins in common use in the States. As a result, the United States dollar was defined[17] as a unit of pure silver weighing 371 4/16th grains (24.057 grams), or 416 grains of standard silver (standard silver being defined as 1,485 parts fine silver to 179 parts alloy).[18] It was specified that the "money of account" of the United States should be expressed in those same "dollars" or parts thereof. Additionally, all lesser-denomination coins were defined as percentages of the dollar coin, such that a half-dollar was to contain half as much silver as a dollar, quarter-dollars would contain one-fourth as much, and so on.

Yes. I know. Lately I have been instructing the county treasurer to obey an act of Iowa circa 1866. I give him a check citing 12 USC 411 and tell him to make his arrangements with the bank and to put the resulting sum in a special account set up for SPECIE payments. I suspect the treasurer is not following either my instructions or the Iowa legislatures instructions. Will have to take the matter up with him soon.

[ShortJohnSilver]

Bluntly - this is NEWSWEAK, a/k/a mouthpiece of Deep State government, Tavistock Institute, Frankfurt School, whatever. Written by useful idiots for useless eaters. Thus we have no idea if they didn't just out a guy who doesn't know jack, but was paid to act "Japanese Buddhist" about Bitcoin.

[Shami-Amourae]

No one can say for certain except the mainstream media since they lie about everything. Personally I think this is just more BS mud slinging onto the Bitcoin community by the media. Let me show you something:

Left is the person the media is claiming -- Right is the actual Satoshi
http://i.imgur.com/DB4oq5s.png
If you believe the report about Satoshi Nakamoto's identity look at this (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zqp2i/if_you_believe_the_report_about_satoshi_nakamotos/)

[EE_]

Looks like Satoshi might have to spend some of his wealth to buy a hide-a-way. I don't think he will be left alone.

Man called Bitcoin's father denies ties, leads LA car chase
By Aron Ranen and Brandon Lowrey

TEMPLE CITY, California Thu Mar 6, 2014 7:08pm EST
Satoshi Nakamoto is surrounded by reporters as he leaves his home in Temple City, California, March 6, 2014.

TEMPLE CITY, California (Reuters) - A Japanese American man thought to be the reclusive multi-millionaire father of Bitcoin emerged from a modest Southern California home and denied involvement with the digital currency before leading reporters on a freeway car chase to the local headquarters of the Associated Press.

Satoshi Nakamoto, a name known to legions of bitcoin traders, practitioners and boosters around the world, appeared to lose his anonymity on Thursday after Newsweek published a story that said he lived in Temple City, California, just east of Los Angeles.

Newsweek included a photograph and a described a short interview, in which Nakamoto said he was no longer associated with Bitcoin and that it had been turned over to other people. The magazine concluded that the man was the same Nakamoto who founded Bitcoin.

Dozens of reporters, including a sprinkling of Japanese media, encircled and camped outside the man's two-story house on Thursday morning, accosting the mailman and repeatedly ringing the doorbell, to no avail. Police cruisers drove by several times but did not stop.

Several times, someone pulled back the drapes on an upstairs window.

In the afternoon, the silver-haired, bespectacled Nakamoto stepped outside, dressed in gray sport coat and green striped shirt, with a pen tucked in his shirt pocket. He was mobbed by reporters and told them he was looking for someone who understood Japanese to buy him a free lunch.

Newsweek estimates his wealth at $400 million.

"I'm not involved in Bitcoin. Wait a minute, I want my free lunch first. I'm going with this guy," Nakamoto said, pointing at a reporter from AP.

"I'm not in Bitcoin, I don't know anything about it," the man said again while walking down the street with several cameras at his heels.

He and the AP reporter made their way to a nearby sushi restaurant with media in tow, before leaving and heading downtown. Los Angeles Times reporter Joe Bel Bruno followed the pair and described the chase in a running stream of tweets. Eventually, the pair dashed into the Associated Press offices in downtown Los Angeles, where reporters are still waiting for Nakamoto to emerge.

WEIRD

Fans see Bitcoin as a digital-world currency beyond the government interference, while critics, whose ranks swelled with the recent close of major bitcoin exchanges Mt. Gox, see a risky investment whose anonymity aids drug dealers and other criminals.

Nakamoto kept a low profile in part to avoid attention of authorities, Newsweek said, and indeed on Thursday the office of Benjamin Lawsky, superintendent of New York's Department of Financial Services, was keen on speaking with him, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters.

Bitcoin is bought and sold on a peer-to-peer network independent of central control. Its value soared last year, and the total worth of bitcoins minted is now about $7 billion.

