Over the past few days, an elaborate campaign has takenplace with its final aim to unmask Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous Bitcoinwhitepaper author. Yesterday, due to what it described as “overwhelminginterest”, the reveal was issued early and cited Bilal Khalid, full legal name JamesBilal Khalid Caan, as the real Satoshi.
Yet the more than 9000-word missive has failed to convince crypto and industry watchers alike.
The campaign has been put together by digital marketing andPR firm Ivy McLemore & Associates, an agency noted more for its pure financialand investment-based clientele. In it, the author explains how the use of Chaldeannumerology, an astrologically-themed numbering system which aims to offerdeeper, metaphysical influences behind names, produced the name of Satoshi Nakamoto,as well as the Bitcoin system.
The author also claims that the Bitcoin name came from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and that the site theBCCI.net was linked by registration date to bitcoin.org with precisely three months between them, while Nakamoto’s public date of birth, April 5 1975, is itself three years out of date, again citing Chaldean figures.
Given many pretenders to the throne have outed themselvesbefore being debunked, this latest claim would certainly not pass withoutscrutiny. This is what many in the industry have been saying:
The timeline so far
The writings come from a curious company by the name ofSatoshi Nakamoto Renaissance (SNR) Holdings. A brief press release issuedAugust 15 by Ivy McLemore announced the client win of SNR Holdings, withthe goal to ‘support the revolutionary new company’s commitment to providesuperior blockchain technologies to help transform people’s lives’, in thewords of the release.
No mention of any reveal there. A day later, however, theagency issueda release titled ‘Visionary Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto to RevealIdentity’, the first part of which was to coincide with the 11th anniversary ofbitcoin.org’s registration. “Nakamoto’s revelations will culminate Tuesday(August 20) in part III with his introduction of Tabula Rasa, his clean-slatevision for Bitcoin’s transformational rebirth, and the declaration of hisidentity,” the release noted.
The latter arrived earlier than expected thanks to a changeof plan; a release on August19 noted that “Nakamoto will end years of conjecture by disclosing why hehas yet to move any of his 980,000 bitcoins… and declare his real-life identityin part II.”
Different writing styles and typos
Various sources have noted the different styles between the ‘reveal’and the original Bitcoin whitepaper(pdf). Yessi Bello Perez, in a TNW piece headlined‘The latest claim to Satoshi Nakamoto is the stupidest one yet’, noted: “WhileI’m no expert, I can tell you the first blog of [Faketoshi’s] upcoming wasn’t writtenby the same person or persons.”
Comparing an article written in a conversational style withthe formal tone of a whitepaper is naturally something of a false economy. Yet industrywatchers saw various typos made in the reveal, some – but not all – of whichhave been corrected. A glaring omission, which has since been fixed, referred to‘cyberpunks’rather than ‘cypherpunks.’ Another, again fixed, referenced BBCI rather thanBCCI in an image mislabelling.
In the second and third parts of the reveal, another caption error is revealed, with ‘dad to day’ being written instead of ‘day to day’ (screenshot: The Block).
Speaking to Bloomberg, Jeff Garzik, who used to exchange emails with Nakamoto, said of the text: “The writing style does not strike me as the same.” It is worth noting however that, according to various stylometric analyses conducted on Nakamoto’s Bitcoin paper, various theories abound that Nakamoto was a pseudonym for multiple authors.
Hosting history
Monero’s Riccardo Spagni, writing on Twitter, was a particularly vociferous critic. Citing the Wayback Machine, Spagni noted certain changes to theBCCI.net’s marketing messages – the site which it is claimed represents the bank that gave Bitcoin its name.
Looking at theBCCI.net’s varioussnapshots since 2008 gives some interesting results. 2009 saw the company’s tagline,and presumable acronym explainer as ‘born to conceive and conduct innovation.’One blog post had been published – a piece taken word-for-word from theFinancial Times in June of that year. By 2011 – still with the solitary blogpost since 2009 – a short notice appeared on the home page. “BCCI Corp and itsall subsidiary Companies [sic] have been acquired by Alexander Hawthorn and isnow under new Management. for [sic] any question [sic] please contact: bcci[at]alexanderhawthorn.com”.
Per Spagni,2013 saw BCCI take on new branding – still with the ‘born to conceive andconduct innovation’ tagline – being renamed Blue Chip Capital International. Ayear later, it was again rebranded, this time removing the tagline, to The BostonConsulting Co International.
The Block explored this link further. By December 2013, a slew of new email addresses were added. Previously the company’s only contact email was contact[at]thebcci.net; however this was expanded to 11 locations including Boston – london[at]thebcci.net and so on (screenshot: The Block). What’s more, a new site, thebostongroup.org, was set up. The company called itself The Boston CCI Group – not to be confused with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) or indeed The Boston Group (TBG), although the company used The Boston Group and The Boston Consulting in its search results.
The site today is a 404 graveyard, although evidence suggests that its removal was a recent process. A Google cache, taken as it appeared on August 15 – the day the first press release was issued – reiterated the majority of the ‘location’[at]thebcci.net addresses (screenshot: The Block).
Further to this, a reverse IP lookup of theBCCI.net reveals various domains hosted on its address. The top three alphabetically are alexanderhawthorn.com, as mentioned above, abundeum.com, and annurcacoin.com. The former is a digital currency provider; the site itself is also a 404 but the company’s Twitter account was launched in December 2016 and tweeted regularly before abruptly stopping in June the following year. The latter was a project which aimed to raise money for the ‘world’s first centralised and cloud-based cryptocurrency’ in 2016. It raised just over €91 from its target of €900,000 (?828,000).
Response
The dual part II and III of the SNR Holdings reveal camewith a note, of thanks ‘for the people who sent one simple line of ‘Thank you!’after reading part I’, and one of less thanks for the ‘cynics’, addressingprevious criticisms.
“Some think that going on-to [sic] my website througharchive.org makes them laugh at me questioning why didn’t I write Bitcoin andleave a note about being Satoshi Nakamoto with my mobile number on it!” thenote began. “Also regarding the petty issues like spelling mistakes and networkoutage, keeping in mind, it’s all been communicated through a professional teamand we had tremendous traffic load to deal with but the team were resilient inposting everything smoothly.
“There’ll be many mistakes made in this journey and we willfix them because our purpose is genuine, taking Bitcoin to the next level.”
You can read the full reveal here.
