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Is Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto tied to Ross Ulbricht & the Silk Road?

Skitt Ish
Skitt Ish
Sep 25 · 37 min read
Photo Credit: https://cbsnews.com

Bitcoin, the digital cryptocurrency that continues to leave regulators and business folks baffled, has retained its headline status across the globe these last few months after yet another meteoric rise. Thereafter, attention shifted to the enormous wave of speculators following this mentioned ascent, as individuals and institutional investors jumped on board earlier this year — signaling opportunity to secure serious gains on an otherwise undervalued asset (or, currency, depending on who you ask). Yet still, the obvious question remains: who exactly is “Satoshi Nakamoto”?

Photo Credit: https://chaintimes.com/

This question should be of immediate of concern after revelations continue to surface that too many ICO’s turn out to be nothing more than scams. ICO’s, unlike IPO’s, are not well regulated so there is little oversight. Often the main complaint is that these offerings amount to nothing more than ponzi schemes. It can be said this entire domain is congested with scammers and bad beggars. Countless incidents can be referenced where exchanges were “hacked”, where site owners walk away with user deposits, or where miners depositing funds for mining equipment were stolen. All which would logically lead us to assume that this marketplace best serves con artists. There are countless individuals who have lost vast sums, most all of them were blinded by a desire to get-rich-quick through cryptocurrency investments. Today, they are left holding the bag as regulators and other relevant government authorities try to make sense of what is occurring. It’s evident that both here and abroad, law enforcement agencies are unprepared to deal with the issues arising. Don’t believe these assertions? Just look at how long it took for scholars and regulators to discover that 95% of all exchange volume could be wash trading. How could it be that it’s 2019 and we’re just now figuring this out?

Grasping even the basics of blockchain technology remains daunting for those not considered specialists in the field of cryptography. To have a solid understanding of blockchain technology, one should have a very strong background in computer science. However, the larger issue is that a strong background in computer science is nowhere near enough to fully realize the scope of development which has occurred in this field since 2009, when Satoshi mined the first block on January 3rd, 2009. Neither, does it take into account the various actors that were involved in its spread between 2009–2011 — the early days. The only clues Satoshi left us: his words in e-mails, the whitepaper, forum posts, and the headline for The Times publication of January 3rd, 2009 which read: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”. A decade later, what has become of Satoshi? Is he still around?

Photo Credit: https://siliconangle.com/

The origins of Satoshi Nakamoto — be it an individual or a group of collaborators responsible for creating the original reference implementation and blockchain database — should be front and center in our public discussions. Yet this ongoing mystery surrounding its creation/creator(s), leaves us without answers, mostly interpreting this issue from a vantage point that praises its “decentralization” which may prove to be catastrophic.

There are many implications surrounding the adoption of bitcoin, thus governments have been slow to adopt even blockchain technology — with so many questions about it’s origins still unanswered. Because of the momentum and hype from the early days, we consider Satoshi brilliant for that ability to conceive a solution to the double-spend problem so many fell short of decades prior to the release of bitcoin. Still, the more important question…can we consider him an ally? Do his views align with those of our own? What if he is an adversary? A foreign agent consolidating power behind bribery and corruption at the state level, perhaps?

How true or accurate is it that Satoshi only mined/holds 1MM of the 21MM bitcoins that will ever be produced? Maybe they mined 2 MM? What if he’s more than one person? Did early conspirators then also mine an additional 2MM? At 4MM that amounts to above 20% of all bitcoins that will ever come into existence. Furthermore, if this was bonafide, and we then added the Chainalysis high count of 4MM bitcoins that are said to be lost forever…that number is closer to 40% of all bitcoins accounted.

What would you think, if it came to be known that Satoshi at the start was a small faction of 10 people? Now, what if that number grew to 50 privy conspirators? You see, the fact of the matter is that we still do not know for certain just how much of this “currency” is owned by nefarious agents (at home and abroad). Media outlets, in conducting their due diligence, have identified a long-list of possible creators, but to-date, nothing has really stuck.

In our examination we will revisit an incident within the past five years where it can be stated as fact, that the headlines shifted our attention to Bitcoin which dominated the media narrative for some time. By doing this, I believe it is a lot easier to understand the origins of Satoshi Nakamoto and potentially his double dealings.

Silk Road home page after being seized and subsequently shut down.
Ross Ulbricht aka ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ is considered the mastermind behind the Silk Road Marketplace, currently serving a double life sentence.

Of course, the incident I am referring to is the Silk Road investigation and Ross Ulbricht which lasted close to 3 years. According to court filings:

“In March of 2011, an anonymous black-market website named the Silk Road was established for the purpose of offering illegal items. The illegal items include such merchandise as illegal controlled substances, weapons and false identification documents, and weapons. The Silk Road currently consists of two individual websites, its marketplace where all the black-market items can be purchased, and an online chat forum associated to topics related to marketplace. Both the marketplace and online forum are operated by the same administer.”

Photo of Mark Karpeles

The importance of timelines just cannot be overstated in this case. In this investigation, the individual whom was originally accused of hosting the bitcointalk site (the first forum for bitcoin discussion) was, Mark Karpeles. Karpeles, in court filings, was the first known person mentioned for hosting the original Silk Road website and also possibly initiating its discussion on bitcointalk forums (also operated and owned by Mr. Karpeles). Strangely enough, Karpeles, though accused of all this was also on the board at the Bitcoin Foundation with Charlie Shrem (Shrem was an individual sentenced to prison time for laundering funds from the Silk Road — an issue entirely separate and distinct from this case). How corrupt can one place get? As such, court filings revealed the following crucial details:

“14. According to the website domaintools.com the www.silkroadmarket.org was created on March 01, 2011, and all of its public WHOIS information registered with non-existent user information. The name, address, telephone number, and email address on the public registered information did not exist in open source or law enforcement databases. WHOIS is an internet directory service that records public records for owners of servers as well as owners of domain names, and Internet Protocol (“IP”) addresses.

