How Did We Hunt Down ‘Nick Szabo’ To Be ‘Nakamoto Satoshi’? – CHAPTER[1.7]

I would have not been able to hunt down the real Satoshi Nakamoto if he had not tried to alter the timestamps on his blogger blog . After...

I would have not been able to hunt down the real Satoshi Nakamoto if he had not tried to alter the timestamps on his blogger blog.

After having thoroughly examined Nick Szabo’s blog activity which is hosted on Google Blogger (same as ours), I have gathered enough evidence to prove that Satoshi is none other but Szabo.

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Just like how every bitcoin transaction is timestamped and recorded in the distributed ledger, Google blogger records it inside JSON Feeds. The JSON feeds data can be easily viewed publically just like Blockchain! That was a nice comparison btw!

A timestamp is a sequence of characters that provides information when a certain event occurs, usually giving date and time of day. Every article, comment or video that you publish online, has its unique timestamp.

In Blogger CMS platform, all data of the blog (users data, category list, authors names, profile links, post title, post URL, article content, thumbnails, published timestamp, updated timestamp etc.) is stored inside human-readable files called XML.

Accessing data through XML is slow because it requires a XML parser to parse data. Therefore Blogger Data API provides JSON support which is a smart alternative to XML files. Using JSON Feeds, a developer can easily fetch information about blog posts or comments. You can read more about it by reading our comprehensive guide:

• READ: Introduction To Blogger JSON Feeds

Blogger platform records data by assigning two different timestamp objects.

1. published timestamp provides the exact time when the article was first published.
2. updated timestamp provides the time when the article was last edited or any of its settings were modified.

In blogger blogs an administrator can easily change Post timestamps but he can not change comment timestamps and neither the URL structure called permalink. Even if the administrator tries to hide date inside blog comments (as Nick did by only showing time not date), we can easily get the exact date and time through Blogger JSON Feeds.

Bitcoin’s original name was Bitgold and it took Nick Szabo about a decade from 1998 to 2005 to convert his Bit Gold idea into Bit Coin reality. He shared his idea of a decentralized cryptocurrency entitled “Bit gold” for the first time publicly in 2005 on his blog. Those who have read the contents of this blog post, are shocked to find over 99% resemblance between Bitgold and Bitcoin key features or in other words the same concept but with slight difference of terminologies used for.

Read the major points of his blog post below to get an idea of how he came up with the idea of bit gold to replicate gold in digital form and then match it with the Bitcoin whitepaper, everything will become crystal clear of how Nick Szabo made Bitcoin a reality:

A long time ago I hit upon the idea of bit gold. The problem, in a nutshell, is that our money currently depends on trust in a third party for its value. As many inflationary and hyperinflationary episodes during the 20th century demonstrated, this is not an ideal state of affairs. Similarly, private bank note issue, while it had various advantages as well as disadvantages, similarly depended on a trusted third party.

Precious metals and collectibles have an unforgeable scarcity due to the costliness of their creation. This once provided money the value of which was largely independent of any trusted third party. Precious metals have problems, however. It's too costly to assay metals repeatedly for common transactions. Thus a trusted third party (usually associated with a tax collector who accepted the coins as payment) was invoked to stamp a standard amount of the metal into a coin. Transporting large values of metal can be a rather insecure affair, as the British found when transporting gold across a U-boat infested Atlantic to Canada during World War I to support their gold standard. What's worse, you can't pay online with metal (underestimating gold here).

Thus, it would be very nice if there were a protocol whereby unforgeably costly bits (referring to bitcoin here) could be created online with minimal dependence on trusted third parties, and then securely stored, transferred, and assayed with similar minimal trust. Bit gold.

My proposal for bit gold is based on computing a string of bits (referring to bitcoin addresses) from a string of challenge bits, using functions called variously "client puzzle function," "proof of work function," or "secure benchmark function.". The resulting string of bits is the proof of work. Where a one-way function is prohibitively difficult to compute backwards, a secure benchmark function ideally comes with a specific cost, measured in compute cycles, to compute backwards.

