Todd’s urgent dismissal of the documentary reads to Hoback like an attempt to throw Satoshi-hunters off the scent. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that Peter would go on the offense. He’s a master of game theory—it’s what he does. He has spent a lot of years now muddying the waters,” says Hoback. “He’s an unbelievable genius.”
I haven’t seen the docu, but I did like his (Hoback’s) docu about Qanon, Q: Into the Storm.
It’s almost certainly bullshit. This is the entry point to conspiratorial thinking; it’s a classic Argument from Silence.
“What is he trying to hide‽” I dunno, man. Maybe he recognizes that there’s a bunch of unhinged weirdos who are hellbent on stalking “Satoshi,” and he doesn’t want to be harassed? Seems like a pretty good reason to try to throw you off.
Also, who gives a shit who it is? Only people trying to make a buck or beg money off of that person care. Reveals a lot about the documentary director.
Forget being harassed. Honestly, being kidnapped is a serious concern. Whoever or whatever group Satoshi is, it’s estimated he, she, or they own something like a million bitcoins.
Kidnapping is normally a pretty poor choice of crime for a criminal gang to undertake. It had its heyday back in the early 20th century. But as the FBI really got going, and we got better at tracking down people across state lines and internationally, kidnapping became much more difficult to pull off. Kidnapping someone - physically abducting them - is the easy part. But actually sending their family a ransom letter and collecting the money in a way that can’t be traced back to you? That’s a whole different matter. Actually getting the ransom money and somehow getting it into a form you can spend, all without getting caught? That’s nearly impossible in this day and age.
But someone with a million Bitcoins? It’s entirely possible that everything needed to access those funds is entirely within that one person’s skull. Either the private keys themselves, or some way to access or generate them.
Someone with that amount of Bitcoins is actually at incredible risk for kidnapping by an organized crime outfit. We’re talking about $65 billion USD worth of assets that can be obtained by just kidnapping one person and torturing them until they give up their private keys. Then once you have them, the coins can be transferred to another account and washed through numerous transactions until they’re untraceable. And the poor bastard who gets kidnapped for this just never leaves their captors alive.
And even if they keep their keys in their home instead of in their head? Now they’re at risk of break-in, or being held hostage during a nighttime break-in.
Hell, even just being suspected of being Satoshi would be incredibly dangerous. That’s an even more horrifying scenario. Imagine an organized crime outfit thinks you’re Satoshi, they’re incorrect, and they abduct you and torture you, demanding you give them something you are simply incapable of providing…
Well technically you can’t just keep having transactions until it is untraceable with BTC. It’s all documented on the coin, its on the blockchain forever and always. You can trace every BTC everywhere it has been from its inception. That’s why the FBI love it so much, the US Federal Government as a whole owns more than 1% of all bitcoins as a result of asset seizures.
Hoback argues
Currently bitcoin or any block chain based currency is more of a grift than financial freedom. However countries like El Salvador have taken it up as official currency, so real lives can be affected by whoever holds that bitcoin stockpile.
Sure. Counterpoint: there’s real billionaires with known identities fucking things up, and we aren’t doing shit about them.
Obviously, knowing the identity of one more isn’t that big of an issue.