A recent attempt to narrow down who operated a bitcoin node belonging to IP 70.113.114.209 in July 2009 after the IP was doxxed during the COPA/Wright trial yielded an interesting source: Wikipedia. That’s because the IP operating the bitcoin node made edits to a Wikipedia entry two years earlier that likely pointed in the direction of Dustin Trammell. Wikipedia publicizes the IP of user-edits if the user is not logged in or has forgotten to do so.
I applied that same methodology to two famous IPs that have been examined very closely for years, one being Hal Finney’s and another belonging to Satoshi when he accidentally logged in to a server without using Tor on January 10, 2009. (view log file) Satoshi was purportedly in California on that day per his recorded IP of 68.164.57.219. While it’s difficult to pinpoint precisely where that IP resolved to sixteen years ago (the log suggests Los Angeles area), that same IP address was logged in December 2006 by Wikipedia for a minor entry on an obscure California-based Christian rapcore band called East West. Whomever it was fixed the typo in the lead singer’s name from Erick Kieselhorst to Eric Kieselhorst. This is two years before Satoshi’s IP was logged so it’s impossible to know if it was the same person. The band was known locally in the Los Angeles area and claimed Corona as its hometown.
It turns out Hal Finney’s recorded IP from that same famous instance was also recorded (207.71.226.132) and it too was used to make edits to Wikipedia, starting with the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance in 2003 and ending in 2010. That IP does belong to Hal as it was linked to finney.org.
The noteworthy one is obviously Satoshi’s, which showed up somewhere else as well. According to one blog, the Satoshi IP was also recorded on a southern California Track & Cross Country forum on October 19, 2008. This is much closer to the time period than December 2006. You can view it here. It’s a post from a well-known Vista High School athletics coach talking about why a track meet had moved from one place to another. It’s unlikely that he’s Satoshi but it’s notable that he was likely closer to San Diego than Los Angeles at the time but was still showed up on a Los Angeles network of the ISP. It also further reinforces that whomever it was assigned to on January 10, 2009 was in California.