Here are the main steps of the bit gold system that I envision:

1. A public string of bits, the "challenge string," is created (see step 5).
2. Alice on her computer generates the proof of work string from the challenge bits using a benchmark function.
3. The proof of work is securely timestamped. This should work in a distributed fashion, with several different timestamp services so that no particular timestamp service need be substantially relied on.
4. Alice adds the challenge string and the timestamped proof of work string to a distributed property title registry (referring to blockchain) for bit gold. Here, too, no single server is substantially relied on to properly operate the registry.
5. The last-created string of bit gold provides the challenge bits for the next-created string.
6. To verify that Alice is the owner of a particular string of bit gold, Bob (referring to miner) checks the unforgeable chain of title in the bit gold title registry.
7. To assay the value of a string of bit gold, Bob checks and verifies the challenge bits, the proof of work string, and the timestamp.

The main problem with all these schemes is that proof of work schemes depend on computer architecture (justifying why he created bitcoin on C++ for cross-platform support), not just an abstract mathematics based on an abstract "compute cycle." Thus, it might be possible to be a very low cost producer (by several orders of magnitude) and swamp the market with bit gold. However, since bit gold is timestamped, the time created as well as the mathematical difficulty (referring to bitcoin difficulty)of the work can be automatically proven. From this, it can usually be inferred what the cost of producing during that time period was (this is how bitcoin is priced today).

Unlike fungible atoms of gold, but as with collector's items, a large supply during a given time period will drive down the value of those particular items (referring to why he chose a fixed 21 Million supply). In this respect "bit gold" acts more like collector's items than like gold. However, the match between this ex post market and the auction determining the initial value might create a very substantial profit for the "bit gold miner" who invents and deploys an optimized computer architecture.

— Unenumerated blog article by Nick Szabo aka Nakamoto Satoshi on Bitgold aka Bitcoin.

Carefully read the red highlighted text where I have pin-pointed how through this bitgold protocol that he published in 2005, he led the foundation for bitcoin. Almost everything that is the building block of bitcoin is mentioned in this extract from blockchain, proof of work (PoW), mining, difficulty, computational cost, to the coins supply.

But there is something more interesting with the timestamps of this article which confirmed my doubts on Nick even more as being the sole mastermind behind bitcoin.

The following is a internet archives screenshot of bitgold article that Nick originally published on 29th Dec, 2005. Almost three years before Bitcoin white paper was released in Oct 31, 2008.

He starts the article by saying “A long time ago I hit upon the idea of bit gold.” which means that he actually started working on bitgold/bitcoin protocol before 2005. In May 28, 2011 Nick Szabo confessed that the work on Bitgold actually started in 1998, almost 10 years before Bitcoin was introduced.

Only a few people had read of the bit gold ideas, which although I came up with them in 1998 (at the same time and on the same private mailing list where Dai was coming up with b-money -- it's a long story) were mostly not described in public until 2005, although various pieces of it I described earlier, for example the crucial Byzantine-replicated chain-of-signed-transactions part of it which I generalized into what I call secure property titles.

— Bitcoin, what took ye so long? by Nick Szabo

Note that Nick published this response just few hours later after an author by the name gwern published an article on 28th May, 2011, on Bitcoin weekly entitled “Bitcoin Is Worse Is Better”. This article has been deleted by Bitcoin weekly (this is how agency react) because it raised some serious questions. You can read the article by checking this archive.

Gwern argued why Bitcoin protocol was introduced so late when almost everything was ready almost 8 years before Satoshi’s whitepaper i.e 2000?

The interesting thing is that by even the most generous accounting, all the pieces were in place for at least 8 years before Satoshi's publication, which was followed more than half a year later by the first public prototype (Satoshi claims that before he write the whitepaper, he wrote a prototype). If we look at the citations in the whitepaper and others, and then order the relevant technologies by year in descending order:

1. 2001-2005: Nick Szabo, Bit Gold
2. 2001: SHA-256 finalized (by NSA)
3. 1998: Wei Dai, B-money
4. 1997: HashCash
5. 1992-1993: Proof-of-work for spam ("Pricing via Processing, Or, Combating Junk Mail, Advances in Cryptology", Dwork 1993, published in CRYPTO'92)
6. 1991: cryptographic timestamps
7. 1980: public key cryptography. (This is Satoshi's citation date; Diffie-Hellman, the first published system, was in 1976, not 1980.)
8. 1979: Hash tree

I've guessed a bit with the first item: it's hard to figure out when exactly Szabo devised bit gold; his post claims to be from December 2008 but the URL indicates 2005 (Same What I mentioned) and it is linked in November 2008 emails. Szabo has long been interested in proof-of-work systems, writing on them in ~1998. A paper started in 2001 motivates the existence of bit gold and describes, but that may be material from the 2004 or 2005 revisions. Hal Finney mentioned bit gold in 2008 (in the context of a bitcoin discussion) describing Szabo's proposal as 'many years ago', and inasmuch as Hal has been active in cryptography circles since the '80s (was a member of the Cypherpunks mailing list etc.), it seems unlikely Hal was speaking of something then just 3 years ago.

