It is somewhat good news for online anonymity that we don't know who Satoshi is. The amount of resources that have been poured into trying to uncover his identity is the equivalent of a medium-sized open source project. He has survived the army of geeks.
The state of user-user or user-corporation anonymity is good. If you want to stay anonymous from other users or a corporation then you can gain anonymity by spending a few hours reading tutorials/guides online and then installing Tails or Whonix (both which solve the metadata problem in OP and a variety of other attacks) or an alternative homebrew solution (machine isolation/snapshots) and apply a level of discipline to isolate your identity.
Last best OPSEC move Nakamoto made was to disappear - removes so many options in tracking him down. Hanging around and living off the credibility you've built with your anonymous persona is likely only going to breed complacency and the odds of slipping up increase each day (you see this in many cases)
I doubt he'll ever be tracked down. I doubt even a gov investigation starting today (for whatever reason) with all the power it has would achieve it (unless more than one person knows the secret, in which case a US investigation has a broad range of legal methods to compel testimony and reveal it).
I know a lot of people are sick of talking about Nakamoto and prefer to focus on what he produced (you can't even google his name anymore without 50% of the hits being about the Newsweek article), but being able to invent such an important piece of transformative technology and remain anonymous for so long, possible forever - is a brilliant accomplishment worthy of its own attention.
> It is somewhat good news for online anonymity that we don't know who Satoshi is.
Only if you believe that none of the identified candidates are him. Personally, I think not as much real effort has been spent as you think; I've found some pretty breathtaking stuff which no one has posted about publicly.
> Last best OPSEC move Nakamoto made was to disappear - removes so many options in tracking him down. Hanging around and living off the credibility you've built with your anonymous persona is likely only going to breed complacency and the odds of slipping up increase each day (you see this in many cases)
Yes, DPR comes to mind as an example of what happens when you don't know when to quit.
> I doubt even a gov investigation starting today (for whatever reason) with all the power it has would achieve it (unless more than one person knows the secret, in which case a US investigation has a broad range of legal methods to compel testimony and reveal it).
I disagree. Given what the Snowden leaks have revealed, I think the NSA, and possibly lower-level entities, could find him even now. They can attack gmx.com, AnonymousSpeech, Digirock, the Californian IP & Freenode, & the P2P Foundation looking for direct IP leaks or other information, either through penetration, legal demands, or their extensive databases of metadata; governments are the main sponsors of stylometric research (either code or writing), which are another excellent attack vector; and of course, they can simply do tailored attacks on major suspects, in the same way they've already individually gone after security researchers. For all we know, they've already done any of this - Snowden's info is dated.
> installing Tails or Whonix (both which solve the metadata problem in OP and a variety of other attacks)
I was surprised the article claims he was using Windows XP. There's a surprising number of leaks when using Windows software. These leaks are functional and can provide cool features, sure, but they're leaks nonetheless.
For example, if you embed a file in a Powerpoint presentation, the PPTX file includes the original full path to the file. "C:\Users\JLewis\SecretWorkForTheNSA\FormattedForPublicRelease.txt". Obviously this isn't exclusive to Windows operating systems, but I feel other OS environments generally don't encourage oversharing like Windows does.
>I doubt even a gov investigation starting today (for whatever reason) with all the power it has would achieve it (unless more than one person knows the secret, in which case a US investigation has a broad range of legal methods to compel testimony and reveal it).
As much as members of the Bitcoin community like to think of themselves as agitators, there were very clearly no laws broken here.
>As much as members of the Bitcoin community like to think of themselves as agitators, there were very clearly no laws broken here.
Yeah, that's all clear now, but 4 years ago the legal situation was much murkier. This was all very new ground and we had no idea how the U.S. government would react, particularly given some of the other things going on at the time (particularly the prosecution of E-Gold, which was centralized but shared some features with Bitcoin).
The state of user-user or user-corporation anonymity is good. If you want to stay anonymous from other users or a corporation then you can gain anonymity by spending a few hours reading tutorials/guides online and then installing Tails or Whonix (both which solve the metadata problem in OP and a variety of other attacks) or an alternative homebrew solution (machine isolation/snapshots) and apply a level of discipline to isolate your identity.
Last best OPSEC move Nakamoto made was to disappear - removes so many options in tracking him down. Hanging around and living off the credibility you've built with your anonymous persona is likely only going to breed complacency and the odds of slipping up increase each day (you see this in many cases)
I doubt he'll ever be tracked down. I doubt even a gov investigation starting today (for whatever reason) with all the power it has would achieve it (unless more than one person knows the secret, in which case a US investigation has a broad range of legal methods to compel testimony and reveal it).
I know a lot of people are sick of talking about Nakamoto and prefer to focus on what he produced (you can't even google his name anymore without 50% of the hits being about the Newsweek article), but being able to invent such an important piece of transformative technology and remain anonymous for so long, possible forever - is a brilliant accomplishment worthy of its own attention.