15. An IP address is a unique series of numbers that identifies the network location of a computer. These addresses allow computers to locate and connect to one another. According to domaintools.com historical hosting history the domain www.silkroadmarket.org was maintained at the domain name server XTA.net from March 01, 2011 through April 13, 2012. Domaintools.com’s historical server records also showed that the IP address for the silkroadmarket.org as 174.120.185.75. The IP was registered at that address from March 01, 2011 through March 30, 2011.

16. A domain name server is what translates the domain name and redirects the user to the IP address. When using the internet a computer can only find a website using a specific numerical location that is identified by the IP address. Without a domain name server, the domain name in and of itself would not direct a user to the desired website.

17. According to Domaintools.com, on January 13, 2010, the domain name and server XTA.net was registered to the company Mutum Sigillum LLC, and the administrative and technical contact for the domain was Mark Karpeles (hereafter known as KARPELES). The email address associated to the account and KARPELES at the time of acquisition was magicaltux@gmail.com. According to records from Google the owner of the email address is KARPELES. According to Domaintools.com’s Historical WHOIS records for XTA.net, KARPELES has maintained administrative control over the website since he acquired it in 2010.

18. Subpoena records returned from the Internet Service Provider (“ISP”) for the IP address 174.120.185.75 shows it was owned by KARPELES from December 18, 2009 through April 01, 2011. KARPELES provided the email address of mark@tibanne.com in his profile for the account. According to records from Google, KARPELES is the registered owner of mark@tibanne.com since September 10, 2011. As of April 05, 2013, Google records show the email account is active and over 234 logins on April 04, 2013. Google records also showed that KARPELES is the registered owner of magicaltux@gmail.com since September 09, 2004. As of April 05, 2013, Google records show the email account is active and over 211 logins on April 04, 2013.

19. Additional research into KARPELES shows that in February of 2011, he purchased the bitcoin marketplace Mt. Gox. As of April of 2013, the Mt. Gox bitcoin market is largest bitcoin marketplace on the internet, and advertises that they handle over 80% of all bitcoin trade. KARPELES also owns and operates and administers hundreds of online websites and is a self-proclaimed computer hacker.”

The value of this information though seemingly immeasurable, helped me to connect or at least identify the gaps of missing information in the Silk Road investigation. Supporters of Ross Ublricht have defended his innocence by stating that Ross was not the original Silk Road creator and was only given reigns at some unknown point after its creation. Moreover, we know from records that it was not until 2013 Ross Ulbricht was suspected of being DPR. The real question to ask is the following one: how did authorities obtain access to the server hosting the Silk Road?

More importantly, what sort of other reliable and valuable information could they have obtained from Mark Karpeles and any additional confidential informant(s) which would warrant a motion to suppress information that could have likely helped point to the possibility that Ross Ulbricht was framed? Could it be that the original Dread Pirate Roberts set out on a misinformation campaign to lead federal investigators down the wrong path? It is my belief that this question, entirely unanswered, will pose as a barrier in the future and challenge others trying to identify, Satoshi Nakamoto.

We know from records that this investigation led to a lot of feuding between various DOJ agencies, all eager to seize various accounts totaling $5MM associated with Karpeles and thereby obtain recognition for inching closer to answers on the Silk Road investigation. No doubt, this meant communication was tense throughout the duration of investigation(s). What is even less surprising, is the fact that we later determined more than one agent had gone rogue during the course of the investigation in attempts to extort DPR.

Court filings indicate that the defense responded with these details in mind pointing to Brady material in the investigation:

“Next, defendant argues that 3500 material produced by the Government just prior to trial warrants reopening and granting his pre-trial motion to suppress evidence obtained as a result of the search and seizure of a server located in Iceland. (ECF №46.) In particular, defendant points to text messages between SA Der-Yeghiayan and a confidential informant (the “CI”) from August 2012 in which SA Der-Yeghiayan asks, “Are we up on the exit node yet?” The CI confirms that they are and states, “100 percent running, logging and recording . . . with verification.” ….. Defendant also references texts in which SA Der-Yeghiayan and the CI discuss the prospect of the Government performing a distributed denial of service (“DDOS”) attack with the purpose of “listening” to the Silk Road servers. (Id. (quoting 3505–4066).) Defendant asserts that these communications provide “further evidence that the government discovered the Internet Protocol . . . address for the Iceland server ending in ‘.49’ through warrantless TOR network surveillance” and that it may have authorized or conducted DDOS attacks. (Id.) This argument is without merit.”

Running circles around this question we are only left to believe that rookie Department of Homeland Security Special Agent Jared Der-Yeghiayan a known agent working the case could have been lured in by the original conspirator(s) under the guise of a “tip-off” by a CI whom was in some way affiliated with the original Dread Pirate Roberts when the case originally opened over a year prior to Ross Ulbrichts’ arrest.

So the question remains, did US Attorney Preet Bharara overlook the very, very likely possibility that any individual(s) or faction(s) tipping off Chicago DHS agent Jared Der-Yeghiayan & Baltimore DHS agents Carl Force and Shaun Bridges could well be the same group that corrupted both of the Baltimore agents in a more sinister plot during their shady investigation of the Silk Road? Could it have been these government agents themselves that stole from Silk Road users and thereafter threatened to blackmail DPR?

More pressing, what exactly are the implications if this is true? Does this, at its core, demonstrate a basic lack of agency preparedness in the field of cybercrimes? If true, of course it does. Might this shed light on the incredible degree of confusion (more so than corruption) between several government agencies due in large part, to a group of opportunist(s) looking to propel the name of Bitcoin to the front and center of our headlines? Really though, who might stand to gain from this most?