Carefully read the points raised by gwern and you can easily connect the dots to draw the picture of the actual bitcoin creator. This is one strong reason why his post was probably deleted, although an edited version still exits on Gwern’s blog.

Nick was very quick in defending his position and promptly replied to this critic within hours but he had no time to answer Gwern emails nor his counter questions. Gwern even provided counter-evidence when Nick Szabo tried to divert the attention of his audience by calling Finney or Dai as possible Bitcoin creators in his post:

Wei Dai, [25 February 2011
> ...If you read the Wikipedia article, you should know that I didn't create Bitcoin but only described a similar idea more than a decade ago. And my understanding is that the creator of Bitcoin, who goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, didn't even read my article before reinventing the idea himself. He learned about it afterward and credited me in his paper. So my connection with the project is quite limited.

But as soon as Bitcoin whitepaper got published, in order to give an impression that Bitgold idea was actually inspired from bitcoin or that it came after bitcoin, Nick Szabo changed the timestamp (published date) of the blog post to a later date i.e. Dec 27, 2008. When he tried to change the permalink (date in URL), he could not edit it nor could he edit the comment timestamps because Blogger editor does not provide any such option. I will prove that through JSON feeds.

Notice the first comment posted on that “Bitgold” post is by “Kay Bell” at 2:16 PM.

Choosing a timestamp for comments with no date mentioned but mentioning only time [ 2:16 PM ] makes no sense, although Google blogger offers several useful ISO 8601 date and time formats as shown below:

May be Nick enjoys keeping suspense in everything. :)

To prove that the first comment posted on Nick’s bitgold blog post is from 2005, I will use the following URL containing special parameters to extract the comment feed in JSON format:

https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?alt=json&start-index=1000&max-results=500

Open the above URL inside a browser and search for “Kay Bell”, you can then clearly see the published and updated timestamps for this comment as shown below:

You can clearly observe the published and updated times in ISO format to be:

2005-12-29T14:16:00.000-08:00

The Date is 29th Dec, 2005 and Time is 14:16:00 or 2:16 PM

This clearly proves the article was published in 2005 and not in 2008. The Published and Updated (Edited) times are same because Blogger does not allow editing of comments just like Twitter statuses.

But surprisingly the Published time and Updated(edited) time of the Blog post timestamp in JSON Feeds has a one minute difference.

To browse the Post Json feed, type this in your address bar and then search “A long time ago”:

https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=json&max-results=76

Note: The timestamp in Blogger Post JSON feeds can be easily changed to reflect the new timestamp unlike the comment timestamps which can’t be changed. So the post feed will show date as 2008 and not as 2005.

Now locate the bitgold text by typing “a long time ago”

You can then clearly locate the published time as:

2008-12-27T16:16:00.000-08:00

and updated time as:

2008-12-27T16:17:00.164-08:00

You can see that the dates are same as 27th Dec, 2008 but the times (GMT pacific time) have a one minute difference. The post was published on 4:16 PM but was updated on 4:17 PM.

I checked full content of the bitgold post in 2005 and 2008 and found not even a comma difference then what did Nick edit during that one minute?

My wild guess is that after publishing the post, Nick might have observed the “2005” string in the URL and then went back to blogger editor to try editing the permalink from 2005 to 2008 but since Blogger does not allow that (unless you delete the post/comments and republish a new post loosing all old comments), he had no choice but to publish the post without any edits.

Hence it is proved that Nick Szabo tried to deceive the non-techy internet community by tampering/altering his blog post timestamp to narrow down his connection with Bitcoin.

What Kept Nick Szabo Busy after 2009?

What is even more striking is that if you carefully monitor Nick’s blog activity through the blog archives, you will notice that his post frequency decreased significantly from 2009 on wards when Bitcoin software was first released in Jan 2009.

