Recently, I've been trying to decipher a question that seems simple: "Did Satoshi write these emails?" There are three emails in question involving two people (other than Satoshi):
- Wei Dai (two emails)
- Jon Matonis (one email)
For the back-story, I wrote about this conundrum at
Stacker News
The canon of Satoshi \ stacker news ~bitcoin
Recently, I wrote this: https://stacker.news/items/684558?commentId=684701 and asked whether three emails were "legit"...did Satoshi write them. St...
The upshot for my ponderance is that the NakamotoInstitute.org (BTC-friendly) does *not* include these emails, but the NakamotoStudies.org (BCH-friendly) site *does*. I wondered, "What's up?" Is this a BTC-vs.-BCH blockchain thing? A block size thing?" Frankly, I don't care. I just want to know if Satoshi wrote them.
Regarding Wei Dai, the general consensus in the SN comments linked above was that I should go to the source...go to Wei Dai and ask. If real Satoshi-emails, then either he or Satoshi released them "into the wild" at some point and then they started to appear on various websites. 'Til maybe now, I hadn't seen that release point.
The Dai/Satoshi emails mostly pop up in two places in a search: bitcoin.com and gwern.net. I was familiar with bitcoin.com (and thus was a bit skeptical), but was unfamiliar with gwern.net. Was it just another bitcoin website? Anyone can make one. Was there an agenda? ยฏ\_(ใ)_/ยฏ
So, going to the source, I reached out to Wei Dai via email today. We'll see.
Digging around, Wei Dai's site
https://weidai.com says any questions can be posted publicly at
https://www.lesswrong.com/ as an AMA. I went there. The "release point," evidence of Wei Dai sending out those emails may well be recorded there.
Here is a message from gwern timestamped March 16, 2014 to Wei Dai asking about the Wei/Satoshi emails:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YdfpDyRpNyypivgdu/aalwa-ask-any-lesswronger-anything?commentId=hGuDqrpRTYiBsRB5Y
Screenshot of the Wei Dai to Gwern reply:
Gwern's response to Wei Dai a couple of weeks later:
The page on gwern.net is still live at
Wei Dai/Satoshi Nakamoto 2009 Bitcoin emails, by Satoshi Nakamoto, Wei Dai ยท Gwern.net
Emails in 2009 between Wei Dai and Satoshi Nakamoto discussing Bitcoin draft proposal and B-money.
. Being healthily skeptical, I looked for that page on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Unfortunately, that page is only first archived [in 2023](
https://web.archive.org/web/20230208163356/https://gwern.net/doc/bitcoin/2008-nakamoto). But, gwern.net does go back to [2010](
https://web.archive.org/web/20101011153322/http://www.gwern.net/) and the first bitcoin mention there seems to be [July of 2011](
https://web.archive.org/web/20110723141839/http://www.gwern.net/), so, it was early.
The bottom line here, to me at least, is that Wei Dai's emails seem legit. Assuming the timestamps are legit, and that the emails being discussed from Wei Dai are indeed the same ones that gwern has on his site, then they're legit. It would take quite a bit of foresight to plan this out, starting 10 years ago, for this to be fake. The fact that the timestamp is pre-BCH, pre-block size wars is a big plus in my view as to the emails being legit. Those were the main reasons a question even arose in my mind, that and the NakamotoInstitute.org vs. NakamotoStudies.org exclusion/inclusion.
My next question, then, is back to NakamotoInstitute.org. Why, actually, are the Wei Dai emails not there? There must be a reason, and if a solid reason, why not share that reason publicly?
I reached out to NakamotoInstitute.org asking effectively, "Why are the Wei Dai and Jon Matonis emails not included? Not judging, just honestly curious." We'll see.
Regarding the Jon Matonis emails. I'd never even heard of him until this week. If you need a program to know the players, like me, he's apparently the former Executive Director of the Bitcoin Foundation (see [Wikipedia article](
Bitcoin Foundation - Wikipedia
)). It seems a bit hard to pin down what he's up to today. I will say one of the top hits when searching for his name pops up with [cypherpunkholdings.com...](
Institutional Solana Validator & Treasury Platform | SOL STRATEGIES
) under "board of directors," complete with "cyphepunk" misspelling (screenshot below) What's more, that link forwards to a Solana DeFi project. Hmm.
I reached out to Matonis via his hushmail.com email. We'll see.
That's all. Summary:
- three Satoshi emails (to two people) are in question
- the Wei Dai emails seem legit to me
- the Jon Matonis email, I'm not so sure
- would love to hear back from NakamotoInstitute.org
We'll see. :)
@BITCOINALLCAPS ๐ฆ ๐ฆ ๐ฆ - tagging you here because I thought you might be interested in the Wei Dai part of this
#plebchain #gm
#coding #plebchain
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