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Over at Medium, a blogger claims to have an inside source at NSA that claimed that the NSA put in effort to determine the person(s) behind Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin.
According to the blog, the NSA created a "fingerprint" of Nakamoto's writing style(s) and used this fingerprint as follows:
The NSA then took bulk emails and texts collected from their mass surveillance efforts. First through PRISM (a court-approved front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts) and then through MUSCULAR (where the NSA copies the data flows across fiber optic cables that carry information among the data centers of Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Facebook) the NSA was able to place trillions of writings from more than a billion people in the same plane as Satoshi's writings to find his true identity. The effort took less than a month and resulted in positive match.
The blog goes on to discuss that it may be a Chinese or Russian individual or group, possibly a state actor. Of course, that's quite a claim so that would require quite a proof.
The blogger has updated the post to decline to substantiate these rumours.
What do you guys think: does the NSA have the capability to perform such an investigation? And is it cheap enough for them to waste it on this? If so, what's next? the NSA identifying the location of Jimmy Hoffa's body?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Post-Nihilist on Saturday September 02 2017, @04:57PM
I was into cryptoanarchy in a time before bitcoin, I remember that most of the concepts required to the development of the bockchain originated around the mixmailer anonymous Usenet posting gateway. The most important one being hashcash: I proof of work currency that was use to make the use of the mixmailer system uneconomic to spammers but almost insignificant compared to the value of anonymous posting to the user.
I am certain that Satoshi was at least a user of the Hashcash system and maybe even one of the pseudonymous dev behind it's integration into the mixmailer network.
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The preferred way to use mixmailer on Usenet was to send a crypted message to a known board and in the message indicate on which random board the reply was expected combined with a new public key to encrypt it. That was a way to foil metadata analysis as there was no conversation thread to follow unless they could somehow break 2048bit RSA 20 years ago...
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I regret leaving the cryptoanarchy community just before the birth of bitcoin... but damm it was a world filled with unsavory character, half of them being into pedophillia, 5% into bombs and terrorism, about 1% into financial crime and the rest being rebellious teenager ( if not in age, in spirit) . I belonged to that last group: anarchy for anarchy's sake....
Be like us, be different, be a nihilist!!!