…Though these questions remain unanswered we can change that by being more sensible, and asking more of the right questions about Bitcoin.

If we continue to sensationalize what we naively interpret as an up and coming “currency”, what are the immediate consequences and what are the long-term consequences? Is Satoshi Nakamoto a US citizen? Is he a patriot, is he a minority, or is he actually a white supremacist? Does it matter? What if he came to be associated with the alt-right movement, or what if he was a ardent supporter of Trump, would his creation garner the same support? These are questions we choose to not ask.

We speak often about decentralization and what this technological revolution that is blockchain might bring society, while simultaneously turning a blind eye to the possibility that Satoshi Nakamoto may potentially be pumping and dumping his stash in unregulated arenas all over the world to the detriment of others, as he gains more for himself and his conspirators by laundering money into ICO’s, alt-coins, etc. I say this because once finished reading this, you may at least feel as convinced as I am, that there could be additional individuals working alongside Satoshi Nakamoto.

Let’s detour for a moment to an individual caught up in the Silk Road investigation that goes by the name of Curtis Green. Curtis Green is so important in the Silk Road investigation because it’s widely unknown how agents managed to get in contact with this silk road moderator, let alone convince him to work alongside them to plot a fake murder. So then, where is the connection? Well it’s hard to understand but below is a picture of Curtis Green:

From previous court filings it is my assumption that the reason that Curtis Green is hardly ever mentioned is because there is an entire disconnect between Curtis Green and the SilkRoad admin Ross Ulbricht. Which would not hold up under scrutiny. Motherboard wrote an article on the arrest and said the following of Curtis:

“..the notorious former Silk Road employee Curtis Green was sentenced to time served — two days, and four years of supervised release — by Chief US District Judge Catherine C. Blake in a Baltimore court. Green had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute and posses with intent to distribute cocaine…”

Two days time served with four years of supervision for this high profile of a crime is the type of bargain you receive when you or someone you know becomes an informant. However, further below, you will find a connection which might explain how some random moderator is potentially connected to the real Dread Pirate Roberts. Would it be so hard to imagine a connection if, say, I showed you a Matthew Green, whom is assistant professor of computer science at John Hopkins?

Okay, this is good, but it won’t have any real value until you can connect him to Gwern Branwen and David Gerard. Who are they? Keep reading. Remember Matt is a cryptographer and a John Hopkins professor from the Baltimore area (where agents of the Silk Road investigation were initially accused of major corruption). But, the immediate question is, did Matt Green have any connection with the Silk Road investigation tip-off in Baltimore? Here is a brief overview of Matt according to his Wikipedia:

“…Green currently holds the position of Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. He teaches courses pertaining to practical cryptography.

Green is part of the group which developed Zerocoin, an anonymous cryptocurrency.[12][13][14][15][16] Zerocoin is a cryptocurrency proposed as an extension to the Bitcoin protocolthat would add anonymity to Bitcoin transactions. Zerocoin provides anonymity by the introduction of a separate zerocoin cryptocurrency that is stored in the Bitcoin block chain. Though originally proposed for use with the Bitcoin network, zerocoin could be integrated into any cryptocurrency. His research team has exposed flaws in more than one third of SSL/TLS encrypted web sites as well as vulnerabilities in encryption technologies, including RSA BSAFE, Exxon/Mobil Speedpass, E-ZPass, and automotive security systems. In 2015, Green was a member of the research team that identified the Logjam vulnerability in the TLS protocol.

Green started his career in 1999 at AT&T Laboratories in Florham Park, New Jersey. At AT&T Labs he worked on a variety of projects including audio coding/secure content distribution, streaming video and wireless localization services. As a graduate student he co-founded Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) with two fellow students and Avi Rubin in 2005. Green served as CTO of ISE until his departure in 2011.

Green is a member of the technical advisory board for the Linux Foundation Core Infrastructure Initiative, formed to address critical Internet security concerns in the wake of the Heartbleed security bug disclosed in April 2014 in the OpenSSL cryptography library. He sits on the technical advisory boards for CipherCloud, Overnest and Mozilla Cybersecurity Delphi. Green co-founded and serves on the Board for Directors of the Open Crypto Audit Project (OCAP), which undertook a security audit of the TrueCrypt software.”

These are excellent credentials. Still, I can only hope to better understand what Curtis Green was doing tied up as a silk road moderator, unless of course, there is something more troubling going on. Where does more digging around lead us? From the time of this article it has been exactly 24 hours since Matt has retweeted a particular individual: Paul Crowley. So what? Who is Paul Crowley anyway? For starters he’s a cryptogapher and also an admin at LessWrong.

https://ciphergoth.org

It should be noted that Matt Green is an integral player in the development of ZCash and Zerocoin, these are two well-known crypto currencies that can make bitcoin untraceable through zero-knowledge proof. The project is headed by hacker Bryce “Zooko” Wilcox whom is also a well known cryptographer. Oddly enough, I found that Mr. Wilcox has a long history of contact with user Gwern Branwen. Though there is no evidence to suggest that he knows who the real Gwern Branwen is. Maybe now there is? The log below dates way back to 2008 where they both participated in the Darcs IIRC. A screenshot just to provide some reference is shown as an example below, but their is an abundance of conversations just like it for those who dig more.

