Jameson Lopp recently attempted to debunk my theory on why Jack Dorsey is Satoshi Nakamoto, which is actually kind of cool that he would spend the time on it, even though he does not respect my efforts in pursuing this. I’ve been waiting for something well thought-out to look at and invite anyone else to do so as well. This is something I’ve been compiling in public for some time, looking for support and the holes.
Lopp, however, has backed himself into a corner with his rebuttal. He uses Jack’s prolific tweeting from his cell phone as evidence of what Jack is doing at specific times and then in the same argument asks the reader to believe that Jack did not possess a cell phone at all and was therefore not capable of posting to an online forum (Bitcointalk) under the Satoshi moniker from it. For example, and I go into all of it below, it’s okay under his rebuttal theory if Jack tweets that he is going somewhere from his phone, but it’s a conflict if Satoshi posts a comment to a forum in roughly the same time period because Lopp can’t imagine Satoshi using a mobile device when posting. If Jack is tweeting from one place with his phone then Satoshi, per his thought process, has to be in front of a desktop computer somewhere else in order to post and this eliminates Jack being Satoshi. Is there some limitation on Satoshi that says he did not have access to the same basic technology as everyone else at the time? I am genuinely curious.
Assuming Satoshi was able to use a cell phone like a normal person, Lopp gets every single one of his timestamp arguments wrong unfortunately. I’ve made screenshots of his rebuttals and commented on each. Let’s take a look:
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because on November 6, 2009 Jack tweeted “Late lunch with @fredwilson” and 5 minutes after that, Satoshi committed code to the Bitcoin SourceForge repository. I’m not sure what this is supposed to imply. Is it not possible that Jack was going to have a late lunch with Fred Wilson but committed code before heading out to do that? Lopp makes the assumption that Jack has to be sitting at the table with Wilson when the tweet is sent for this supposed conflict to be true. If he can prove that, I’ll reconsider this one. Not very good.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because on November 27, 2009 Jack tweeted that he was furniture shopping with Alyssa Milano and that 35 minutes prior to that Satoshi posted to the forum. Not sure what this is supposed to imply. Satoshi can’t post to a forum and then go shopping? Have people never posted to a forum and then gone somewhere afterwards? Would it not be possible for Satoshi to post to a forum from a phone even if it means he did it while shopping? Ironically, I’ve posted previously about the possibility of Alyssa Milano specifically being in on the Satoshi secret. Not very good.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because on December 9, 2009, Jack tweeted that he was walking to meet the Mayor of Paris at City Hall (in Paris) and then 18 minutes later Satoshi posted to the forum. Lopp presumes that Jack was not capable of posting to an online forum while waiting at City Hall to begin the meeting. When did the meeting start? How long did he wait? People post online while they sit and wait for meetings. I have personally sat in government buildings and waited for meetings with officials and passed the time by posting to forums. Why is this considered to be impossible? Answering emails and posts is and was a commonplace thing to pass the time. Not very good.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because he attended a long company meeting on February 26 that ended at 10pm and Satoshi made posts on the forum at 6:17pm and 6:48pm. Okay? He couldn’t have posted before the long meeting? Pretty weak. Not very good.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because on May 20, 2010, Jack tweeted that he was in a car with his brother to go out to dinner with his family and 10 minutes later Satoshi posted to the forum. Was it Jack driving or his brother? Because if it’s his brother, then Jack can post from his phone to the forum while they’re driving. But if it’s Jack driving, then how is he also tweeting? Hmmmm…. Or did they get to the restaurant already and they are waiting and Jack is posting to the forum from the restaurant. I’m still lost on why Jack couldn’t post to a forum from his phone. Why are these things conflicts again? I myself was posting to forums from my phone in 2010. Not very good.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because on May 26, 2010 he tweeted that he was headed to meet Senator Cory Booker at 5:01pm and Satoshi posted to the forum at 5:16pm (with a file attached) and again at 5:34pm. Booker tweets at 7:32pm that he had just met Jack and Jack tweeted at 7:45pm that he had just met Booker. It seems like they actually met late then, perhaps around 7pm. Not sure why it’s considered impossible for Jack to say that he’s headed to a meeting and subsequently post to a forum (with an attachment) before actually being in the meeting itself, which doesn’t appear to have taken place for a while. Maybe Jack left later than he said he was leaving or maybe Jack got there and ended up waiting around for a very long time before the meeting and played on his phone and posted to the forum as people do when they’re bored. Not very good.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because on July 10, 2010, Jack tweeted at 6:17am local time that he was getting ready to go on stage and present Square, followed by Satoshi posting four sentences to the forum at 6:36am local time, followed by Jack tweeting “Boom.” at 6:45am. (The screenshots says 9:17 and 9:45 respectively because they show my timezone) Lopp presumes that “getting ready” means that the presentation, which he believes to be at Square’s headquarters, was starting within minutes or seconds of that first tweet and that the subsequent tweet of “Boom” meant it was over. Satoshi posting in between these times therefore makes it impossible to be Jack. I would like to know what presentation he was giving on a stage at exactly 6:17am and why tweeting “Boom.” is proof that the presentation is over. Is it not possible that he actually presented during regular business hours but like a normal person was simply getting dressed, rehearsed, and ready at 6:17am? I have not been to any tech conferences that had presenters at 6:17am or heard of too many in-company presentations for employees taking place at that time. Willing to reconsider this with more evidence. Not very good.