Nick’s blog archives from 2005-2018

► 2018 (1)


► 2017 (3)

► 2016 (4)


► 2015 (3)


► 2014 (3)


► 2013 (3)


► 2012 (8)


► 2011 (12)


► 2010 (9)


[————-What happened after 2009?—————-]


► 2009 (29)

► 2008 (55)


► 2007 (47)


► 2006 (130)


► 2005 (44)

He was posting over 40 posts per month from 2005 to 2008, but his activity decreased immensely from 2009 on wards when he posted just 29 posts. From 2010 to 2018, you can see he hardly managed time to write over 3 posts per month.

The big question is: “What kept Nick Szabo so busy after 2009 that he could not manage time to blog?”

Only one thing might have kept him busy:

Transforming bitcoin dream to a billion dollar crypto-industry could have been the only activity that kept Bitcoin’s original writer busy from 2009 onwards to this date i.e. 2018.

Similarities Between Nick Szabo Whitepaper Vs. Bitcoin Whitepaper

I compared Nick Szabo’s Secure Property Titles whitepaper with Bitcoin whitepaper and this is what I found out:

• Both Whitepapers start with a headline in Capitalized style and using “Times New Roman” font as the preferred font throughout the two documents.



• Followed by copyrights info and author name.



• What you see next is not a cover image, Index table or Table of Contents but plain text introduction (Abstract) in both papers.



• The writing style, vocabulary pattern and choice of words match a lot.



• You can easily feel the same rhythmic tone in introductory paragraph of both papers.

Now lets analyze the headlines and reference section.

• Both papers had simple 1-4 words Capitalized headlines



• Words like to, of, and are written in lowercase



• All headlines in both papers are written in “Times New Roman” font with weight 700.



• The “Notes” section for citation has same heading of “References” for both papers with no use of colon. (Most papers prefer writing it as “References:”)



• I found extreme resemblance in choice of words and language fluency. It felt like the authors of both papers is One.

Throughout my life I have read different whitepapers released by Google, Facebook, Data scientists, Computer scientists but almost none has any resemblance to Bitcoin whitepaper or Nick Szabo’s whitepaper which are both written in the same classical style and with almost same formatting.

Stylometric Analysis Proves Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto

In Dec 2013, an unknown blogger, who created a wordpress blog entitled “Like In a Mirror” analyzed the vocabulary patterns and speech patterns used in Bitcoin Whitepaper to compare them with writing materials of various cryptographers especially Nick Szabo, by running textual similarity metrics on several pages of their writing.

His analysis of the stylometric characteristics of the Satoshi whitepaper indicated a much stronger match for Nick Szabo compared to other cypherpunks, such as Wei Dai, Hal Finney, David Chaum or Adam Back.

He also emphasized that Bitcoin whitepaper indicates a match with Nick Szabo’s writing tics, at a level that only has a one in a thousand chance to be a coincidence.

According to him:

“...what originally led me to this hypothesis is that reverse-searching for content similar to the Bitcoin whitepaper led me to Nick's blog, completely independently of any knowledge of the official Bitcoin story. I must stress this: an open, unbiased search of texts similar in writing to the Bitcoin whitepaper over the entire Internet, identifies Nick's bit gold articles as the best candidates.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto is (probably) Nick Szabo

Some of the major similarities he found are:

• Repeated use of “of course” without isolating commas, contrary to convention (“the problem of course is”)



• Expression “can be characterized”, frequent in Nick’s blog (found in 1% of crypto papers)



• Use of “for our purposes” when describing hypotheses (found in 1.5% of crypto papers)



• Starting sentences with “It should be noted”(found in 5.25% of crypto papers)



• Use of “preclude” (found in 1.5% of crypto papers)



• Expression “a level of “ + noun (“achieves a level of privacy by…”) as a standalone qualifier



• Expression “timestamp server”, central in the Bitcoin paper, used in Nick’s blog as early as January 2006



• Repeated use of expression “trusted third party”



• Expressions “cryptographic proof” and “digital signatures”



• Repeated use of “timestamp” as a verb

He also took writing samples of other researchers involved with cryptocurrencies, such as Wei Dai, Hal Finney, David Chaum and Adam Back and ran several speech pattern recognition tests.

The writing samples were from 5k to 40k word long. He then computed histograms of word length frequency and character frequency, and compared them with that of the original Satoshi whitepaper.

His results were shocking as they showed a much stronger match between Bitcoin whitepaper and Nick Szabo’s text patterns.