Okay, so now, let’s dive deep into the subject of who we may suspect Satoshi Nakamoto to be. More about Gwern Branwen too. This next bit should lead you to something resembling a suspect rather than de facto culprit(s). Since the subject above is about Dark Net Markets, I was left with but one highly respected individual to turn to for further information. According to his Twitter, the individual I am referring to, ‘Gwern Branwen’, considers himself a “writer, independent researcher, Internet 𝘣𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘸𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘳” (oddly you’ll find “Gwern” knows a bit of German just like DPR on silk road whom I will quote from court filings:

“…Anyone who wants to reach me, use the contact info at notreason.com Last post. Auf wiedersehen. …”

On the web at least, the above mentioned individual goes by the alias Gwern Branwen. Yes! Exhaustive searching will reveal that Gwern Branwen is but an alias. At first sight, this individuals degree of obsession with dark net markets seems innocuous (ha)…perhaps even misguided you would suppose judging by his intelligence. However, after careful inspection of his contributions on the internet under the pseudonym of Gwern Branwen, what we reveal is that this alias is active in various communities. Namely, the main social pages such as Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Patreon, and finally, a relatively unknown site on the internet which is packed with interesting individuals and essays. The site is lesswrong.com, or LW to those that frequent it. A nice play on words similar to the site notreason.com (mentioned above in court filings).

The LessWrong community at some past point states the following about itself:

“LessWrong dates back to 2006 when Eliezer Yudkowsky starting writing about rationality on economist Robin Hanson’s blog Overcoming Bias. In February 2009, those posts were used as the seed material for Less Wrong. Since 2006 we have collected many friends.”

Several organizations spun off from the community, such as The Center For Applied Rationality (CFAR), the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), and the Effective Altruism movement.”

Upon further inspection, it can be said there are some well-known rationalists discussing insightful topics on the forums. It is widely used by other prominent individuals in the crypto-sphere which, at one time or another, have been suspected of being the Satoshi Nakamoto. Individuals like Wei Dai and Hal Finney (now deceased) have in the past contributed their fair share of ideas in community discussions. Many still do. Therefore I ask again, why is LessWrong so important?

From my experience, once an individual utilizes a pseudonym for the pure sake of remaining anonymous in a community, it is quite likely that they are using additional aliases to operate and disseminate information via other platforms. In the case of Gwern Branwen, a stylometric analysis from his detailed essays indicates he routinely operates under a variety of aliases — not all of which align with his views. While it was at first fascinating to see this amount of record keeping by one individual, it is bewildering to come to terms with the level of involvement that Gwern Branwen has had in the domain of crypto and the obsession he has had with injecting himself time and time again, sometimes anonymously, into the biggest headlines. He has contributed or been included in stories for Wired, Vice, and Forbes just to name a few…mostly on the subject of Silk Road or Satoshi Nakamoto. He considers himself a dark net market “expert” and an “independent researcher”. His involvement in many of these major breakthroughs & studies leaves you wondering….

Thus, it’s no coincidence that a couple of years ago, in 2015, Gwern Branwen was being investigated to understand his involvement in a separate case concerning Evolution Market. A type of Silk Road 2.0 spin-off, Reddit was eventually subpoenaed by the DHS requesting user information related to Gwern Branwen, as well as other individuals accounts involved in the hack. Citing a WIRED article:

“According to a copy of the subpoena shared with WIRED by one of the forum’s moderators who was named in the document, the DHS seeks information that includes the names, IP addresses, dates and times of site visits as well as other data that Reddit likely doesn’t possess, including the users’ phone numbers and financial data.

The subpoena’s five targets are NSWGreat, a user who had claimed to be an Evolution staffer; three other users named z-l, Deepthroat and Evosmith who boasted on Reddit that they were tracking Evolution’s administrators or identifying details about them; and Gwern Branwen, a well-known security researcher, writer and moderator of the darknetmarkets forum. It’s Branwen who has now publicly revealed the subpoena’s existence to WIRED. He says the DHS’s interest in him may be in part because Z-l had recently publicly promised to send proof of findings about Evolution’s administrators to him, though Branwen says he never received any such information.

Reddit’s r/darknetmarkets community has become central to the dark web’s drug economy in recent months.

Branwen says he sees z-l, Deepthroat, Evosmith and himself as likely red herrings for law enforcement, but that NSWGreat might be an actually important target of the government’s investigation into Evolution. The apparently Australian NSWGreat went so far as to host an “ask me anything” session on Reddit as an internet drug trafficker and public relations staffer for Evolution’s black market. “Given the date and the affected accounts, it doesn’t take Holmes to deduce the reason for this subpoena,” writes Gwern in a statement he sent to WIRED. “Just one naked connection revealing [NSWGreat’s] home IP would be enough, and if he’s like past market employees, a raid will turn up all the damning evidence one could hope for.”

Branwen adds that he himself has never sold illegal products on a dark web market or worked for any such site. He’s nonetheless troubled by DHS’s probe into his personal data. “How can I continue as a [Reddit] moderator,” he writes, “knowing that all my non-[encrypted] communications have been laid bare, there may be followup subpoenas for my Gmail account, and I may be under further investigation myself?””

Why then Gwern? Why, as a writer that struggles to make ends meet, that claims to get by with just enough, why is it that Gwern Branwen continues obsessing and involving himself over events central to the Bitcoin story line? I have determined the following: if at face value we merely suppose he might have something to gain from his commotion, this then begins to justify his level of involvement. He has no blog, nor a reliable source of income tied to bitcoin activities, so why is he so involved?

That is not all however, whether Gwern Branwen was an admin on the Silk Road is anyone’s guess right now, but what immediately caught my attention after reviewing additional court documents was a letter sent to Ross Ulbricht. Namely, letter #14 of the 100 letters supporting Ross, wherein there is a redaction of the authors name and details. 1 of 100. The person though unknown, is believed to be a previous partner whom Ross dated in Austin. Note that this is the only letter which had a redaction of all 100 submitted in support of leniency in sentencing Ross Ulbricht. The letter (in its entirety below) reads:

Two-page letter admitted in court by anonymous “lover” of Ross Ulbricht.

