Forensics: bitcoin.org and AnonymousSpeech

The first material trace of Bitcoin is neither the whitepaper nor the code: it is a domain registration. On August 18, 2008, at 1:19 PM, bitcoin.org is created through AnonymousSpeech.com, one of the very few services of the time that allowed registering a domain name without revealing one's identity, paying in a way that is difficult to trace. The registrar is eNom. The historical whois, preserved in the evidence file, has become an archive piece:

Domain Name:    bitcoin.org
Registrar:      eNom, Inc.
Creation Date:  2008-08-18 13:19:55
Expiration:     2013-08-18 13:19:55
Last Update:    2008-11-07 19:48:25
IP:             82.197.131.24  (Kiel, Germany . Apache)

Registrant Contact:
  Name:         ANONYMOUSSPEECH ANONYMOUSSPEECH
  Organization: Anonymousspeech LLC
  Address:      1-3-3 Sakura House
  City:         Nakano-ku
  State:        Tokyo-to    Zip: 164-0011    Country: JP
  Phone:        +50.55396801
  Email:        @anonymousspeech.com

Administrative / Technical Contact:
  Name:         DIGIROCK INC.
  Organization: DigiRock, Inc.  (value-domain.com)
  Address:      Chuo-ku Bakurou-cho 4-7-5, Honmachi TS Building 6F
  City:         Osaka-shi    State: OSAKA-FU    Zip: 541-0059    Country: JP
  Phone:        +81.662416585

syllables highlighted in the whois → SA · TO · SHI · NAKA · MO · TO = Satoshi Nakamoto

The registrant's address is a relay box: Sakura House is a genuine Tokyo company renting furnished accommodation, used here as a mailing address in the Nakano-ku ward. That is where the coincidence that fascinates amateur investigators appears: SAkura House, NAKAno-ku, TOkyo. Rearrange the syllables and you are not far from Satoshi Nakamoto. The pseudonym would then be a nod to the postal address of the service protecting his anonymity, or the reverse: a name chosen first, then a registrar whose Japanese address made the Japanese pseudonym credible. In reality, this address is that of AnonymousSpeech itself, which it stamps on all the domains it registers: the syllable game therefore concerns the provider's address, not a place chosen by Satoshi. And who hides behind this provider?

The name itself has fed countless decodings. The most down-to-earth reading sees in it an assembly of Japanese brands: SAmsung, TOSHIba, NAKAmichi, MOTOrola, that is SA-TOSHI-NAKA-MOTO. But another reading, more cultural, appeals to the veterans of the scene. In the hacker imagination of the 1990s, one confrontation has remained mythical: that of Kevin Mitnick, the most wanted hacker in the United States, who marked an entire generation, and the man who brought him down. That man is Japanese: Tsutomu Shimomura, a physicist and security expert whose machines Mitnick had hacked in late 1994. Shimomura tracks the hacker on behalf of the FBI until his arrest in February 1995, then co-authors the book Takedown, adapted for the screen in 2000 under the title Track Down / Cybertraque (Shimomura is played by Russell Wong), a DVD an entire generation wore out in the early 2000s.

Hence a persistent hypothesis: what if the "shi" of Satoshi, and more broadly the choice of a Japanese pseudonym, were a nod to Shimomura, the archetype of the brilliant and discreet defender who brings down the system? The idea is beautiful, but it must be put in its place, on the side of appealing hypotheses and not of proofs. "Satoshi" is also one of the most common Japanese first names (it can mean "wise," "clear-sighted"), and one and the same name can carry ten readings without any of them being the right one.

The evidence file reveals an often forgotten detail: while the displayed registrant is AnonymousSpeech, the administrative and technical contact is a very real company, DigiRock, Inc., which operates the Japanese service value-domain.com from Osaka. In other words, behind the anonymity screen, the registration passes through a Japanese domain reseller, which reinforces the Japanese anchoring of the operation without, however, yielding a name. An additional detail: the server hosting bitcoin.org is located in Germany, in Kiel. And the domain bitcoin.com had been registered even earlier, on January 4, 2008, by an unknown person; it will pass much later into the hands of Roger Ver, with no established link to Satoshi.

One must stay honest about the value of these clues: they are correlations, not proofs. But they say something solid about Satoshi's method. Ten weeks before publishing anything, he had already planned his opsec: an anonymous registrar, a relay address abroad, a technical contact at a Japanese reseller, a disposable email, no named credit card. Bitcoin is not the project of an enthusiastic amateur who anonymized himself after the fact, it is an operation prepared never to be attributed.

The logical continuation of this discipline: in late 2011, Satoshi silently transfers control of bitcoin.org to Martti Malmi and the community, cutting one of his last material links with the project.