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Comment by nwh | Hacker News Reader

Bear in mind that the connection between these addresses is tenuous at best. There's very little to suggest that the same person owns all of these transactions. The paths are fairly convoluted, it could be a normal user or a mixer or an internal wallet. You'd never know by design.

As I've mentioned before, this sort of thing is usually correct in that same way a broken clock is.

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I hope you'd agree with "Jed McCaleb once controlled the donation address 1EuMa4dhfCK8ikgQ4emB7geSBgWK2cEdBG."

While it's unclear precisely how that donation address is related to all of this, I assume that people traced money flowing out of it and into an Mt. Gox cold storage wallet, thus establishing that the person who controlled the donation address was involved with the people who control the cold storage addresses.

If so, then it's hard to see how to disagree with "If the Bitstamp address 1PAzo was funded with coins deposited by Jed McCaleb or one of his associates, and simultaneously two Mt. Gox cold storage wallets were depleted, and the chain of withdraws eventually lead from the cold storage wallets to 1PAzo, then it's extremely likely that Jed or an Mt. Gox owner is trading Mt. Gox cold storage coins on Bitstamp."

It sounds like you're worried that a chain of transfers doesn't prove ownership. For example, someone could randomly send all their bitcoin to someone else for no reason. But in practice, the only reason to give large amounts of BTC to someone else is either because you're buying something from them, repaying a debt, or you're cooperating with them. Regardless of which of those it turns out to be, the Mt. Gox cold storage wallets are the property of the Mt. Gox customers. Using them to buy something or repay a debt would be fraud. Transferring them to an associate with the intent of laundering them via Bitstamp would also be illegal, of course.

I can't think of any other explanations for why the BTC would change ownership except perhaps that they were stolen yet again. But theft can be ruled out if the identity of the Bitstamp account turns out to be a cohort of Mt. Gox.

(You mentioned that it could be a mixer, but that can be ruled out in this case because it'd make no sense for Mt. Gox to launder bitcoins and then deposit them into a bistamp account that has someone's real-world identity attached to it. Also, when bitcoins are being mixed using a mixer, it transfers the coins in a pretty distinctive way that indicates a mixer is being used, such as by randomizing the BTC amounts rather than always transferring e.g. 150BTC or 50BTC or some other nice-for-humans value. I assume that if a mixer is being used here, it'd be possible to show that the transfers are behaving in a way consistent with a particular bitcoin mixer implementation.)

Since there are no plausible explanations about how the bitcoins might change ownership, why would it be unreasonable to proceed with the assumption that the ownership hasn't changed, unless proven otherwise?

Bear in mind that this is the same sort of analysis that attributed large amounts of the initially mined coins to "Satoshi", when they were in fact core developer Gregory Maxwell's. There's a lot of room for error, especially when the email in question has an address in between with no attributable person behind it.

That's fine though, because at that point our theory has been proven wrong. So I propose we take the best guess that fits the available evidence and act accordingly. In this case, that action has already been taken: to notify Bitstamp that if the person trading those coins is an associate of Mt. Gox, then there's a high probability that illegal trades are occurring on their servers. This would let them take an action like freezing the account until they can provide an explanation about where the coins came from. (We're slowly turning into Paypal...)

analysis that attributed large amounts of the initially mined coins to "Satoshi", when they were in fact core developer Gregory Maxwell's

You just reminded me of something cool (but totally offtopic): https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-f... Someone recently came up with a previously-unknown technique for mapping out Satoshi's fortune.

You forget that this is a community that threatens violence over this sort of bullshit.

You're right, I forgot. It's a real concern, and preventing witch hunts from forming should probably be the highest priority.

Scientist?

Hm? I think this is being read in a confused way— that some gazillion coins are mine or something.

Basically people were going around claiming that _all_ the unspent coins during a particular time period were "satoshi's"— and this is a claim which is obviously untrue on its face, if nothing else because there are other people who mined blocks during time (and lost them), including myself. Thats all. Nothing especially interesting.

Reliably analysis from historical data is pretty lossy. Bitcoin exists in an odd equilibrium where speculative analysis from the chain alone is both enough to frequently break privacy but often not enough to make reliable inferences.

In hindsight I see how people have read this in a way I didn't intend, I'm being bitten by HN's two hour editing window. I meant that people picked out a large amount of coins as "satoshi's", and you mentioned that some of them were yours. If I could edit or delete the parent I certainly would.

> Bear in mind that this is the same sort of analysis that attributed large amounts of the initially mined coins to "Satoshi", when they were in fact core developer Gregory Maxwell's.

Citation or redaction, please.

If Gregory Maxwell owns a life-changing sum of early bitcoins, it is certainly news to me. If he does not, then you are making claims that could endanger the life and well being of someone who has worked very hard in service of the bitcoin community.

Anecdotally, I think I remember that incident, but unfortunately I don't remember precisely where I heard it.

There have been a lot of very-wrong analyses of the blockchain which have gotten people riled up about one thing or another and then turned out to be bogus. The whole process has sometimes shown unsettling parallels with numerology. It's good that nwh is reminding everyone to try to be as skeptical as possible.

It'll be interesting to see whether the evidence turns out to match the story.

The only incident I can think of was a paper by Adi Shamir and Dorit Ron claiming Satoshi had a connection to Silk Road, and the actual owner of the coins (Dustin Trammell) came forward and demonstrated that (a) the coins were his and (b) the transaction was with MtGox not Silk Road. Gregory Maxwell was not involved in any way:

http://blog.dustintrammell.com/2013/11/26/i-am-not-satoshi/

I know of no other incident involving mis-identification of Satoshi's stash.

He's mentioned it on the forums directly, though I'm not in a position to dig it up right now. It's fairly easy to infer that he sold a lot at low prices, from his posts it doesn't seem that he is particularly rolling in the stuff. Probably best not to speculate on such things too much though unless he specifically brings it up.

Shouldn't there be dozens/hundreds/thousands of addresses flowing into the Mt. Gox cold storage?

Or did these do it too directly?

edited to fix account/address mistake.

Address, not account. Completely different levels of abstraction.

Agreed- it is very hard to tell who is holding the currency due to tumbling and all.

But if it all does condense down to one wallet, or a set of transactions that is suddenly happening on this one service... then it does smell funny.

If it should turn out that the owner of the account is someone affiliated with MTGox, then I can only imagine that shit will hit the fan.

http://pastebin.com/uahBR4HC

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