At 8:41 AM PT on Jan 12, 2009, Hal Finney received an email from Satoshi Nakamoto with a rather striking idea, vanity bitcoin addresses.
You can send to my Bitcoin address if you want to, but you won’t get to see the full transfer sequence:
1NSwywA5Dvuyw89sfs3oLPvLiDNGf48cPD
I just thought of something. Eventually there’ll be some interest in brute force scanning bitcoin addresses to find one with the first few characters customized to your name, kind of like getting a phone number that spells out something. Just by chance I have my initials.
When this email and others were released by Hal to the Wall Street Journal in the months before he died in 2014, bitcoin fans quickly drew up two possible theories as to what Satoshi meant by “NS”.
1. That the initials stood for Nakamoto Satoshi in true Japanese name sequence styling.
2. That it was a wink and a nod from the sender to Hal Finney that NS secretly meant Nick Szabo, another individual long accused of possibly being Satoshi.
And so for the last 10 years the debate has mostly been stuck on expanding on those two theories. And that’s mainly because the email has been interpreted literally, that Satoshi had been voicing nothing more than a stream of consciousness about something that happened “just by chance.”
However, if we don’t interpret it literally and bear in mind that both sender and recipient were cryptographers, then it becomes far more likely that Satoshi was dropping a hint about something he had already thought to play around with.
Check out this timeline:
Jan 11, 7:30 PM PT – Satoshi sends 10 bitcoins to Hal Finney
Jan 11 or 12 – Hal in a non-timestamped email tells Satoshi “I see you sent me a payment, thanks!”
Jan 12, 8:41 AM PT – Now that Hal has received the bitcoins, Satoshi gives Hal a separate address than the one he used to send them from along with the clue about customized addresses.
You can send to my Bitcoin address if you want to, but you won’t get to see the full transfer sequence:
1NSwywA5Dvuyw89sfs3oLPvLiDNGf48cPD
I just thought of something. Eventually there’ll be some interest in brute force scanning bitcoin addresses to find one with the first few characters customized to your name, kind of like getting a phone number that spells out something. Just by chance I have my initials.
Ironically, Satoshi had already done this. He used another bitcoin address starting with the initials NS for the official bitcoin demo, which nobody has ever seemed to notice. Satoshi even bruteforced the genesis block’s wallet, giving it a nice clean appropriate beginning with A1.
Indeed, it turns out the sender of those bitcoins to Hal came from 12cbQLTFMXRnSzktFkuoG3eHoMeFtpTu3S which by chance has two words in it! HomeFTP. While anyone is free to conclude that this is just a random assortment of letters (and I have been attacked on this very possibility), I believe it is a reference to Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon novel.
“Another thing he did this morning was to download the Cryptonomicon from the FTP server where it lives in San Francisco.” — quote from the novel.
I did not select Cryptonomicon completely at random. It is already an established fact that the Bitcoin White Paper was released on Neal Stephenson’s birthday (October 31) and that Neal Stephenson’s initials are NS, the initials Satoshi said were his. Cryptonomicon is also one of two books (the other being Neuromancer by William Gibson) that Jack Dorsey is recorded as having commented about on alt.cyberpunk (Usenet) back in 1999, which are relevant only because Bitcoin incorporates references from them.
One particular critique I have received on the bitcoin address having the words HomeFTP in them is that the early 2009 era employed the use of pay-to-public-keys (p2pk) rather than the hashed version (p2pkh) and thus Satoshi would not have even known what his own p2pk would have looked like when hashed and converted to a later modern p2pkh format. This, however, is obviously false because Satoshi himself provides Hal with a bitcoin address in p2pkh format in the very email where he expresses the idea of brute forcing a p2pkh address. Satoshi knew exactly what he was doing, what his addresses looked like, and what the resulting hash of any p2pk would look like. So even if p2pk was employed, Satoshi would obviously be able to generate and look at the final p2pkh version. Others have expressed doubt that the publicly released bitcoin software was capable of brute forcing anything. However, it defies logic that Satoshi, the creator of this tech, would’ve been limited by his own publicly released software.
For good measure, I personally brute forced many legacy bitcoin addresses for the purpose of validating this theory and was able to produce many starting with my own initials, SM.
Satoshi didn’t stop with his transaction to Hal. In fact, he executed four subsequent transactions from his “HomeFTP” bitcoin address immediately after Hal before terminating use of that address for good. He sent bitcoins to:
Jan 11, 10:02 PT – 1DUDsfc23Dv9sPMEk5RsrtfzCw5ofi5sVW
Jan 11, 10:12 PT – 1LzBzVqEeuQyjD2mRWHes3dgWrT9titxvq
Jan 11, 10:34 PT – 13HtsYzne8xVPdGDnmJX8gHgBZerAfJGEf
Jan 12, 12:04 PT – 1ByLSV2gLRcuqUmfdYcpPQH8Npm8cccsFg
I’ve assumed (but haven’t proved) that the recipients were alternate addresses belonging to Satoshi.
Using Satoshi’s guide of how to read the hidden message: “Eventually there’ll be some interest in brute force scanning bitcoin addresses to find one with the first few characters customized to your name, kind of like getting a phone number that spells out something. Just by chance I have my initials” then the initial readout looks something like:
1DUDsfc23Dv9sPMEk5RsrtfzCw5ofi5sVW
1LzBzVqEeuQyjD2mRWHes3dgWrT9titxvq
13HtsYzne8xVPdGDnmJX8gHgBZerAfJGEf
1ByLSV2gLRcuqUmfdYcpPQH8Npm8cccsFg
DUDsf
—
3H
ByLSV
Since we know HomeFTP is a novel reference to an FTP server in San Francisco, we’ll interpret the first 1 as:
Dude, San Francisco
The second one is not immediately clear. The words “Hes” and “tit” are discoverable throughout but this departs from the opening characters and could be by coincidence.
