Serious Question: Greg, are you Satoshi?

Felt
4 min readJun 29, 2016

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[Note — I no longer think Greg can be the person behind the midnightmagic accounts listed in no. 1 below; most tragically, I don’t think he’s behind the persona featured in no. 3 either. — 19:47:34 UTC, Saturday, July 2, 2016]

  1. I think its clear that one of your alias accounts is Midmagic / MidnightMagic.

a. Your writing styles are very similar. I have the jgaap software and I may run some tests (but I probably will not).

b. Months before Aaron Schwartz was arrested in Jan 2011, Midmagic was all about access to scholarly articles being a fundamental human right in conversations with ZooKo
https://twitter.com/midmagic/status/22863944285

c. A few months after, you’re freeing tons of JSTOR articles via Pirate Bay:
https://plus.google.com/108313527900507320366/posts/R8RKTyQCoFW
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/swartz-supporter-dumps-18592-jstor-docs-on-the-pirate-bay/

I mean, need I say more?

d. It is known that midmagic cleans up/defends your posts on reddit, especially when people aren’t looking.

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-672#post-23593

2. MidMagic was rubbing elbows w/ Wei Dai and Zooko way back in the day:

https://www.mail-archive.com/tahoe-dev@allmydata.org/msg01195.html
https://www.mail-archive.com/tahoe-dev@allmydata.org/msg01350.html

We all know about B-Money and Crypto++ and Zooko. We know about Zooko’s blog being linked to the bitcoin.org site in March 2008 as a related project. Zooko and midnight seem to be pretty tight. So, you, along with others (like Peter Todd and Zooko) also being involved with financial cryptography in 2008 time period would be supremely interesting.

3. Please tell me Gary Midnight is your other alter-ego — its very Duke Silver-ish (Ron Swanson, Parks & Rec)

http://midnightmagic.info/

He is into body art and is from Florida. Also, he’s into mentalism, illusions and manipulation:
http://midnightmagic.info/page5.php

And so is midnightmagic:
http://forums.gucomics.com/showthread.php?14644-Politics-(6-28)&p=306623#post306623
http://forums.gucomics.com/showthread.php?9416-I-did-the-same-thing-with-a-Hello-Kitty-Lunchbox-(8-24)&p=201173#post201173
https://twitter.com/midmagic/status/15391810795

4. MidMagic first appeared on BCT 3 days after Satoshi’s last post on BCT.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2759

This is about the time Peter Todd showed up, who I’ve previously written about as a Satoshi candidate.

Midnight mourned the loss the Satoshi, poor guy — he did declared 0.00000001 to be 1“satoshi” as a homage:

I’ve also written about the importance of transit networks in influencing Satoshi’s formulation of the Bitcoin system.

I could imagine you and PT running across one another and deciding to make some beautiful some art (and sandwiches) together:
http://imgur.com/oGSLqyY

So, again, are you Satoshi? I don’t think its an unreasonable question.

EDIT — Posts from BitcoinTalk on this subject:

@Lauda — I empathize w/ Greg now. Go through some of my recent posts here, I listed Greg as preferred Satoshi candidate of mine.

You [edit — I think I meant Franky here] are correct about not having linked writing styles conclusively — although I’m not sure even the best stylometry software can do that. I haven’t run the software yet b/c IRL duties; when I made the post last night, it was really late. I will also agree w/ you that my initial post is just a musing — I’m not betting Greg is Satoshi one way or another. I just think it would make sense if he were and that it is plausible.

About explaining this past year — 2015 and 2016 have had the scaling debate front and center to the extent main stream news has covered it. There have been intense debates. I think if Greg were Satoshi, I’d have a lot to reflect on especially from 2015 and 2016. Remember when Greg got called out for claiming credit for some of Satoshi’s commits on Github? Remember how Gavin came to the rescue to explain that away? Such blips from the recent past take on new meaning if Greg is Satoshi.

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4550sl/greg_maxwell_unullc_given_your_valid_interest_in/
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/45g3d5/rewriting_history_greg_maxwell_is_claiming_some/
http://www.coindesk.com/gregory-maxwell-went-bitcoin-skeptic-core-developer/

via @Midmagic, these tweets are interesting is Greg is Satoshi (and midnightmagic):
https://twitter.com/midmagic/status/674514614772563968 (http://archive.is/R0R4j)
https://twitter.com/midmagic/status/76112785175617536 (http://archive.is/jsdlW)
https://twitter.com/midmagic/status/139822645301616640 (http://archive.is/TkuGg)
http://bitcoinvox.com/article/1041/satoshi-asked-wikileaks-to-avoid-bitcoin-in-2010
https://twitter.com/midmagic/status/22863783508 ←- One of the most interesting to me, tons of reading + Jstor dump maybe offers insight into how Satoshi found an obscure 1968 article on transit networks (http://archive.is/esGvo)

@Franky

If Satoshi was worried about being discovered from the beginning, its very possible he wrote in a way that would make author attribution analysis very difficult (i.e., mixing up spelling, punctuation, word choice). Its not that hard to copy and paste american english text into a translator that converts it into Aussie or Brit english. You can even make the text take on a pirate dialect. argh. People also take on words used by their friends. So, for example, if Greg were talking a lot with with folks in the UK via ham radio, I could easily see him picking up British words:

http://www.interceptradio.com/ham.php?call=NT4TN
https://wdtn.co.uk/2014/09/14/nt4tn-launch-event/

Ham radios are very John Galt-ish, by the way.

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