Please note that units are arbitrary (smaller scores mean closer histograms).

Word length distribution

1. Diff Nick Szabo / Bitcoin: 0.160



2. Diff Wei Dai / Bitcoin: 0.241



3. Diff David Chaum / Bitcoin: 0.257



4. Diff Adam Back / Bitcoin: 0.337



5. Diff Hal Finney / Bitcoin: 0.510

Character frequency distribution

1. Diff Nick Szabo / Bitcoin: 0.191



2. Diff Wei Dai / Bitcoin: 0.208



3. Diff David Chaum / Bitcoin: 0.228



4. Diff Hal Finney / Bitcoin: 0.284



5. Diff Adam Back / Bitcoin: 0.342

He thus proved that Nick Szabo’s writing matches the Bitcoin whitepaper, not only in the vocabulary pattern, writing style, but also on hard-to-fabricate style metrics.

Another stylometric analysis was carried out by a Data scientist by the name “Michael Chon”, who ran tests in two parts to find out which author(s) in the tests are linguistically and semantically similar to Satoshi Nakamoto.

Even according to Michael Chon, Nick Szabo is the best candidate who is linguistically similar to Satoshi’s Bitcoin paper and email texts.

In 2014, a study, entitled ‘Project Bitcoin’, was undertaken in England by a team of 40 final-year forensic linguistics students led by Lecturer Dr Jack Grieve at Aston University.

It compared the linguistic similarities of Bitcoin whitepaper with writing texts of eleven candidates who are often suspected to be writers of the Bitcoin whitepaper: Dorian S. Nakamoto, Vili Lehdonvirta, Michael Clear, Shinichi Mochizuki, Gavin Andresen, Nick Szabo, Jed McCaleb, Dustin D. Trammel, Hal Finney, Wei Dai, and Neal King, Vladimir Oksman & Charles Bry.

According to Dr Jack Grieve:

Notice just like many web pages which are deleted, the following Aston university page also no more exists but fortunately I could extract the contents of the page using Internet archives here.

“The number of linguistic similarities between Szabo’s writing and the Bitcoin paper is uncanny, none of the other possible authors were anywhere near as good of a match. We are pretty confident that out of the list of people regularly referred to as possibilities, Nick Szabo is the main author of the paper, though we can’t rule out the possibility that others contributed.”

“Our study adds to the weight of evidence pointing towards Nick Szabo. The case looks pretty clear-cut. Szabo is an expert in law, finance, cryptography and computer science. He created ‘bit gold’, a precursor to Bitcoin, and was looking for collaborators in 2008. Did Nick Szabo create Bitcoin? We’re not sure, but we think he probably wrote the paper so it’s certainly worth a closer look.”

Nick Szabo is undoubtedly the mastermind who hides behind the pseudonym of “Nakamoto Satoshi”. He invented Bitcoin and made peer-to-peer electronic cash system a reality with his years of research in the fields of legal laws, origins of money, technology and dedication to cryptology.

Nick Szabo Never Protested Against Satoshi Nakamoto

As a blogger, if someone violates our copyrights without taking our permission or without crediting us, we miss no opportunity to reach that violator, requesting him to either remove the content or face the DMCA take down or any other legal penalty.

Imagine a polymath who has dedicated all his life (Since 1998) to create a decentralized digital currency is completely silent on no mention of his name in the Bitcoin whitepaper and who abandons all his research on Bitgold software (which is the direct precursor to the Bitcoin architecture) after Bitcoin whitepaper is published. Weird Isn’t it?

In Bitcoin whitepaper’s reference section, Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned Wei Dai’s b-money, as well as Adam Back’s hashcash, while none of them seem like a direct inspiration to Bitcoin. Surprisingly, Satoshi made no mention of Nick Szabo’s bitgold at all, which is the original formula behind bitcoin protocol.

If Satoshi Nakamoto had not been Nick Szabo, he would have surely given all due credits to Nick Szabo as per good scientific etiquettes.

Do you know what is more surprising? Nick showed almost no public reaction to this mistreatment by Satoshi. Instead he post-dated all public mentions of his bitgold research in order to appear posterior to the Bitcoin announcement date of Oct 31^st 2008.

