And no, this is not a reference to the excrable and exploitative "Satoshi is Female" slogan that the SJWs attempting to inroad the blockchain movement wear on t-shirts. Those t-shirts have led quite a few hackers to try to hack the bank accounts of Hal Finney's widow on the flawed logic that she is who those t-shirts are referring to. If anyone in the world does not deserve that sort of treatment, it's Hal's widow. No, she is NOT Satoshi.
What I am talking about is the newly released document (http://nakamotofamilyfoundation.org/duality.pdf) from a new website titled "Nakamoto Family Foundation (http://nakamotofamilyfoundation.org}" that purports to be excerpts of an upcoming book doing a tell-all about bitcoin, Satoshi, and what really went on.
I am not going to do any sort of verification or denial of this Satoshi writing. If this is actually Satoshi, he knows how to authenticate his work in incontrovertible ways, and until Satoshi is actually ready to release his actual name, it isn't fair of me to jump the gun. I have enough people asking me who Satoshi is, I am not going to change my answer until Satoshi is good and ready.
I can say that the author gets a lot of the facts right about the 2008-2009 period, the bugs in the early versions of the code, and early comments, but all of that is easily found in the Github, on the cypherpunks email list archives, etc.
I can also say what his writing seems to exclude. For instance, I know that in 2005, Nick Szabo was finishing his law degree at George Washington University, because he told me so in personal emails. For Satoshi to be working in a university lab in that time period would indicate he was in some STEM discipline and still working on his degree in 2006-2008. So this document would indicate that Nick is not Satoshi.
He also says that other than Hal Finney, he worked alone on bitcoin in 2008. I cannot speak to that as I'd gotten away from what we called the Bit Gold discussions in 2006 and went into VR. That he says he started working on bitcoin in 2006 is interesting. Nick stopped writing about Bit Gold in 2006 and a lot of us were getting into virtual world economics at the time since there was a bit of a land rush, figuratively, virtually and literally, in the VR space back then.
It seemed like our fantasies of a Snow Crash future were potentially taking hold despite the lack of a First Distributed Republic to create a gold backed cryptocurrency. No, people were building things in the walled gardens of Second Life, Blue Mars, Entropia, and other platforms, and letting the companies controlling those platforms to control the money, the virtual patent office, and peoples virtual identities.
By 2010 it had become clear to some of us that the walled garden models were flawed and enabled corporations to turn customers into products. Bitcoin was seen as an option at least to decentralize virtual money. It wasn't yet clear how we could decentralize other parts of the virtual world, but the ideas of building smart contracts into a cryptocurrency had been with us back in the Bit Gold era between 1998 and 2005. Nick had been talking about smart contracts as far back as 1992.
I know of a number of individuals who were mining bitcoin back then to buy World of Warcraft gold with it. One friend of mine and his college roommate who bought WoW gold with bitcoin they'd mined calculated in late 2017 that, at November 2017 prices, they'd spent a half a billion dollars of bitcoin on WoW gold between 2010 and 2012. The next week he had posted on Facebook mocking people who spent bitcoin on lamborghinis as if that was a waste of good bitcoin. I had responded, "But J___, Lambos are a MUCH sexier purchase than WoW Gold!"
Imagining a means of actually transacting bitcoin for WoW Gold online, via a smart contract that could hold both currencies in escrow, was necessary for uniting all of the walled garden virtual economies. Enabling people to shape shift WoW Gold for Linden Dollars, for Entropia dollars, EVE Online ISK, etc would create a monetary mobility, a fungibility of digital finance that would allow money to flow to where it is valued from where it is not, and encourage platform creators to treat users more fairly in order to avoid users voting with their feet.
Why the focus on VR and gaming? Well theres a ton of overlap between VR/Gaming cyberpunks , and cypherpunks. A lot of that overlap is in the transhumanist communities that existed like WTA, Extropy Institute, The Well, and other venues. With the technological singularity, we all see that more and more commerce happens on line, and more real world activities are becoming gamified and have virtual or augmented reality being built into them to varying degrees. Eventually a post-human society will involve a civilization of AI and uploaded personalities interacting in a VR/AR universe. So the shape of that future largely depends on who controls the core services of the economy: money, IP rights, identity, anonymity, etc.
These are issues that matter to a lot of people in the "real" world too, but in "real world" applications that can be simulated and tested in VR environments before real world deployment.
Anyways, back to the point: is this new website and its document real? They FEEL real to me, but I've read a number of well written fake stories about Satoshi over the years. Until Satoshi tells me personally it's him, I'll wait, and read what is posted. Don't trust. Verify.
