Liu Jiaolian’s note: This is the latest research by Jameson Lopp, a well-known encryption expert. He carefully investigated the activities of legendary cryptographer Hal Finney and compared them with the early activities of Satoshi Nakamoto , the founder of Bitcoin , and concluded that the former was not Satoshi Nakamoto. Hal Finney, as the earliest cryptography professional to support Bitcoin and complete the first Bitcoin on-chain transfer with Satoshi Nakamoto, unfortunately died of ALS more than two years after the advent of Bitcoin . This is shocking. Choke. Because of the temporal relationship between his death and Satoshi Nakamoto's retirement, many people have suspected for many years that the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto is the disguised incarnation of Hal Finney.
Text: Jameson Lopp. 2023.10.21. Hal Finney Was Not Satoshi Nakamoto.
Subtitle: Compilation of evidence that Hal Finney and Satoshi Nakamoto are not the same person.
Since the birth of Bitcoin in 2009, the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity has puzzled countless people. The world cannot help but ask, who is so talented that he can solve the Byzantine general problem? We can't help but ask, who is so altruistic that he creates a new monetary system but does not use it to line his own pockets? We ask, who is so private that they can accomplish these feats without revealing their true name?
Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity has no bearing on the security, evolution, or future operation of the Bitcoin network. However, speculation about Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity does have real-world consequences for those involved.
Hal Finney was blackmailed in 2014 when his health was failing.
In 2014, Newsweek’s baseless speculation upended Dorian Nakamoto’s life.
Many scammers do the opposite, claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto and trying to use Satoshi Nakamoto's reputation to make money.
Who do I think is Satoshi Nakamoto? I have my theories, but I will never share them because it would be irresponsible to do so. Instead, I believe that it is in the best interest of Bitcoin that we eliminate any speculation about Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity. let's start.
that race
On Saturday, April 18, 2009, at 8 a.m. Pacific time, avid runner Hal Finney began a 10-mile race in Santa Barbara, California. We can see his results here:
Source: https://archive.is/46t9A
Why is this noteworthy? Because while Hal was running, Satoshi Nakamoto was also doing activities. During the 1 hour and 18 minutes that Hal ran, we can confirm that he did not interact with the computer.
It turns out that early Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn was emailing back and forth with Satoshi during this time. Hearn later published his emails on his website, an archive of which can be found here (https://archive.is/f68bN).
As can be seen from the timestamp, Mike sent an email to Satoshi Nakamoto at 3:08 pm on April 18, 2009, and Satoshi Nakamoto responded to the email at 6:16 pm. But what time zone is Mike's email client reporting? Hearn conveniently included his IP address at the time (because one way to send and receive Bitcoin at the time was to connect directly to the peer's IP address), which was 84.73.233.199. A quick query shows that this IP belongs to an ISP in Switzerland.
Source: https://www.whois.com/whois/84.73.233.199
This coincided with the fact that Mike Hearn was working for Google in its Zurich office at the time. During the course of my investigation, I also confirmed these details directly with Mike.
What can we determine from all this? Satoshi emailed Mike at 9:16 a.m. Pacific time—two minutes before Hal crossed the finish line.
Source: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?iso=20090418T161600&p1=268&p2=1050
How do we know for sure that Hal actually entered the game and wasn't sending an imposter? We can see that his ID number 591 is consistent with the number in the match results database linked above.
There is also a photo taken by Hal’s wife:
that deal
As can be seen from the email exchange between Mike Hearn and Satoshi Nakamoto, Nakamoto sent 32.5 BTC to Mike Hearn via transaction 6a679898780f5d99f0ffa12573b855e0dc470956406eb8b82690b688fa19200f, which occurred on April 18, 2009 at 8:55 AM Pacific Time. Confirmed in block 11,408. 20 minutes later, Satoshi responded to Mike’s email.
The previous block (11407) was mined at 8:28 AM Pacific Time, so this transaction was most likely created, signed, and broadcast during the window between 8:28 AM and 8:55 AM.
Blocks 11407, 11408, and 11409 (blue) were all mined by a Satoshi model (possibly Satoshi Nakamoto).
The previous block 11,406 was minted by an unknown miner at 8:08 AM; it is certain that if the transaction had been broadcast and existed in the node's mempool at that time, it would have been minted at 8:08 AM confirm.
possible objections
"Mike Hearn cannot be trusted"
Before Hearn released the full emails in 2017, many people distrusted him due to disagreements over years of expansion debates. In fact, Hearn shared the first email on the Bitcoin Foundation forum in December 2012. Hearn's emails are the strongest evidence, but not the only evidence, as we will soon see. Mike’s own take on the matter ( https://archive.ph/GNOu8 ):
“I thought these emails had been released because I had forwarded them to a project to archive Satoshi Nakamoto’s emails a few years ago. When CipherionX asked me for the emails again, he told me that they had never actually been uploaded to Anywhere, so I forwarded it again.