In the Newsweek article, Nakamoto was credited by Bitcoin's chief scientist, Gavin Andresen, in working out the first codes behind the currency.

A man of few words who refused to discuss anything beyond the currency or even communicate outside of email, Nakamoto was described by his brother in the Newsweek article as "fickle and has very weird hobbies," including a penchant for model trains.

The Japanese-born Nakamoto displayed an unusual aptitude for math as a child. He immigrated with his mother to California in 1959. He was worked for defense and electronics company Hughes Aircraft, but never discussed work because much of it was classified, according to Newsweek interviews with several friends and relatives.

"He's very focused and eclectic in his way of thinking. Smart, intelligent, mathematics, engineering, computers. You name it, he can do it," Newsweek quoted Arthur Nakamoto, his younger brother, as saying.

[Ares]

Looks like Satoshi might have to spend some of his wealth to buy a hide-a-way. I don't think he will be left alone.

Nope most likely not..... Just think, he might not actually be the Satoshi Nakamoto and Newsweek just ruined a guys life for web hits and print sales.

[Shami-Amourae]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zppHkCQOLM

[Horn]

Left is the person the media is claiming -- Right is the actual Satoshi
http://i.imgur.com/DB4oq5s.png


Both works appear to be from the same writer in body and structure, why would he sign with a different name though?

[monty]

Both works appear to be from the same writer in body and structure, why would he sign with a different name though?

One is the son.

Sent from my iPad using Forum Runner

[Neuro]

Here's a video interview of the woman who tracked him down.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101469309

Family and friends said he's (Satoshi) always had a large mistrust of governments and authority.
And he calls the police, when someone wants to interview him...

[chad]

it's him. but it's not him. but no one really knows. then he used to work for the government. then some people of exchanges are being murdered. then some exchanges close and take 460 million with them. then the fbi confiscates large wallets of some people. this is like a jason bourne movie.

[Horn]

it's him. but it's not him. but no one really knows. then he used to work for the government. then some people of exchanges are being murdered. then some exchanges close and take 460 million with them. then the fbi confiscates large wallets of some people. this is like a jason bourne movie.

With all the terrible news surrounding actual use of Bitcoin, msm has to find someway to shed some sort of positive light on the situation by removing mystery for its future looting.

[Ares]

With all the terrible news surrounding actual use of Bitcoin, msm has to find someway to shed some sort of positive light on the situation by removing mystery for its future looting.

How do you loot that which you do not control? Any one of you detractors have yet to show any evidence of it being controlled, or even show evidence of how it can be controlled.

I think of Bitcoin as Bit Torrent money. If you can find a way to control, regulate or loot Bitcoin, give Hollywood a call as I'm sure they would love a way to control, loot, or regulate Bit Torrent.

[Horn]

How do you loot that which you do not control?

Advertise the terrible repercussions of dealing with the uncontrolled, so the overall impact is stretched into oblivion. (Instead of flattening it at the get go) We've talked before on how bittorent in the end pushes state controlled programs thru to emerging markets, after all look at the products it deals in.

Once the base is established, the market is then legitimized. Bittorent is the prime mover of controlled programming instead of letting the uncontrolled market come up with its own program.

The current anglosaxon empire was built upon pirates hard labor. Bitcoin is the prime mover for state controlled E-currency.

[Ares]

Advertise the terrible repercussions of dealing with the uncontrolled, so the overall impact is stretched into oblivion. We've talked before on how bittorent in the end pushes state controlled programs thru to emerging markets, after all look at the products it deals in.

Once the base is established, the market is then legitimized. Bittorent is the prime mover of controlled programming instead of letting the uncontrolled market come up with its own program.

The current anglosaxon empire was built upon pirates hard toil.

Correct but Bit Torrent is also used as a tool for independent movies and media to get their voices heard. Zeitgeist was purely distributed via Bit Torrent, So was America From Freedom To Fascism. Neither one of those would see the light of day in our Mainstream sources of controlled information distribution.

Like all tools, it can be used by either side.

[Horn]

America From Freedom To Fascism

There is no other tool so helpful to the powers that be, then letting the people know how hopeless they are to deal with them.

Why not switch the title, To Freedom from Fascism?

[Ares]

One Does Not Simply Find Satoshi Nakamoto

Newsweek’s decision to out Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto as the creator of bitcoin appears to be backfiring spectacularly.

Nakamoto was quick to deny that he was the ‘real’ Satoshi Nakamoto and he attributed the misunderstanding to his less than perfect command of the English language.

He told the Associated Press that he refused to discuss his employment with Newsweek reporter Leah McGrath Goodman because he had signed confidentiality agreements, not because he was involved in the development of bitcoin.