The third one starts with 3H
The fourth one reads pretty clearly as ByLSV.
—
Dude, San Francisco
—
3H
By LSV
I must admit that this combination opens up an endless sea of possibilities if one truly had no inkling of whom Satoshi might be or what he would be writing here. However, I have a suspect in mind, one I have discussed at length for almost a year, Jack Dorsey. Thus, anyone is free to conclude that my following analysis is the result of confirmation bias and understand that I’m willing to accept that criticism? Ok, keep reading:
Tweets from Jack Dorsey that very week:
Jan 16, 2009 – Jack reminds people that he’s living at Mint Plaza, which is across the street from the San Francisco Chronicle
Jan 16, 2009 – Jack asks how to tell someone their neighborhood?
Jan 16, 2009 – Jack says he shares his location by intersection or landmark.
Ok, thanks Jack, we’ll use that as a guide. Where did he live at the time? Very publicly he lived at 2 Mint Plaza in San Francisco, which if you were going up 5th Street in San Francisco from the San Francisco Chronicle, you’d turn left when you see the newly opened Latte Express, Soup & Sandwich, and Vietnamese Sandwiches and Iced Coffee place, shortened down to: By Latte, Sandwiches, and Vietnamese, aka ByLSV.
Super speculative? Maybe, but 2 Mint Plaza is the 3rd house/building down from there. 3H
So now:
Dude, San Francisco
—?
3rd House Down
By Latte, Soup, and Vietnamese
What’s missing of course for this conspiracy theory to make any sense is the actual location, which suddenly makes itself known in the 2nd address. It’s in the middle. jD2m. Jack Dorsey, 2 Mint Plaza.
Dude, San Francisco
Jack Dorsey, 2 Mint Plaza
3rd House Down
By Latte, Soup, and Vietnamese
How do you tell someone your location? Exact address? Intersection? Neighborhood?
— jack (@jack) January 16, 2009
I share my location by intersection or landmark. Most often by the former.
— jack (@jack) January 16, 2009
We hear you Satoshi, we hear you, oh I mean Jack.
On its own, going from brute forcing initials to directions on a map to Satoshi’s apartment (lol) could still come across as a leap even if you correlate Satoshi’s transactions with Jack’s tweets, and indeed when I first posted this, thousands of people accused me of having a mental illness. I ended up deleting it in some places I posted it because I gave no surrounding context and was ridiculed into oblivion.
However, we haven’t discussed the most important piece of the puzzle, that there is actually a novel about Jack that concludes with Jack having hidden a secret message using carefully arranged magazine headlines and circling specific letters. It sounds too unbelievable to be true, and yet it is.
In September 2013, Alyssa Milano, one of Jack Dorsey’s best friends (and godfather to her son), went on Larry King Live to promote an upcoming graphic novel she had authored called Hacktivist. According to her, the novel’s main character (Edwin Hiccox) is based on Jack Dorsey. She would go on to repeat that again in the book’s Afterward and Dorsey himself has a note embedded on the first page.
In the novel, Dorsey, played by “Edwin”, is a billionaire co-founder of a popular social network based in San Francisco (a Twitter clone called Yourlife). And business is good for the founders until the Arab Spring erupts in Tunisia which is where the book starts off. The social network’s influence on the events are noticed by the US government and the CIA approaches the founders with terms for a startling trade: ‘give us access and control over your social network and in return we won’t prosecute you over your secret.’
As it turns out Edwin and his co-founder are the masterminds behind a famous elite hacking pseudonym called .sve_urs3lf. Edwin, who was apparently developing an advanced decentralized peer-to-peer network with strong encryption, is completely dejected because he was so close to getting it where it needed to be. In the end he accepts the deal of amnesty for his actions under the .sve_urs3lf pseudonym and agrees to cooperate. It doesn’t last long and he disappears and is believed to be dead. Edwin’s co-founder, who tried to save his life at the last second, is unsure of Edwin’s fate. The story ends with the co-founder looking for Edwin online under his .sve_urs3lf ID and getting no results. Saddened, he suddenly sees something that had been right in front of him forever that he had never noticed before. In the text of a magazine display case on his wall, he discovers that the headlines spell a secret message. It was the pseudonym and now the beginnings of a master plan of what to do next: s.a.v.e.yo.ur.s.el.f.
Those red circles in the comics are not mine. They’re included in the last 2 pages of the comic book story.
For those who say Satoshi would never want to be found and therefore wouldn’t do this, I say “says who?” Is that what Satoshi said? No, he didn’t. He never said that. People have completely made that up because he used a pseudonym or Tor or PGP. Consider that Satoshi was actually just playing a part. Alas, Satoshi wasn’t even his real name, nor was he from Japan. It’s a role, a game, it’s for fun.
Besides, if Jack Dorsey were put in a position where he had to prove he was Satoshi and he had lost his private keys or his private keys had become compromised, and a fellow like Craig Wright was on the verge of being legally credited as Satoshi and all of the fallout from that lay ahead, the real Satoshi could use these transactions as a backdoor way in tandem with his tweets to prove his final point. It’s literally my name and directions to my apartment, what more do you want your honor?