You might wonder like me, why this author insists on their anonymity? If you read through all 100 letters, compared to others, this one is extremely superfluous in discussion and largely impersonal in its appeal too. Does Ross truly believe this to be a letter from his “Late Spring 2012-Late Summer 2012” lover (“which by late July and August, constituted a near daily basis”)? I am filled with doubt and believe it warrants further investigation on the individual composing the letter.

After reading every other letter it was apparent to me that the sender of letter #14 padded it with much that one could consider, impersonal. Especially, for the level of trouble they went through to have that letter in court filings. What gives? Who would be so wildly obsessive yet so ambiguous when a lovers freedom is on the line? Does the notion still hold up that often times culprits like to find their way into investigations as informants/sources? Is their any underlying guilt we should be made aware of? If so, what was the cause of it?

This individual does not openly introduce themselves. They hardly reveal details related to their geographic location, and they make little connection to Ross except for a few emails which, it seems, the sender likely forged themselves. Additionally, they point to a few Youtube videos and TEDtalk comments as a crutch to ask for leniency? Huh? Like myself, you might begin to think this is all a sick joke; remnants of someone in those years that found it appropriate to find their way into the investigation. However, I am strongly of the opinion that Ross did not and will not verify that this letter was in fact written by a previous romantic partner from Austin — as is documented in court filings.

On the other hand, most every other sender was able to share personal memories they had with Ross, and relay their sentiments effectively. They stood by Ross, they put their name on the line for Ross. So I ask you all again, why then, did this individual that had much more to say than any other letter — as far as word count is concerned — reveal absolutely nothing substantial about Ross as a person? Did they even know Ross?

Instead, t­hey focused their first paragraph entirely on the “media narrative” and thereafter spoke as an armchair philosopher on the matter. The long-winded response was unjustified, empty, and cold. Who else is so fixated on the “media narrative”? A quick glance and you’ll find the individual was able to write just as much as Ross’ mother, sister, and father about him. Yes, his immediate family! This should have raised red flags from the beginning for the defense.

It is important to note that rationalists participating in the LessWrong community created a new spin-off movement recognized today as Effective Altruism. At times, the LessWrong community has been criticized by others as being more akin to a cult than say, a community of rationalists. However, even in this cult, members demonstrate no issue identifying themselves, their personal blogs and photos, homepages, or even their credentials and educational backgrounds. All of course, except for those few users that tend to engage in conversations with Gwern Branwen and his sock-puppet accounts on LessWrong. Overwhelmingly, those users that do engage with, and amplify Gwern’s personal viewpoints are sympathetic to his opinions, and often times tend to have fictional information associated with their pages on LW…abandoning these handle created for short use on a thread or a few threads.

You will note that on the bitcoin subreddit r/bitcoin there are numerous instances of members complaining about censorship. In the LessWrong community, I noticed the same issue with real-users who shared their personal information on their profile, while complaining about the level of censorship on the LessWrong forum. After more digging, I noticed something very interesting. It was a daily “auto-thread” which pops up on many of the cryptocurrency subreddits and which follow the same pattern by a real user: David Gerard. I will share more information about this individual later.

As I started drawing out all of the similar markers between gwern.net, his suspected Reddit accounts, and finally, his suspected LessWrong accounts, I noticed there to be an overwhelming amount of sock-puppet accounts in discussions where he was a participant. These, likely created for the sole purpose of amplifying some individual opinion posted to a thread. Time after time, I observed similarities not just in single words, but in bigrams, and trigrams. Eventually it became clear words and phrases utilized by Gwern were also contaminating his other aliases. This, of course, added more weight to my suspicions.

It is unarguable, after thoroughly investigating, that several hundreds of accounts across many subreddits were created for this sole purpose. Patterns of use on these sock-puppet accounts led me to discovering that they were used heavily in communities (and more specifically threads) where David Gerard participated under any of his various aliases, and possibly, Gwern Branwen.

Certainly this does not prove that Gwern Branwen is Satoshi Nakamoto or that he is David Gerard, but it sure is exciting to arrive at this juncture. To finally have a real-name in clear alliance (through sock-puppets) with an individual that demonstrated highly suspect behavior. This all gave me better footing from which to compare Satoshi Nakamoto to a real person…David Gerard. Eventually, I managed to discover that David is staunchly opposed to the idea of Bitcoin. He even wrote a book about blockchain. Is this out of convenience, is he part of a misinformation campaign, both maybe? What kind of charade is this?

To document more about this individual…we can safely say David is a regular participant in the LessWrong community — it seems to me one of his favorite places on the internet. Currently he is a system administrator and also a board member at RationalMedia Foundation (a direct competitor of LessWrong). To the best of my knowledge, he first became interested in the work of Eliezer Yudkowsky (of LessWrong) early on when Eliezer wrote Harry Potter’s and the Methods of Rationality, and when he (Eliezer Yudkowsky) was a contributor on overcomingbias.com, a blog run by Robin Hanson.

It is crucial to note another detail as we narrow in on this suspicious behavior. That is, where I found sock-puppets I also observed real-users in the reddit community contributing and propping up ideas suggested by David Gerard. Did they know? Were they merely instructed? Was it him on a sock-puppet? The most odd thing of all was that these users were affiliated with the same NPO’s that the LessWrong community was in support of. This was and still is an extremely sensitive detail in my entire assessment.

Realizing what I had discovered about David Gerard, I took to reviewing all 539 posts by Satoshi on the bitcointalk.org forum. This at first served to establish a very real pattern of consistency (in written language) between David Gerard and Satoshi Nakamoto. It was here that I was able to make a connection between Satoshi’s use of Briticisms and David Gerard’s writing style, which seemed to be a clone of Satoshi. Satoshi, though many have come to believe was disguising his origins, is clearly not American and he made no attempt to hide it, this can be observed by his spelling in posts such as #194 or #242 on Bitcointalk, respectively:

“I favour the plan to monitor if the frequency of blocks received drops too slow. That covers a large range of possibilities”

“I’ve wondered about that for a long time, but I didn’t think it would be possible due to addition carrying into the neighbour’s value.”