"These emails are genuine. As others have pointed out, I have quoted parts of them in various conversations over the years. Forgery of these emails would have required careful planning and there is no reason to do so."
"Hal may have scripted the emails and transactions ahead of time."
Sure, but Occam's razor applies too. Why go to all the trouble of spreading false news in private communications? It would be much simpler if Hal just responded at different times instead of looking for a needle in a haystack.
"Hal may just be part of a group"
Sure, but Occam's razor strikes again. As Benjamin Franklin said, “It only takes two men dead and three men to keep a secret.” In all my time researching Satoshi Nakamoto, I have yet to find any evidence that this is an organization. If this were an organization, they would all sleep the same hours, consistent across code commits, emails, and forum posts.
“Early blockchain history may be rewritten”
Technically correct, but 3 hours later, Mike emailed and confirmed the BTC. The timestamp activity of emails and blockchain are consistent.
"There may have been someone else who took Hal's place in the game"
As shown above, we have photographic evidence from multiple parties that this is not the case.
Singularity Summit 2010
Hal at the Singularity Summit
Hal attended the Singularity Summit in San Francisco on August 14 and 15, 2010. We can see his wife posting this a few days later.
"Over the past year, Hal and I have had to drastically change our predictions for our future together. Hal was diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known in the United States as Lou Gehrig's disease). .Since his diagnosis in August 2009, Hal has undergone very noticeable physical changes. His speech has become slow, quiet, and labored. His typing speed has changed from a fast typing speed of 120 wpm to a sluggish finger-pecking typing. He The weekly runs (50-60 miles per week in February 2009) stopped in November 2009, and Hal now gets around in an electric wheelchair. Eating, always a pleasure, now became A challenge that required concentration to avoid choking. The most concerning recent manifestation of Hal's voluntary muscle weakness has been his breathing. However, all of these changes are occurring in Hal's body. Hal's brain The machine is controlled to interact with the environment through external transmission. In his body, he is still the same smart person I have known for most of my life."
She specifically mentioned that Hal could barely type now.
What was Satoshi Nakamoto doing on August 14 and 15, 2010? Satoshi Nakamoto is very active, with 4 code check-ins and 17 forum posts. You can view my collection of all public Satoshi Nakamoto activity timestamps here ( https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16uyf7v9xcitr5zy1-WVYx7UiKnasHDcViK_udZyfExg ).
that IP address
In the early days of Bitcoin, clients connected to an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) room to discover the IP addresses of peer nodes to connect and join the network. Therefore, debug logs are critical to the investigation. The logs show the IP addresses of three users who connected to IRC on January 10, 2009 - the day after Bitcoin was released. As far as we know, only Satoshi Nakamoto and Hal were working on this project at the time.
The debug log is quite lengthy, so I'll point out the relevant lines:
[x93428606] is the administrator of the IRC channel (Brother Cong), connecting from i=x9342860 gateway/tor/x-bacc5813d7825a9a (via tor, a privacy-protecting network).
[uCeSAaG6R9Qidrs] CAddress(207.71.226.132:8333) – This is Hal.
[u4rfwoe8g3w5Tai] New CAddress(68.164.57.219:8333) – This is the only other node, so it’s most likely Cong.
What can we determine from these IP addresses?
Hal Finney's IP address is easily identifiable because his website is hosted on the same IP address. The data source can be found here (http://www.plotip.com/ip/207.71.226.132).
IP address 207.71.226.132
State/Region: California
Country: United States United States
Reverse DNS: 226-132.adsl2.netlojix.net
Host/ISP: Silicon Beach Communications
Domain hosted on IP 207.71.226.132
finney.org
privacyca.com
franforfitness.com
Could someone else be running the node? Of course it's possible! Although the debug logs show that Hal's node started up not once, not twice, but three times, and received the same peer IP address each time. From this, it appears that no one else is running the node at this time.
we can notice
Satoshi's IP address does not appear to be a Tor exit node (I cannot find this IP address in the public Tor exit node IP history list) Satoshi's IP and Hal's IP belong to different Internet service providers, but the same Located in California.
I think we have reason to ask ourselves the following questions:
If Hal values privacy, why would he release this information? If "Hal" is "Satoshi Nakamoto" posting false information, why not put their IP in a different state or country?
Inconsistency in coding style
Some claim that Hal and Satoshi's public writing styles are similar, but I know nothing about stylistic analysis and can't comment on the veracity of this claim. What I'm sure of is that their code is completely different.
We can compare Haar’s reusable proof-of-work code to the original Bitcoin client, and several differences are immediately apparent.
1. Hal uses tabs while Satoshi uses spaces (a big, never-ending debate among developers)
2. Hal likes debugging statements not to be indented, while Satoshi’s debugging statements maintain an indented relationship with the surrounding code.