Lopp points to the fact that Satoshi posted to the forum precisely during the short window that Jack was meeting with the President of Chile in Santiago on July 14, 2010. Satoshi posted at 9:10pm UTC time on the forum which would have been 5:10pm in Santiago. This is corroborated by two tweets from Jack that
(1) says at 3:36pm that he’s on the way to meet him and that they will spend an hour together
(2) suggests that their meeting was already over by 5:03pm.
At 4:10pm a tweet goes out from the President’s account about their meeting. It does not confirm they are actually together yet even if it implies they are.
Satoshi posts to the forum at 4:25pm.
Jack signals the meeting is over with a tweet at 5:03. Satoshi posts at 5:10pm local time. While narrowly outside the perceived window, it is outside of it, and we don’t know when the meeting actually ended. It could have been over at 4:45, for example. A tweet at 5:03 doesn’t mean it ended at exactly 5:03.
It is well documented that Jack and the President met but it is not known for precisely how long. It could have been 10 minutes as these are how these things go, particularly with important figures like a head of state. Lopp takes the hour at face value and combines it with his belief that Satoshi did not have access to a cell phone in order to make his debunking work. Not conclusive but worth looking at.
On July 21, 2010, Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because Jack was at an Apple Store in Chicago where his company was hosting a demo of Square starting at 12 noon all while the forum shows that Satoshi posted at 11:07am and 12:31pm local time that same day. I’m not sure why Satoshi being in a computer store would imply it would be impossible to post a message from a computer or from a phone. The more substantive post of the two that Lopp relied upon was the one that was made an hour before the demo. For this to be a conflict, it would require Jack to literally be doing a Square demo himself during the exact minute of 12:31 when Satoshi posted. Not very good.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because on July 28, 2010, Jack was attending a baseball game while Satoshi was posting on the 28th. Unfortunately Lopp got the dates wrong. Jack was at the baseball game on the 27th, not the 28th, as evidenced by the 9:19pm PT tweet on July 27, 2010 that he uses as his evidence.
Lopp misread the dates.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because he tweeted on August 14, 2010 that he was walking to meet with Scott Harrison for lunch and that an hour and 18 minutes later Satoshi posted two sentences on the forum that he had solved an issue with compiling the Bitcoin software. Ok? Which means what? Which means we have to presume that Satoshi had been busy doing this work exactly during the lunch time window and then rushed to post about it immediately to the forum? Satoshi couldn’t have solved it earlier and then posted it on the forum later when he got around to it like right after a lunch meeting? Not very good.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because he tweeted on August 22, 2010 at 4:25pm that he was listening to music while on the highway when Satoshi posted to the forum at 3:51pm, 4:01pm, 4:21pm, 4:55pm, and 4:57pm local time. I like this one to Lopp’s credit because there’s a link in Jack’s tweet to a purported photo of Jack behind the wheel looking out through the windshield. And so the argument here is that Jack can’t be posting to the forum because Jack is too busy driving! But we only know this because Jack is tweeting! And with a photo too? So if Jack is really driving, he is still apparently capable of taking a photo while driving and tweeting while driving, which hurts the case that he couldn’t also be capable of posting to the forum. Or there’s the possibility that someone else was actually driving and he was busy posting to the forum from his phone. Or… that Jack actually made that tweet about being on the highway hours or days after it actually happened. Or it never happened at all and it was online content for engagement or a dream of something nice. But if we give this one the benefit of the doubt and say Jack was really driving at that time, we can’t ignore that the evidence of him driving is a result of him playing on his phone while doing it. If he’s driving, how’s he tweeting?
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because he tweeted on September 19, 2010 that he walked 1,256 steps in the span of 425 minutes and that Satoshi posted to the forum twice during this time period and made a code commit. I did the math and it seems 1,256 steps is only 0.6 miles and 425 minutes is over 7 hours. This seems to actually support the theory of someone sitting around all day and builds on the case that Jack is Satoshi to make the code commit. Not very good and even supports Jack as Satoshi
Furthermore, Lopp says my theory lacked common sense because “[Jack was] an extremely busy person not only overseeing multiple companies, but traveling around the world meeting important people, doing press interviews, speaking at conferences, promoting philanthropic causes, and more.” and that “His activities do not fit the profile of someone who had the time and mental bandwidth to also be building a completely new financial system from scratch while maintaining perfect anonymity.” He also says that Satoshi had 2 lengthy gaps in his public activity but that Jack kept posting during those time periods in question, not realizing all of the above supports the case for Jack because Satoshi expressed that he was very busy with other things.
June 14, 2009: “Thanks, I’ve been really busy lately.”
July 21, 2009: “I’m not going to be much help right now either, pretty busy with work, and need a break from it after 18 months development.”
May 16, 2010: “I’ve also been busy with other things for the last month and a half. I just now downloaded my e-mail since the beginning of April.”
July 18, 2010: “I’m losing my mind there are so many things that need to be done.”
April 23, 2011: “I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”