Seeing this, I made the attempt to connect David Gerard to other previously discovered sock-puppets or his other more frequently used aliases on Reddit and LessWrong. Doing this, I was able to make significant progress in my examination and eventually identify this man as one of the conspirators in the faction we know today as “Satoshi Nakamoto”. But I still did not know much about David, so, I continued digging. In my continued search, I wanted to remain certain that this wasn’t just a one-person operation and that Satoshi had in fact, accumulated conspirators. In doing this, I came full circle to a possible list of accomplices, most notably: Jimmy Wales or Jimbo as he prefers to be called. Jimmy Wales, a British-American entrepreneur is the founder of Wikipedia — not to be confused with Wikileaks which Jimmy Wales denies any connection to.

Through all of my findings, I have come to believe it is not just LessWrong that appears to be a cult, but also the Effective Altruist movement. This is a movement originally founded by the Centre for Effective Altruism, a registered charity in England, Wales, and then the US in 2014 (out of Berkeley, CA) according to public filings. Highly notable individuals associated with the EA movement include Peter Singer (Animal Charity Evaluators), Dustin Moskovits (Good Ventures), Eliezer Yudkowsky (MIRI), William MacAskill (EA), Toby Ord (Giving What We Can), Liv Boeree (Raising for Effective Giving), and this is just naming a few select people. Though still, something even more notable is that 75% of MIRI’s fundraising, as a prime example, is coming in the form bitcoin. This seems suspect, doesn’t it? I wondered, what connection Eliezer Yudkowsky had in all this…

Fundraising goal for MIRI which was completed with 75% funding in the form of Bitcoin.

The EA foundation is a parent organization for the Centre for Effective Altruism, as well as that of Raising for Effective Giving, a charity in England and Wales headed by poker stars Liv Boeree and Igor Kurganov. This too seemed interesting so I took another look…

..Raising for Effective Giving, as an organization, accommodates only professional poker players and financial investors according to its wikipedia. Last checked there were currently 87 individuals associated, all contributing 2% of their income. A brief example as to how this works is depicted above and shows how the Machine Intelligence Research Institute had their 2017 fundraiser drive this quarter, as well as how in just the last couple of weeks, the NPO was miraculously able to obtain the maximum amount from the $2MM dollar matching challenge from poker players Martin Crowley, Tom Crowley, and Dan Smith in partnership with the charity Raising for Effective Giving. They were given more than $500,000 in bitcoin donations.

Now, is this just a very savvy organization? An even better question to ask is: how exactly is due diligence conducted on these obtained cryptocurrency donations to ensure that they have not been laundered or worse, tainted by some illicit activity? How far back in the blockchain do these organization trace funds to verify indisputably that they are entirely legitimate funds arriving into their accounts? More importantly, does enough informational gap exist to suggest that these funds are not legitimate? Today, I would wager a guess in the affirmative.

Though this one instance might not immediately strike others as odd, a careful study of all charities which are supported by the original LessWrong community or even those which have spun out as creations from within such as: MIRI, CFAR, CEA, FHI, FLI, SIAI, OpenAI, Good Ventures, GiveWell (Against Malaria, Malaria Consortium, Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, GiveDirectly, etc.) Good Ventures, Open Philanthropy Project, and many more have successfully found stay as a result of crypto investments/donations.

Immediately, I recalled a separate observation I had made when wandering through Reddit and specifically r/bitcoin under the Pineapple Fund reddit thread titled: I’m donating 5057 BTC to charitable causes! Introducing The Pineapple Fund.

An astronomical sum at almost $85MM at the time of writing this paper. I wondered, how early-on did this unnamed individual get into Bitcoin that he had the privilege to be so generous? I assume individual because he uses “I” throughout his postings. More importantly, who on earth is he giving all his money away to? This question is perhaps the only one that lead my curiosity forward and thereafter gave rise to even more unanswered questions — some which still remain unanswered today.

You see, it turns out that in this Reddit thread linked above, the suggestions most amplified through the use of sock-puppet accounts were the ones associated with the effective altruist movement. This finding was not only astonishing but alarming. In particular, the most supported charities (and just about the only ones mentioned unless you went 3K comments below) were: Give Directly, MIRI, CFAR, SAIA, Animal Charity Evaluators, Against Malaria Foundation, etc. This looks to me like money laundering at its finest. With the need to create a spectacle behind the giving on a popular platform that encourages…you can be sure the product of a successful campaign will leave less on the table for investigators to scrutinize these organizations successfully receiving six figure donations — or more. Who would think to question someone donating so much money? Or a better questions is…who would decide to pick this story line up and write negatively about giving to worthy causes, rather than highlighting the perceived benefit of Bitcoin used as a new vehicle for altruism? It makes it easier to turn a blind eye when questions such as these can be left unanswered, doesn’t it?

Given this knowledge, given access to other aliases studied, and given the stylometric reference points, it can reasonably be stated that Satoshi Nakamoto is David Gerard and that at least one likely conspirator is the notorious Jimmy Wales a co-founder of Wikipedia. Wales also was the founder of Bomis (a successful porn ad network) and has been known to be something of a charlatan and playboy in tech circles. Most notably however, for denigrating Rachel Marsden a woman he briefly dated and whom he subsequently blackmailed upon discovering she had released explicit chat discussions between them to her friends. He is also well-known for his attempts to shore up credit on the creation of Wikipedia as the “sole founder”. A wiki style page known for satire, outlines the following (how much is true, is not yet known):

“When Jimbo Wales (or Jewbo, or “Jimmy”, as his own TOW article calls Jimbo Wales in a failed attempt to make Jimbo Wales cool and hip instead of the douchey and pissy troll that is Jimbo Wales IRL) was a boy, he lived with his grandmother, who owned a lovely set uv encyclopedias. Jimbo Wales delighted in drawing cocks all over the pages, but later regretted this; when Jimbo Wales’ grandmother stumbled upon the vandalism, she slapped the bejeezus out of Jimbo Wales and dragged Jimbo Wales to the local Catholic church to be sodomized. “If only we can find a way to undo your vandalism!” she muttered as she watched the priest have his way with Jimbo Wales.

