Since this thread is mostly just new users trying to bump up their post count, I thought I would post some useless thoughts on the matter of who Satoshi might be without sounding all tin-foil-hatish.

Apparently, most of the people that worked with Satoshi are pretty confident he was one person. His code was not written in a way that a team would have developed it. And he used reverse polish notation which seems more like something someone older with a math background would use. Save for the guy who comments on this post and says he uses it all the time in 2018. Pedantic.

Satoshi also said later in the Bitcoin project that Tor 0.2 alpha was coming out soon, and he would provide instructions on how to use it. He may have followed along with the TOR development and had some ideas on how to integrate it with Bitcoin. But I found it interesting that he knew how to use it before 0.2 alpha and was going to help people with it.

That got me to thinking. Perhaps Satoshi was one of the TOR guys. Maybe not one of the main guys, but an underling that worked on the math side. At the time Tor was funded by DARPA and development was going on pretty much at the same time. They have "some" similarities with the nodes, encryption, P2P concepts that Satoshi employed. So do many other P2P tools, I realize and true, there is no blockchain with Tor. So maybe not.

But if we stretch our imagination here, I don't think this was the work of the entire TOR team at DARPA because Satoshi didn't seem really concerned about privacy so much as just trying to free us from the banking system. Which makes me think he could have been one of the team members that was big into the math side of what was going on, but less on the privacy side. I can imagine while sitting in meeting rooms while discussing the best way to communicate with TOR nodes and share P2P information while making it encrypted, that ideas can spring to mind on how to leverage similar concepts to do something different and outside the scope of the current project. And Satoshi taught himself to do some coding and put together Bitcoin with the knowledge he had working on similar projects such as TOR.

As Satoshi eventually left the Bitcoin project with Gavin, he said had moved on to other things, and that the Bitcoin project was in good hands. I think given that TOR was still early, his "other things" were exactly that. TOR. Again, as a team member. Not the project lead or anything.

That would also explain why the coins haven't been touched. Whoever did it was on DARPA's dime at the time. Whatever knowledge or tools being used were funded by them, and Satoshi probably didn't want anyone to trace it back to him and the TOR project. Not to mention, there are a lot of hands in that pot. The Government, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as the TOR organization as it exists now, and the various members that rotated through it. Whoever has the keys would probably not end up with the money, it would get owned by the Fed and a bunch of lawyers maybe. It would also create some public static if it was found out that it was DARPA funded. And/Or sanctioned by the Government to pay dissidents or spies, etc. Whatever conspiracy theorists want to imagine.

We'll never really know unless Satoshi himself comes out and proves it. But I do think it is interesting that these two projects were lining up at the same time Bitcoin and TOR and that Satoshi had a hand in one, and strong enough knowledge in the other to teach people how to use it at an early Alpha state.

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