The Most Elusive Identity On The Internet - Pt. 1 (Ft. Nexpo)

[Music] [Music] thousands of people would like to know who really created Bitcoin so who made that when you asked about the Creator who created us who invented this they must be real genius everyone's like we have no idea were you able to learn anything more about who Satoshi Nakamoto is you're taking a look at Bitcoin whole rally mode today you're right about that romain at this point bitcoin is up about 20% if you can believe it and over the last 150 trading days only one damn day look at that it's really pretty incredible 71% the Bulls thoroughly in charge after collecting over a billion dollars of people's investments just and disappeared into the wind now you did not lose $3,000 okay everyone listen up you didn't lose your money now you you have to technically you kind of lost your money [Music] it's most likely it's a fictitious name I don't know them no I don't even know his name [Music] [Music] by now and just about everyone has heard about Bitcoin it's a household name and in the short span of a decade cryptocurrency as a term has gone from obscurity all the way to the mainstream the creation of Bitcoin has fostered this entirely new world of financial discussion into this day and blockchain technology seeks to undermine a number of industries in the future whether you're a fan of the whole Bitcoin thing or not there is one thing almost all of us can agree on Bitcoin is legendary for the sheer number of insane stories that come out of its existence the first story that comes to mind for me with Bitcoin is the tale of the Gizmodo editor who threw away a hard drive with 7,500 Bitcoin on it this is both absolutely hilarious and tragic simultaneously by the time he realized it he had thrown away 7.5 million dollars and today it's worth around 54 million on the flip side of things you might be all too familiar with the stories of the Bitcoin millionaires who made good on their initial investments and held long enough that the words moon and Lambo had a new meaning all in all bitcoin as a whole has fostered this incredibly interesting community but when it comes to Bitcoin the most infamous story you've probably heard of is the rise and fall of the bit Connect Ponzi scheme we've all seen the ball dude yelling bit connect and in all honesty this topic deserves a video of its own time and time again and we've seen scandals of youtubers promoting things that are less than stellar and these are obviously in exchange for those sweet influencer dollars it's one thing to promote youtuber merchandise that's going to end up in all of the thrift stores and a couple of decades from now but selling your audience a Ponzi scheme that led to the loss of people's life savings is just another insane story from the Bitcoin realm the list goes on and on and on my channel previously we've only scratched the surface of the stories of the various darknet marketplaces and services all stemming from bitcoins creation all in all I must say the cryptocurrency community fascinates me with the Witter pumping dumps blackmail emails and major Bitcoin exchanges getting hacked there's so much chaos in the world of cryptocurrency that I can only really describe it as the Wild West but don't get it twisted I still believe that Bitcoin and blockchain technology is a great invention whenever there's something new and there's hype around it it takes time for it to grow out of its infancy we all know Bitcoin by now but despite us knowing all about it there is one thing that none of us know at the heart of bitcoins Genesis there is one internet mystery and that is just as grand a story as all of the others that mystery is the true identity of the creator of Bitcoin and it begins with one elusive online persona as many of you know already and that certain identity is mr. Satoshi Nakamoto in the 21st century it's practically impossible to have a global impact without at least putting your name out there yes Satoshi Nakamoto is an exception by all accounts the person behind this online persona was a genius and to this day no one knows who he is or what happened to him [Music] satoshi nakamoto is a pseudonym which is a fictitious name and this name is the author of the now famous white paper by the name of bitcoin appeared appear electronic cash system Satoshi was the catalyst to the creation of Bitcoin along with the help of various developers over time but to this day not a sliver of verifiable proof as to his real identity has been revealed the person behind this identity is believed to have been ahead of his time and had a comprehensive understanding of C++ coding economics and cryptography this unnamed billionaire is believed to be the owner of about a million Bitcoin that has remained untouched to this day something I should note is that this 1 Million number is a bit of a rumor it's widely speculated that much of the unspent coins within the first year of bitcoins mining belonged to Satoshi I would say that it's very likely that Satoshi owns a large sum but it's incredibly difficult to say exactly how much bitcoins Satoshi has stashed away this mysterious identity came out of nowhere and has thus created non-stop speculation in regards of what type of person could have been behind Bitcoin you might think that the creator of Bitcoin would have some end game where they would profit off of it yet Satoshi's actions thus far have pointed in the opposite direction not a single penny of the supposed fortune has ever been touched and due to the nature of how public blockchain transactions work we would know if this were to change at any given moment there are quite a few theories about why Satoshi hasn't spent any of his fortune so I'll take some time now to address some common theories some people believe that Satoshi is waiting for the perfect time to cash out while some optimists believe that Satoshi never intends on selling his fortune as a donation to the community there's a chance that Satoshi lost access to its Bitcoin which I will explain in more detail later some people believe that Satoshi is dead while others believe he wanted to retain his anonymity as we go forward I will elaborate on all of these theories much more I must say that this Satoshi debate has gone on for quite some time and by no means is his topic new many people have done their research into this subject but typically something I notice is that a lot of journalists who do videos or articles on this matter