Furthermore the Bitcoin whitepaper was published on the cryptography mailing list, which Nick Szabo was very familiar with and had been actively participating in. For a man who was so actively involved with cryptography and was looking for ways to create a software for his bitgold idea, Nick remained silent for almost three years after Bitcoin was released and spoke for the first time about Bitcoin on his blog in May 2011! Funny isn’t it?

This utter silence and not even protesting against a person who had stolen your entire idea without even giving you due credits, only prove one thing: Satoshi Nakamoto is the Pen Name Of Nick Szabo. Bitcoin is a practical implementation of Bitgold by none other but Nick Szabo.

When Did Satoshi Mention Nick Szabo For The First Time?

After having realized that he made a big mistake by not mentioning Bitgold in the reference section of the bitcoin whitepaper, and that all fingers are now pointing straight at him, Nick Szabo made another mistake..

It took me hours to get to this extremely precious forum post on bitcoin official forum where Satoshi Nakamoto (Szabo Nick) finally confessed publically that Bitcoin is an implementation of Nick Szabo’s Bitgold proposal! :)

It took Nick Szabo two years to realize that not mentioning Bitgold in his Bitcoin whitepaper was a blunder and in order to divert the attention of the crypto-community, he mentioned bitgold on official bitcoin forum under his pen name Satoshi. This mistake strengthen everyone’s doubts that Satoshi is none other than Nick Szabo himself.

The harder you beat a drum, the harder the noise.

“I Designed Bitcoin..” Says Nick Szabo in a Tongue Slip

Near June 4, 2017, Nick Szabo was interviewed by Tim Ferriss on "The Tim Ferriss Show". This interview was a two and half hour long podcast conversation between Tim Ferris, Naval Ravikant and Nick Szabo.

I spent an entire night listening to this 2.5 hours long conversation and what I found are pieces of interesting information that will further help the internet community to decode the Satoshi mystery which is already 99.9% unlocked in this chapter of our research.

Before going any further let me first introduce Tim Ferriss to readers who might not know him a lot.

According to wikipedia:

Ferriss has been called the "Oprah of Audio" due to the influence and reach of his podcast "The Tim Ferriss Show" which as of 2016 had over 80 million downloads. It covers topics ranging from personal and character development, to exercise routines, acting, venture capital and metaphysics.

The show was voted “Best Podcast Episode of 2015” by users of Product Hunt in their "Golden Kitty Awards.

The New York Times listed Ferriss among their "Notable Angel Investors" while CNN said he was "one of the planet's leading angel investors in technology”. Wired called Ferriss “The Superman of Silicon Valley”

I hope you may now understand the importance of this podcast interview. Also note that this interview was intentionally organized as an attempt to promote Bitcoin (Cashless Currency) to millions of non-techy listeners.

The Interview included the following core questions:

• What is Bitcoin, what are cryptocurrencies, and what problem do they solve?



• What is “social scalability?”



• What is Ethereum and what makes it unique? Strengths and weaknesses?



• How will smart contracts actually get adopted or go mainstream?



• What are ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings)?



• Blockchain governance — is there any existential risk?



• “Wet” versus “dry” code



• Pascal’s scams



• Quantum thought



• What fields will you be working on in the future?
  
  
  

In this entire 2.5 hours long interview Tim Ferriss never asked Nick once if he was Satoshi Nakamoto or why Satoshi has not given credits to Bitgold. The interview seemed like it was mutually decided that no such question will be asked that may further draw public attention towards Nick Szabo.

It felt like they didn’t want the listeners to know that they were actually listening to the man who invented bitcoin.

]Hear it to believe it, how a deep memory hard coded in a human’s mind can slip off so easily via the tongue despite a human’s best efforts to camouflage the truth.

[1:35:25] Naval Ravikant : and and so Nick, I know you don't want to get into the middle of the politics of it, but just from a pure computer science perspective - like if you were designing, you know, you were re-designing a Bitgold today, and you wanted to incorporate some of these learnings, where would you fall-in on? Would you go for larger blocks? Would you go for a second layer?

[1:35:40] Nick Szabo: Oh no, I'd definitely go for a second layer, I mean I designed Bitcoi... gold with two layers becoz...

[Nick pauses, realizing the mistake he just made and Ferriss jumps in quickly to cover him]

[1:35:45] Tim Ferriss: And can you explain, just - I must have lost something - just what that second layer is, one more time?