If unfounded, Newsweek’s scoop could very quickly turn into a PR nightmare, as the magazine ran the report in its re-launched print edition. Perhaps Newsweek was simply too eager to get a scoop for the big day?
Back to the stone age

Newsweek is not the first publication to try and reveal the identity of the mystery man. What was so different this time around?

First of all, bitcoin is bigger and better-known, used frequently as headline ’link bait’. Secondly, this was not the work of blogger or a niche website. Newsweek has quite a reputation, or at least it used to.

Six years ago Satoshi Nakamoto was just another anonymous member of the P2P Foundation, so 2008 would be a good place to start. Back then nobody knew bitcoin would become a global phenomenon, so anonymity wasn’t such a big deal.

Satoshi Nakamoto had a simple user profile and claimed to be a 37-year-old Japanese man. The community didn’t exactly buy it, as certain details did not add up. His English was good and sometimes he used British English. Judging by the time he made his posts, the mystery man probably resided in the Americas, not Japan.

On the other hand, bitcoin.org was registered using a Japanese anonymous registration service and it was hosted by a Japanese ISP.

Several developers were working on digital currencies and e-cash technology even before Nakamoto published his bitcoin whitepaper. Most of them were not anonymous and even today there are people in the bitcoin community who claim that these crypto pioneers are the real Satoshi.

Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, Wei Dai and several other developers were among those who were periodically named in media reports and online discussions.

They all insist they are not Nakamoto.
Media reports start to emerge

As bitcoin took off, the media started taking notice and another round of speculation ensued. In 2011 an investigative journalist identified three patent holders as Nakamoto. All three denied they were involved.

The same year, The New Yorker ran a story claiming that a few Dublin-based scholars including Dr Vili Lehdonvirta could be behind bitcoin, but once again the claim was followed by denials.

The list of potential Satoshis continued to expand. Eventually it started looking like the “who’s who” of bitcoin. Founder of Mt. Gox Jed McCaleb was eventually named, along with several scholars, core developers such as Finney, crypto specialists and just about everyone else who could remotely fit the profile.

Interestingly, all ‘suspects’ were men – we’re still waiting for the first female Satoshi.
Conspiracy theorists join the fun

Rampant speculation in a fact-free environment is an invitation to conspiracy theorists, thus a number of whacky and rather amusing theories have emerged over the years.

Some insist the DARPA is behind bitcoin, while others maintain it was created by the NSA, or any of a number of secretive government agencies that have the brains and resources to develop cutting-edge crypto technologies. One theory alleges the ‘real’ Satoshi is in fact NSA researcher Tasuaki Okamoto.

Since conspiracy theorists have a penchant for one-world governments and global domination, some claim bitcoin was in fact created by the IMF to serve as a global currency.

Others point to central banks, financial institutions or tech companies.
It doesn’t really matter, does it?

Satoshi Nakamoto left the world of bitcoin in 2010, saying he is moving on to new projects. He handed everything over to the bitcoin community, the source code repository, the domains – everything but his bitcoins. Nakamoto is still believed to hold about one million coins, which would have made him a billionaire when bitcoin peaked.

A few hours after Newsweek outed Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, the ‘real’ Nakamoto logged into his disused P2P Foundation account and left a simple message:

“I am not Dorian Nakamoto.”

Nicolas Mendoza from P2P Foundation took to reddit, saying the foundation is in the process of verifying whether Satoshi’s post is legitimate. He said an official statement will be issued in the coming hours.

But in the grand scheme of things, does it really matter? The real Satoshi clearly does not want the attention – if he dropped everything in 2010, when bitcoin was still a geekish curiosity, he surely does not want it now.

The community loves the bitcoin mystique and if he ever comes forward, much of the romantic mystery surrounding bitcoin will be gone for good. Other than a few headlines, the world of bitcoin wouldn’t gain much, yet Nakamoto would lose his privacy and peace of mind. In other words, it is not going to happen.

That said, he could make an appearance without revealing his true identity. After all, he seem to be pretty good at that sort of thing – and he wouldn’t have to develop a proof-of-identity protocol to make it happen.

http://www.coindesk.com/one-simply-find-satoshi-nakamoto/

[Ares]

There is no other tool so helpful to the powers that be, then letting the people know how hopeless they are to deal with them.

Why not switch the title, To Freedom from Fascism?

How is it helpful in people knowing that the entire system is an illusion? Kings have lost their heads, governments collapsed, central banks burned to the ground when people recognize that the illusion is not the master, but the people themselves are.

[Horn]

Satoshi is an absolute capitalist.{**}