The incident moved Jimbo Wales greatly, inspiring Jimbo Wales when Jimbo Wales later decided to follow Jimbo Wales’ cunt leader by moving from pr0n to getting other people to make an encyclopedia for Jimbo Wales’ own profit!!1!?1. Remembering Jimbo Wales’ joyous days of toilet training as an infant, Jimbo Wales wanted it to be easily vandalized yet efficient to clean up. Jimbo Wales lured vandals into Jimbo Wales’ encyclopedia by allowing anonymous editing, and appointed other anonymous to clean up the vandalism so it never got boring for the vandals. Finally, anonymous declared himself “High Priest of Wikipedia”, and made the final step in the vandal punishment process: “Sodomy by Jimbo”, ensuring that Jimbo Wales, like Jimbo Wales’ inspiration, would have a plethora of boys to anally rape.

Jimbo Wales gets all of his minions together every year for a convention called Wikimania. The purposes of the convention are to endorse pedophilia and force the administrators to join NAMBLA.

Founding of Wikipedia

Jimbo Wales is also a HUGE fan of historical revisionism. Jimbo Wales is currently attempting to erase the fact that the co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, had anything to do with its creation or that he even exists, and has already let people forget who was the actual founder of Wikipedia, Ben Kovitz. He can get away with this because Sanger and Kovitz are both Jewish, so nobody takes them seriously. He has edited his User Page on Wikipedia to change it from his being its co-founder to being its sole founder. Naturally, this kind of action is beneath someone as great (in Jimbo Wales’ own mind) as King Jimbo Wales, so Jimbo Wales holds secret, dark rituals in the Wikipedia Admin IRC channel after sacrificing newborn infants to Jimbo Wales’ Dark Lord. During these heinous cabalist meetings, Jimbo Wales bids the minions of Jimbo Wales to do Jimbo Wales’dirty work, often whining about how Jimbo Wales “really wishes someone could help me with this”. Naturally, his asslapping toadies are all happy to bend over and open wide, assisting Jimbo Wales to wipe the fetid presence of Larry out of Wikipedia altogether. [1]

Of course, Jimbo Wales is well aware of the intense criticism he faces as the supreme leader of his cabal of vitally important editors and researcherson Wikipedia. As such, Jimbo Wales is now moving to ensure that his edits and bans are democratically vetted and that others will carry on the work when he is otherwise occupied. Although easily found most times trolling Wikipedia like an arbitrarily epic fucktard, and claiming that he’s only doing it for the lulz, it is a known fact that he only does it to compensate for a horrific run-in he had as a young man with a person of indeterminate gender. Needless to say, he got pwnt.”

Below is a photograph of Jimmy Wales seated beside David Gerard in ’14 after having received $500,000 in funding from the UAE for reasons unknown and for which he was criticized as well:

Photo Credit: https://theregister.co.uk

David Gerard, much like Gwern, was an English Wikipedia editor. It is fact that both joined Wikipedia circa ’05. Gwern, on one hand, has made upwards of 100,000 revisions. David Gerard, has for some time now served as a voluntary spokesperson in the UK for Wikipedia.

David Gerard

David Gerard is a Unix system administrator by day. His job includes keeping track of exciting new technologies and advising against the bad ones. He was previously an award-winning music journalist, and has blogged about music at Rocknerd since 2001. He is a volunteer spokesman for Wikipedia, and is on the board of the RationalMedia Foundation, host of skeptical wiki RationalWiki. Originally from Australia, he lives in east London with his spouse Arkady Rose and their daughter. Until he reinstalled the laptop they were on, he was the proud owner of six Dogecoins.”

A little digging and I found that David is originally from Perth, Western Australia but currently lives in Walthamstow, London, England with his daughter, cat, and his wife Rose Arkady Gerard. According to his bio it is possible he is no longer married to his first wife, Alison Wheeler. Further, to shed some light on this individual, I will quote this questionable source so in sum you may get a better understanding (perhaps, through his own viewpoints):

“It is widely known that The Wikipedia articles on cryptocurrency and blockchain are guarded again by the “skeptic activists” on Wikipedia, especially grand wizard skeptic David Gerard who is also apart of the ”RationalWiki” braintrust, a website featured extensively here primarily for its abuse in targeting individuals in misinformation campaigns, attacking their reputations on the internet.”

Very little is known outside of public Wikipedia pages about David Gerard. Aside from his regular critiques of the crypto-sphere he remains out of the spotlight. However, he also shares the following information on a different wiki style page here. In his FB page below I link him back to an admin on LessWrong from London using the alias Ciphergoth, and whose real name I find out is Paul Crowley (the same person mentioned above). Crowley is well connected to MIRI, CFAR, FHI, etc., and someone I deem to be complicit in this scheme and actively engaged in the circle of co-conspirators referred to as “Satoshi Nakamoto”.

David Wainwright Gerard (also known as Red Drag Diva) is a senior bureaucratic fuck on TOW and sysadmin on RationalWiki who openly uses his real name on the site. David Gerard is meant to be an indication of just how serious Wikipedia is at becoming a well-known and respected encyclopaedia.

