On Tuesday HBO will release a documentary claiming to reveal the real identity of Satoshi. Websites are predicting total disaster and total salvation. Given the history of TV “reveals”, I doubt that it will settle the question or even provide a valid answer. And given the amount of hype surrounding this one, I doubt even more strongly.
There is one interesting hint: the people who watch these things have noticed sudden activity in several bitcoin accounts. The accounts have sold some of the bitcoins they’ve been holding since 2009. These related accounts were started soon after Satoshi’s initial announcement of bitcoin, and may belong to Satoshi himself or his associates.
From the start, my best guess was that Satoshi was a product of Deepstate in some form, not necessarily a single person. Spy agencies are expert at creating a fake personality with a convincing cover story. It’s part of their old basic skill set. The C++ code has a consistent style, so it was probably written by one programmer. But the rest of the scam has no particular personality, just a normal Deepstate purpose. Attract people to the movement, identify them, use them. “Independent” or “populist” movements have been playing this trick for ages.
Bryan and other 1890 populists developed Bimetallism as the attractor, with the same flavor and purpose as Bitcoin. Bimetallism looked like a path to freedom for poor farmers and workers, and turned out to be a way for banks to gain more power. When Larry Fink pulled bitcoin into the stock market last year, he revealed the same ending for the similar plot.
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Later but before the documentary, articles say that the bettors are favoring Nick Szabo. I hadn’t heard of him before. One part of his biography strikes a note: he got a degree in Computer Science from UW in Seattle in 1998. The C++ code seemed to be in the ‘Microsoft dialect’ that I learned around the same time, so I guessed the real Satoshi might have some connection with Microsoft.
Polistra's Mill 