It stands to reason that Bitcoin's creators would have believed that they needed a killer app as a catalyst to spur acceptance. Silk Road was ideally suited to show off the advantages of Bitcoin over more traditional payment methods. However, Silk Road didn't pop up until nearly two years after Bitcoin was first introduced.
This paper is trying to make a connection between a few transactions sent from a very early Bitcoin address to some Silk Road addresses. It is possible that if this early address belongs to "Satoshi" that he was simply buying from Silk Road. Whatever he was doing, the connection is tenuous at best, which of course is the entire point of Bitcoin. DPR is facing a life sentence, so there is a good chance that if he has partners, the feds (and eventually the rest of the world) will find out about them as part of a plea deal.
I read the article and I think that they state clearly that the connection between DPR and Satoshi is pure speculation. It is true that they could as well not have mentioned it, but hey, it makes it for a more interesting reading, and as long as the journalists don't get a hold on the paper and print "DPR = Satoshi", no harm done.
>It could represent either large scale activity on Silk Road, or some form of investment or partnership, but this is pure speculation.
It's done up in clean paper form. It's got the name of a major cryptography researcher on it. It has an abstract.
Does this mean I can sit down and write a similar-form paper consisting of wild speculation about Shamir being financially in bed with the Citi Foundation specifically to write hatchet-job pieces linking trivially-discoverably innocent people to black market drug bazaars?
No, of course not. I'm a nobody. But when Shamir does it, dozens of people spread it to thousands of others and now I}ruid is almost certainly wondering whether he's going to get a knock on his door.
How much more of a dick do you have to be before people in general just agree that it was a shitty thing to do with so little evidence?
It's not interesting, it's reputationally dishonest, and damaging.
This paper is trying to make a connection between a few transactions sent from a very early Bitcoin address to some Silk Road addresses. It is possible that if this early address belongs to "Satoshi" that he was simply buying from Silk Road. Whatever he was doing, the connection is tenuous at best, which of course is the entire point of Bitcoin. DPR is facing a life sentence, so there is a good chance that if he has partners, the feds (and eventually the rest of the world) will find out about them as part of a plea deal.