3. Hal uses block-style multi-line markup in comments, while Satoshi likes to create many single-line comments with double slashes
4. Hal uses snake_case to write function names, while Satoshi uses camelCase.
There may be more subtle differences, but these stand out in just a few minutes of browsing the codebase.
Inconsistent personality
There are some inconsistencies in the opinions of Satoshi and Hal, and it would take a very creative writer to differentiate their characters. For example:
“Thinking about how to reduce CO2 emissions from widespread adoption of Bitcoin — Hal Finney (@halfin) January 27, 2009”
Are we to believe that Satoshi Nakamoto, who has been working on Bitcoin for a year (if not several years), suddenly starts to care about carbon dioxide emissions?
It seems that Satoshi only learned about Nick Szabo’s “Bit Gold” idea from Hal Finney’s first reply to the white paper announcement on the cryptography mailing list.
“I also think there is potential value in an unforgeable form of token with predictable productivity and immunity to corrupt elements. This would be more akin to gold than fiat currency. Nick Szabo wrote many years ago An article about “Bit Gold” may be the realization of this concept.”
Then again, for someone who's not a professional novelist to do this level of "characterization" of another character is a pretty tall order.
Hal Finney was not a particularly private person. According to his wife, Hal was a very private man who believed everyone had a right to privacy. But privacy is the ability to selectively reveal yourself to the world, and Hal is pretty public about his dealings.
In terms of privacy awareness, most of the other Satoshi competitors are much stronger in this regard.
Activity interruption inconsistency
There were two lengthy interruptions in Satoshi Nakamoto's public activity:
From 2009-03-04 16:59:12 UTC to 2009-10-21 1:08:05 UTC From 2010-03-24 18:02:55 UTC to 2010-05-16 21:01:44 UTC
We can see that Hal Finney has been posting during these times:
Email timestamp ( https://www.mail-archive.com/search?a=1&l=cryptography%40metzdowd.com&haswords=%22hal+finney%22&x=0&y=0&from=&subject=&datewithin=1y&date=1%2F1% 2F2010¬words=&o=relevance ) LessWrong timestamp ( https://www.lesswrong.com/users/halfinney )
While this doesn’t prove anything, it is another difference in the characteristics of Hal and Satoshi.
Hal is a legend, just not that legend
We should all aspire to be like Hal Finney.
“1) I recommend every Bitcoin enthusiast to read Satoshi Nakamoto’s original announcement email subject in full: https://t.co/wt0X5w2ulc — Jameson Lopp (@lopp) April 17, 2016”
Just look at the reaction on the cryptography mailing list to Satoshi Nakamoto’s announcement of Bitcoin.
First response: "Your system doesn't scale."
Second response: "Honest nodes will not control the network. Bad guys with zombie swarms will take it over."
A third response: “I think the real problem with this system is the Bitcoin market. Proof-of-work calculations have no intrinsic value. We can have a finite supply curve, but not a demand curve at a positive price that intersects it.”
Here comes Hal: “Bitcoin seems to be a very promising idea. I like the idea of basing security on the assumption that the CPU power of honest participants is greater than that of attackers. It’s a very modern concept that exploits The power of the long tail. When Wikipedia was created, I never thought it would be successful, but it turned out to be a huge success for the same reasons."
Hal is an optimist, a builder, and a thoughtful collaborator. He has contributed greatly to cypherpunk projects such as the anonymous remailer, PGP 2.0, reusable proof-of-work, and Bitcoin. Open source projects need people like Hal.
This is good for Bitcoin
Some people will definitely say that the previous points do not constitute conclusive evidence that Hal is not Satoshi Nakamoto. In fact, proving a negative judgment is often an impossible task. But I think that taking all the evidence together and the many doubts, a reasonable person would come to the conclusion that it is much more likely that Satoshi Nakamoto is someone else. After months of research, I was convinced that I was willing to put my reputation on the line.
“Bitcoin is better off keeping the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto unknown. People can be criticized and politically attacked. Myths can stand the test of time. — Jameson Lopp (@lopp) August 12, 2023”
For Bitcoin, it is best that Satoshi Nakamoto is not a human being, because humans are fallible, fickle and fragile. Satoshi Nakamoto is an idea, and all those who contribute to Bitcoin better be the embodiment of this idea. Therefore, I submit to you that for the good of Bitcoin we must shatter any myths about the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.
Satoshi Nakamoto is dead
Long live Satoshi Nakamoto
(Public account: Liu Jiaolian. Knowledge Planet: The public account replies "Planet")
(Disclaimer: None of the content in this article constitutes any investment advice. Cryptocurrency is an extremely high-risk product and may return to zero at any time. Please participate with caution and be responsible for yourself.)