tend to pick a candidate and then work backwards I should mention that we are going to go over the list of popular candidates but for now I need to point something out the fact of the matter is that starting with a candidate in mind creates a sort of confirmation bias and doesn't give you the full picture of the online persona of Satoshi Nakamoto so instead when we get to my analysis I'd like to focus only on primary sources for evidence to try and set the record straight about what we actually know about the mysterious creator of Bitcoin despite the fact that Satoshi took a wide variety of steps to make sure no paper trail would lead back to him no matter how good you are at operational security the fact of the matter is whenever you connect and interact online with others what you do and say still directly gives clues to what type of person you are any good poker player will tell you that whenever you sit down to play at a table every little thing you do sends information to the other players there whether that information is body language decision-making or even your word choice to the others at the table all of these give hints towards a poker games final outcome in our search for the creator of Bitcoin I'd like to collect a vast majority of the analysis on the internet and compile it together in a similar way to my poker analogy that being said understanding this topic requires quite a bit of background information so bear with me without further ado to start our timeline of context I'd like to take you back to the 1980s to begin our attempts at unraveling the true identity of Satoshi not [Music] [Music] despite what many people have been led to believe the influence for the creation of Bitcoin spans way farther back in history than just 2007 the roots for the creation of Bitcoin actually take place all the way back in the late 1980s and much of their influence can be traced back to one individual by the name of David chow David Chama was a cryptographer and computer scientist who was well known for his various contributions to the cryptographic community in and around 1982 he released a paper called blind signatures for untraceable payments this academic paper ultimately led to the creation of a company by the name of digi cash an anonymous payment system much of David Chang's work is what could be credited as the main influence to the activist group known as this cypherpunks Satoshi had a knowledge of the cyberpunk group what it stood for and he seemed to know many but not all of the popular members but more on that later the term cyberpunk is something that is crucial in understanding the origin of Bitcoin and who its potential creator might be so for the sake of simplicity I'll give you the Wikipedia definition for what a cyberpunk is a cyberpunk is any activist advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change originally communicating through the cypherpunks electronic mailing lists informal groups aim to achieve privacy and security through proactive use of cryptography to explain a bit further here cypherpunks essentially saw ahead in time in regards to the lack of privacy found in our modern Internet nowadays we give up all of our info to advertisers and the government and by now you could argue we've all just accepted that we're all being monitored in the 1970s though that was a bit different and encryption was something that was really only used by governments and spies as these methods of encryption made their way out to the general public cypherpunks advocated against Big Brother by promoting cryptography and other practices on an individual basis cypherpunks sort of wanted the average consumer to take their own online privacy into their own hands by giving them tools to do so as you can imagine teaching advanced cryptographic techniques to the general public and getting them to care about online privacy would be an uphill battle as most people the time didn't even own a home computer [Music] this was the roots of the cypherpunks though and as mentioned previously their main form of communication was a very active email list called the cryptography mailing list you can think of this email list as a sort of precursor to an online forum and this mailing list was so active that trolls of the time would actually sign people up on their behalf to flood their inboxes with spam this mailing list was started around 1982 by Eric Hughes Timothy C May and John Gilmore who founded a small group that met monthly at Gilmore's company Cygnus solutions in the San Francisco Bay Area here as like-minded individuals they would discuss a wide variety of political topics and goals of the group had in mind as a cypherpunk community grew the mailing list grew quickly as well to over a few thousand individuals and over time it became an incredibly active group for discussion over the years as the group grew further the cypherpunks continued to play at least some role in developing a number of notable software's over the years something I want you to keep in the back of your mind as we go forward is that the origin of the site a punk group stems from California consider that at this time in the internet's history you didn't have as far-reaching political activism geographically this group grew far larger by word of mouth more than just random strangers on the internet sharing things like we do today we should keep in mind that the cypherpunks group influence would be strongest where this group had the most people locally if we look at Google Trends for the term cypherpunk leading up to when Satoshi approached the group we can see that California had the highest interest in the United States from 2004 to 2008 Satoshi had come into contact with the cypherpunks influence at some point and something we should consider is that there may be a chance that Satoshi may have been active under a different username prior to creating Bitcoin coding for Bitcoin started in 2007 according to Satoshi so if we look at the cryptography mailing list archive theoretically Satoshi would have been posting previously under another name or another email account as a cyberpunk keep this archive in the back of your mind as I start to add more and more clues to this internet mystery I will link the cryptography mailing list archive in the description for later use what I really want to highlight here more than anything is that California was a hotspot for this groups activism I know this detail might be trivial now but as we