— Podcast Transcript from “The Tim Ferriss Show”

No one understands Bitcoin and its problems more than the original creator. This is one reason when Tim Ferriss asked Nick if he would go for two layers and out of curiosity he abruptly replied: “I'd definitely go for a second layer” and then since Bitcoin was hard coded in his memory, he made a serious mistake of a tongue slip and he paused by saying: “ I designed Bitcoi... gold with two layers becoz... ”

Critics will say: “Oh come on that was just a slip of a tongue and it happens with everyone”

Indeed tongue slip is a common mistake but carefully listen to the flow of conversation (click the audio button again). Nick took a brief pause showing his nervousness and loss of control over his words.

Suppose If he was not the original creator of Bitcoin, he could have just laughed and said “Oh I am sorry, I meant Bitgold not Bitcoin...” and people would have considered it as a normal tongue slip mistake but he got so much nervous when the word “I designed Bitcoi..” came out of his mind that he quickly uttered “..gold” as if his mind had instantly detected the blunder and told him to stop immediately and correct himself.

UPDATE: Tim Ferriss Audio Podcast Has Been Edited!

I published the research roughly 7 hours ago but then I started feeling its impact after seeing some unusual traffic activity on this chapter i.e: Chapter[1.7].

Upon looking the contents carefully, I noticed that just within 7 hours, the audio podcast from "The Tim Ferriss Show" that I shared on my website was edited, clipped and the exact "minutes" of the interview that I quoted are now missing from the official audio podcast! As you might have probably noticed that you are not hearing what the I quoted.

The contents of the audio was untouched since June 4, 2017 and have been just edited on June 13 2018 (few hours after our research got published).

The original podcast was 2:34:13 long but the edited one is now 2:31:11 

Those most important minutes that I highlighted in my research are now gone!

I am really shocked and yet alarmed about what is coming up next.

Fortunately I had taken a backup of the original podcast 3 months ago because I knew the biggest mistake made by Nick Szabo will be covered by the Elites by censoring the blunder as soon as it hits the search engines.

Hear below the original podcast uploaded by Tim Ferriss’s team and compare it to the edited one above:

I never expected this simple research could prove so much disturbing for the very elite. I am really shocked and yet alarmed about what is coming up next and how I will be treated in days to come.

Update 2:

After I posted the original audio, they have added back the clipped part but those 3 minutes and some seconds is still missing and only a audio forensic expert can tell which minutes or seconds are clipped next. 

Also note that Naval Ravikant had full knowledge of cryptocurrencies and especially how bitcoin works. He is the person who actually invited Nick Szabo to Tim Ferriss show. This means Naval knew clearly the rumors revolving around Nick Szabo as a probable creator of Bitcoin. But Naval Ravikant remained quite throughout the program on this aspect of Nick Szabo’s profile and didn’t react at all (though he enjoyed interrupting Nick often..) when Nick made the tongue slip.

The two layers question is quite technical to be discussed in a podcast and Naval intentionally asked this question from Nick by saying: “..if..you were re-designing a bitgold today” in order to broadcast the Satoshi version of the solution to the ongoing Bitcoin scalability problem. Naval knew quite clearly who he was talking to.

Note that the original creator of Bitcoin would never support a hard fork or splitting of bitcoin through larger blocks, instead he would prefer a two layer network as Nick Szabo supported in this conversation.

The biggest issue with respect to Bitcoin is high number of unconfirmed transactions waiting in queue and high transaction fees due to a limited block size. This bottleneck is called the Bitcoin scalability problem and the only sensible solution according to Nick Szabo’s interview to Tim Ferriss is peripheral or second-layer network on top of the bitcoin blockchain to settle smaller transactions more efficiently.

Nick was never a supporter of larger blocks (> 1 MB) and this is why he is not a fan of Roger ver who hard forked Bitcoin and created a whole new bitcoin out of thin air called the “Bitcoin Cash”. Nick didn’t liked Roger because that so called Bitcoin-Jesus hard forked (split) his original bitcoin into two separate cryptocurrencies.

This is another ugly aspect of cryptocurrencies that I have discussed in Chapter#2.

Just few days after this interview, Nick Szabo (Bitcoin creator) tweeted this which became breaking news  for many crypto news blogs.

The level of attention Nick Szabo (Nakamoto Satoshi) receives within seconds is another proof of his hidden authority in crypto-world. Such respect and say in the bitcoin community is enjoyed by none other than Nick Szabo.

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