In Dr. Craig Wright’s latest blog post, a crucial question is explored—was it really Satoshi who was posting on the Bitcointalk.org forum? The answer to that question is… yes and no.
According to Satoshi, not all of the posts were created by himself, and some of the posts that you see have been edited or altered from their original versions. At the moment, the account on BitcoinTalk.org does not even belong to Satoshi. Let’s take a closer look at why this is the case.
Changes and transfers
According to the man behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, the BitcoinTalk.org forum that we see and use today is not the original Bitcointalk forum that he was posting on. Satoshi says that initially, the Bitcointalk forum was a sub-site of the bitcoin.org website; what we see and use today is a version of the forum that has been ported and soft forked several times.
“The migration was done in multiple steps,” said Dr. Wright, adding:
“First came the move from the original subsite: https://web.archive.org/web/20110401171747/http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php; to a GitHub repository:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110923151638/http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php.
It was then moved onto a completely new server:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110713083033/http://forum.bitcoin.org/.
Then, the server was replicated on Bitcointalk. There is nothing stopping the current administrators of Bitcointalk from posting as satoshi, which would prove nothing, because it isn’t my account and it never was. Satoshi (I) never posted on Bitcointalk.
Robots.txt and other controls allow you to stop certain aspects of the website being archived and to alter what is put onto the Wayback Machine.
If you go back in time, so to speak, you will notice that certain web pages won’t show, such as with:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3;sa=showPosts; or
Who owns the Satoshi account on Bitcointalk Forum?
As you can see, there is a digital trail that shows the Bitcointalk forum migrating from server to server. Unfortunately, with each migration, the prose and semantics of Satoshi’s original messages were sometimes edited or altered. That being said, the Satoshi account on Bitcointalk.org does not actually belong to Satoshi, instead, it belongs to whoever controls the database.
All in all, these migrations, edits, and alterations were an effort to obscure what Bitcoin is supposed to be. With each transfer of the forum, the original vision that was set out for Bitcoin was made more and more unclear by individuals who did not agree with Satoshi’s vision. Instead, these individuals made edits and alterations to Satoshi’s original messages because they wanted Bitcoin to be a vehicle that enabled them to realize their own end goals, such as using Bitcoin as an anonymous payment system.
But as Satoshi says, “What we will discover in time is that Bitcoin is an evidence trail. It is the worst possible thing that criminals would want to use.”
To learn more about why “Satoshi NEVER Posted on Bitcointalk,” we recommend you read the full article on Craigwright.net
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