How the NSA identified Satoshi Nakamoto (2024)

The ‘creator’ of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is the world’s mostelusive billionaire(worth more than $7B as of November 2017).Veryfew people outside of the Department of Homeland Security know Satoshi’s real name. In fact,DHS will not publicly confirm that even THEY know the billionaire’s identity.Satoshi has taken great care to keep his identitysecretemploying the latest encryption and obfuscation methods in his communications.Despite these efforts (according to my source at the DHS)Satoshi Nakamoto gave investigatorsthe only tool they needed to find him — his own words.

Usingstylometryone is able to compare texts to determine authorship of a particular work.Throughoutthe years Satoshi wrote thousands of posts and emails and most of which are publicly available.According to my source, theNSA was able totheuse the ‘writer invariant’ method of stylometry to compare Satoshi’s ‘known’ writings with trillions of writing samples from people across the globe.By taking Satoshi’s texts and finding the 50 most common words,the NSA was able tobreakdownhistextinto 5,000 word chunks and analyse each to find the frequency of those 50 words.This would result in a unique 50-number identifier for each chunk.The NSA thenplaced each of these numbers into a50-dimensional spaceand flatten them into a plane using principal components analysis.The result isa ‘fingerprint’ for anything writtenby Satoshi that could easily be compared to any otherwriting.

The NSA then took bulk emails and texts collected from their mass surveillance efforts.First throughPRISM(a court-approved front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts) andthen throughMUSCULAR(where theNSA copies the data flows across fiber optic cables that carry information amongthe data centers of Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Facebook)the NSA wasable to place trillions of writings from more than abillionpeople 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.

This wasn’t the first time efforts had been made to unearth the identity of Satoshi usingstylometry.Various reporters and members of the Bitcoin communityhave used various open source stylometry tools to attempt to uncover the true identity of Bitcoin’s creator.Their problem?Theydidn’thave access to trillions of emailsfrom a billion people and theyweren’t able toplug them into a supercomputer.The NSA’s proprietary software, bulk email collection ability, and computing power made it possible for them to conclusively identify Satoshi.

Butwhy? Why go to so much trouble to identify Satoshi?My source tells me thattheObama administrationwasconcerned that Satoshi was an agent of Russia or China — thatBitcoinmight be weaponizedagainst us in the future.Knowing the source would help the administration understand their motives. As far as I can tellSatoshi hasn’t violated any lawsand I have no idea if the NSA determined he was an agent of Russia or Chinaorjust a Japanese crypto hacker.

The moral of the story?You can’thideon the internet anymore.Your sentence structure and word use isMOREunique than your own fingerprint.If an organization, like the NSA, wants to find you theywill.

Sources:Many readers have asked that I provide third party citations to ‘prove’ the NSA identifiedSatoshiusing stylometry. Unfortunately,I cannot as I haven’t read this anywhere else — hence the reason I wrote this post.I’m not trying to convince the reader of anything, instead my goal is to share the information I received andmake thereaderaware of the possibility that theNSA can easily determine the authorship of any email through the use of their various sources,methods, and resources.

Identity:Many readers have asked who Satoshi is and I’ve made it clear that information wasn’t shared with me. Based on my conversation I got the impression (never confirmed) thathe might have been more than one person.This made me think that perhaps the Obama administration was right that Bitcoin was created by a state actor.One person commented on this post that Satoshi was actually four people.Again, I have no idea.

How to Protect Yourself:There is a project on Github you can join to helpcreatea way to write without fingerprints:https://github.com/psal/anonymouth