start to dig into things you'll understand why I pointed this detail out as mentioned previously the cypherpunks developed a wide variety of software however one thing the cypherpunks couldn't seem to be successful in developing was a digital currency and that's where Satoshi Nakamoto comes in you on October 31st 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto showed what he was working on to the cyberpunk mailing list and sought to turn the proposal into a reality this proposal is the now-famous white paper Bitcoin a peer-to-peer electronic cash system unlike most white papers that came before him Satoshi had already started working on the project prior to writing the white paper in 2007 if you're unfamiliar with the term white paper let me break it down for you as there's a clue here there are quite a few definitions for the term white paper but in this context it's defined as a sort of document with the guiding philosophy towards solving a problem satoshis white paper was a theoretical outline for creating a decentralized currency that others before him failed to do one of the main problems with creating a currency at this time was the double spending problem - which I won't get into technically but in this circumstance Satoshi took knowledge foremothers past work and applied them towards his proposal in creating the Bitcoin project the term white paper itself is actually a British origin and something you should consider is if we look up the Google Trends we can see that out of any of the first world country is up until 2008 when Satoshi posted this the term white paper had almost double the interest in the United Kingdom to top that off and almost every given opportunity in this white paper he would write in British English throughout his various ridings across all his profiles he uses terms like checks analyse favor organize and even bloody difficult throughout all his writings he never spells anything incorrectly though keep in mind that none of us are perfect which means that whatever spell checking software he had at the time was correcting him in a British English [Music] what's incredibly interesting about all of Satoshi's writing on the internet over the years is that he used two full spaces after a period in every single sentence I kid you not go look up his form account on Bitcoin talk and you'll see what I'm talking about this idiosyncrasy is found predominantly in two categories of people one instance for the use of double space after a period is that of academics as a few different college writing styles mandated the use of a double space after a period but here's the thing many of these college formats have since then remove this requirement over the years what's interesting here is that Satoshi casually used this double space after a period method to the point that it became muscle memory which hints at this habit having been done for years this could very well mean that the toshi have learned to type on a typewriter instead of a keyboard as double spacing after a period on a typewriter was required if this is true this gives us a major hint about his age many of the first popular home keyboards for personal computers that actually saw mass adoption weren't even released until 1977 with both the Apple 2 and the trs-80 typically most schools at this time didn't have you write papers on typewriters until college which leads me to believe that satoshi nakamoto is far older than he stated on one of his online profiles on his p2p foundation form accounts it states that he was born on April 5th 1975 which by this time it would make it far rarer that someone would grow up learning to type on a keyboard over a typewriter typewriters saw a pretty steep decline in popularity around 1985 theoretically this would make Satoshi Nakamoto 44 today if he were telling the truth but if we factor in the possibility that Satoshi was around 16 to 18 by the time he began using a typewriter I would estimate that he's around the age of 55 to 64 I know this is speculative so take what I'm saying with the grain of salt here but as far as estimating his age goes this would be my best guess at this time Satoshi claimed that he started working on the project since 2007 and was already well underway and making it a reality many people on the mailing list met this proposal with skepticism the idea for this type of digital money was long in the heads of others before Satoshi but the key difference here was that mr. Nakamoto actually managed to execute on his proposal be money by weight I was another project that was referenced as an inspiration to Bitcoin but never made it past a write up digi cash which barely mentioned earlier was a proposed idea by David charm for anonymous payments where people could take money from a bank and then use the forms of blind cryptographic signatures to store money on their computers and pay for things anonymously digi cash filed for bankruptcy as a company failed to see the adoption in the 1999's due to the fact that ecommerce hadn't really taken off yet another project was bid gold by Nick Szabo and this was basically the precursor to Bitcoin and was incredibly similar but Nick Szabo never turned his big gold into a reality while the two projects at theory were very close Szabo has since written on his blogs the differences and challenges he faced and how Satoshi's idea was an improvement I won't bore you with the technical details but you can go look him up if you're interested many people mentioned that because Nick Zappa wasn't referenced in the white paper and that the project were so similar that Nick Zappa was Satoshi but as it turns out Satoshi did credit nick szabo not just on the white paper but also on his website this seems to suggest that Satoshi Nakamoto hadn't heard about Nick Szabo until his project started to receive attention will discuss the Nick's Abba theory in detail in a bit but for now let's get back to our timeline despite previously failing projects Halfin II decided to be the first to take Satoshi upon his proposal and began to work on the Bitcoin project for free Halfin II was a computer scientist and also a cypher Punk he was pretty well known among the cyberpunk community for his work as a lead developer in the PGP corporation if you've ever dabbled with encryption then you've likely heard of PGP encryption something I should mention is that Satoshi even looked up to hell but more on that later Hal later wrote on the Bitcoin talk forum when Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list he got a skeptical reception at best cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs they tend to have a knee-jerk reaction I was more positive I had long been interested in cryptographic payment schemes plus I was lucky enough to meet and extensively correspond with both Wade I and Nick Szabo generally acknowledged to have created ideas that be realized with Bitcoin as I mentioned previously how worked on the Bitcoin project continuously since his first contact with Satoshi and made a fair amount of money mining the currency in the early days January 3rd 2009 the very first block of Bitcoin was mined and inside this code was a hidden message this message reading The Times January 3rd 2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks which was in reference to the financial collapse of 2008 and was the headline of a United Kingdom newspaper called The Times once again here we see another hint Satoshi being British Satoshi nakamoto's Bitcoin had come with the right place in the right time and that hidden message seems to communicate strongly his intentions for creating the project during the following years up until late 2010 Satoshi would post regularly on the Bitcoin talk forum and make further improvements to the Bitcoin projects he would post daily to the forums and to this day anyone can view his post history on his forum accounts we're going to individually dig up these posts by Satoshi in a bits but for now I should bring up Satoshi's disappearance without any kind of regulation it was primed to be adopted by criminals and other gray area practices we all know what happened with the Silk Road if he watched Bailey's other video but more in regards to 2010 another incident occurred at the time of satoshis disappearance for context and late 2010 WikiLeaks was one of the prime targets for the US government as a result of leaking countless confidential files to the public no government likes a whistleblower and a bounty was made on the organization WikiLeaks was in between a rock and a hard place as the site was hit with frequent DDoS attacks and funding was cut off as no payment processor wanted to work with them any company providing payment services to WikiLeaks became directly associated with them which made them a target by the government as well in 2010 a thread was started on the Bitcoin talk forum that linked to an article from PC world comm keep in mind at this time Bitcoin was still relatively unheard of when the article titled could the WikiLeaks candle lead to the new virtual currency popped up it suggested that Bitcoin could have been a solution to current funding problems over at WikiLeaks this was one of the most popular sites to link to Bitcoin at the time and as a result a flood of new traffic came in over the brewing WikiLeaks scandal it was even reported that right after this article was published the entire Bitcoin forum went down from the influx of new visitors many people chimed in on this thread gawking at the headline and even Satoshi made a post that read the following it would have been nice to get this attention in any other context WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest and the swarm is headed towards us it appears that Satoshi saw an impending threat from the government has not long after this post he'd move away from Bitcoin Satoshi would only make one other update to Bitcoin and would later hand off the project to a man by the name of Gavin Andersson something I should explain is that Bitcoin by nature is an open-source project and by this time there were quite a few people involved Gavin was a computer scientist that graduated from Princeton and at the time he was developing new products for the Bitcoin market as a result of Satoshi's absence for a time he became the spokesman for Bitcoin after handing off the project to Gavin Satoshi was still in contact via email for a short while and so one final day on April 26th 2011 Satoshi would write the following to Gavin I wish you wouldn't keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure the press just turns that into a private currency angle maybe instead make it about the open source project and give credit to your dev contributors it helps motivate them Satoshi really didn't like the angle of Bitcoin being adopted by criminals as opposed to risk of him being targeted by the government keep in mind this email was sent two months after the Silk Roads launch and by now Satoshi had been full aware of what bitcoin was shaping up to being after this email Gavin had informed Satoshi that he was invited to speak at a conference hosted by the CIA but he never actually replied and to this day this is the last known verified correspondence from him [Music] when I initially started working in this video I imagined a one part documentary but with a topic like this I really wanted to take my time and slow things down and improve the video polish the saga that includes this mystery is so extensive that I'd be doing you a disservice by not splitting it into a series to make it easier to follow there are a ton of implications around the mystery of satoshi nakamoto so I want to cover it in a way that explains the scope of the situation and debunk popular misinformation in the next video or videos we will discuss the events after Satoshi's disappearance and narrow down his online profile much further with all that being said I'll see you in the next episode this is barely sociable have a good night [Music] you

Channel: Barely Sociable

Views: 1,333,476

Rating: 4.9368587 out of 5

Keywords: mystery, internet mysteries, bitcoin, satoshi nakamoto, unsolved mysteries, unsolved internet mysteries, internet mystery

Id: _Kav2K1DVWo

Length: 30min 2sec (1802 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/sidekick_in_the_ball]

In case Barely Sociable sees this.

The whitepaper ‘Bitcoin a peer-to-peer electronic cash system’ seems to be written in LaTeX or similar document preparation system. From searching the double space after full stop it seems this have been the standard in *TeX systems up until fairly recent (unless using different packages) and could therefor mean that it’s the system creating the double space. Most LaTeX systems also doesn’t neccesarily have grammar check, which might suggest that the english words isn’t spell checked but just the way he types them normally.

[u/icegal9666]

Great video! I think this is going to be a great series!