Gerard’s favorite weapon is the Clue Stick, although you will never see him hit himself with it. He’s an over-50 over-60 bisexual polyamorous twatfenster goth from Western Australia, who speaks with a carefully cultivated faux-London accent, since he’s lived in the UK for many years and fears being sent back to Ausfailia, where bogan prison and face-rapes await. Currently, he’s on the waiting list for a vaginoplasty. And works for Dell UK as a minor server sysop.

All of this is absolutely true. It hasn’t been altered for lulz. This is 100% actual factual truth. It doesn’t need to be lullified. He really is a bisexual goth s&m freak with a disabled wife and furry girlfriend, and he got that girlfriend pregnant, while his wife has her own girlfriend. He really is a senior member of Wikipedia — the motherfucking UK media spokesperson and a Checkuser. He is meant to be respectable! He uses his real name in all of this. These are his real photos that he took himself, and has listed for public download. It is very difficult to find “normal” pictures of him — or Arkady — or “Red Countess” (his (ex)wife). It is just plain and simply impossible to make any fun of him any worse than this. What more could you say that isn’t actually true already? David Gerard himself is disappointed that this article doesn’t make fun of him more.

Gerard sanitized his “bisexual-friendly” TOW user page in early January 2011 when Jimbo floated the idea of running for U.S. Senate (R-FL) 2012 — a plan likely to sag which flopped faster than Carly Fiorina’s failed attempt for the same in California and perhaps even faster than her plastic Barbie-doll tits. For this remarkable accomplishment, Gerard gets a wikicide honorable mention.

Unlike the stereotypical crazy old men of yore who would be content with yelling at children to get off their lawn and turn down their music, Gerard instead spends his twilight years snarking and sneering at the Millenial whippersnappers who disagree with him. With the icy grasp of Death growing nearer and nearer to the aging Gerard as each day passes, Gerard appears content with puttering around various wikis, bitching about bitcoins on reddit (and complaining about wrongthinking redditors off-site), griping about GamerGate, attempting to recruit a new anti-Gamergate sperg to replace Ryulong, name searching RationalWiki on Twitter, talking shit and lying because someone wouldn’t work on RationalWiki’s outdated software, shilling his blogs, keeping the manchildren and autists of RationalWiki under control, and, disturbingly, abusing his RationalMedia Foundation position to protect pedophiles.

..While the full extent of his pedophile apologia is unknown, observers have caught Gerard threatening users and using his position of power at RationalWiki in order to defend self-admitted pedophiles.”

To date Satoshi Nakamoto continues to remain anonymous except probably to those few whom have benefited most from the fruits of their labor. To date Ross Ulbricht is still locked behind bars. To date we don’t really know if authorities were able to independently access the server or if they were provided either a plan or discreet method of access by some unknown entity.

Unsurprisingly, Jimmy Wales has made countless references to bitcoin as well as other crypto-related comments, leading me to believe that he is certainly not out of the loop. If this is to be true, that would indicate that Satoshi Nakamoto is no longer an entity of one, but of several. I find his compulsion to comment on the subject quite odd because few people (if anyone at all) consider him an authority on Bitcoin or crypto. I would however, congratulate Jimmy Wales for having launched the Wikitribune early last year. Wikitribune is a for-profit entity trying to reshape news delivery, which to-date has even covered the NiceHash hack. See below:

What we know about Jimmy Wales is that he is obviously more than aware of the Reddit and bitcointalk communities embracement of the term HODL, which propogated throughout the web quickly and became mainstream in 2014 by a sock-puppet account most likely associated with Satoshi. This raises more red flags. In any case, what we do know so far is that neither David Gerard nor Jimmy Wales political views are held in high esteem by the US. We also know from his most recent book published, he does not support Bitcoin. Finally, we might want to begin making the assumption that one of these men, be it Paul Crowley, David Gerard or Jimmy Wales are tied to ownership of the Pineapple Fund or affiliated in some way with those at the highest level and that Paul Crowley is potentially an important point of contact for his Berkeley conspirators. From these insights, we must make way for an open discussion about bitcoin and the explosion of cryptocurrencies in the last couple of months. We must wonder if at the very top it even matters to these influential individuals discussed above who this elusive Satoshi Nakamoto is. Money affords others power, corrupts, and helps keep the blinders on. Just ask the Winklevoss twins how they found their way into Bitcoin in 2012.

This top comment below is a sock-puppet account that someone painstakingly created to leave a more than likely innocent comment…correct? To me this seems more like a compulsion to document every last detail of progress made by those responsible. But again I must ask, who might have such a compulsion?

If “Satoshi Nakamoto” has been able to infiltrate these new organizations and institutions springing up in the US, if “they” has been able to create a misinformation campaign via means of social media, what’s to suggest “they” are not already doing the same thing in China, Singapore, India, Korea, Japan, Australia, or Russia? What if they are targeting influential governments and its leaders that have less in resources to check corruption at the highest levels of office. What are the consequences of letting this go unchecked another decade?

For now, however, it’s clear that there is a lot of censorship, spam, and groupthink in subreddits. There is likely a lot of manipulation by the suspected creator(s) and conspirator(s) of Bitcoin to ensure that all ideas posed by David Gerard, Jimmy Wales, Paul Crowley, as well as various other coordinating actors — knowing and even unknowingly at times — are always most amplified on these social platforms. Now I’m only left wondering, could it be that David, Jimbo, and Paul are just a few individuals holding on tight to the reigns of this sinister plot? Effectively pretending to despise cryptos and suggesting cryptocurrency is worthless all while cashing in on their holdings? Wash trading has been real for the last decade. I am still curious to know what precisely was this incident that led Satoshi running in the opposite direction for good?

Photo Credit: https://wsj.com

…Follow the $. Can’t do that? Ask P, D, or J to comment.

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