The important things to note about the relation between DPR and SN:
* There was an account/wallet that was created a week after Bitcoin mining 'commenced' in 2009.
* SN was known to have been active in the early mining. However so was Hal Finney (inventor of RPOW). They refer to it as the founder's wallet, but I think it would be more appropriate to think of it as the wallet of an early miner.
* This early miner's accumulated into it over 77,600 BTCs (mostly from mining operations)
* During June 2011 (4/6/2011 - 28/6/2011) almost all of these bitcoins were moved into a second account
* On the transaction graph, on one path, 45% of these bitcoins are are transferred to another wallet over the course of late 2012 to new year 2013. On the other path, the remaining 55% is sent to another wallet over the course of early 2012 to the same day new year 2013.
* The 45% wallet has a little of its funds sent to the 55% wallet, and then has laid dormant since a month back. In the 45% wallet in March'13, a fifth of the wallet is sent to the 55% wallet. Again, from the 14/9/13 to 23/10/13, another 15% is sent to the 55% wallet.
* However, if we look at the 55% wallet, we can see a clear link to DPR's wallet. In March'13, the 55% wallet sends 6 transfers totalling 2.5% of its balance ($1000) to another wallet, which sends this to DPR's account (as we know from the FBI's discovery of the wallet).
The authors suggest that all of these accounts belonged to the same person, this same early miner they call the founder. This is a possible flaw in their argument, as there were multiple early miners, Hal Finney being one of them.
The transactions that divided this wallet into the 45% and 55% wallets could have also split the ownership.
Lastly, it's very important to understand that while it may not be publicly recorded in the blockchain, these accounts could've changed hands by manually exchanging the private keys, and thus could bring into question the basis of this speculation.
I'd make a reasonable bet that those motions were to one of the early exchanges, — based on the timing, maybe Britcoin. I'd consider it doubtful that the later owner of those funds was the same as the earlier one.
I'm not sure why they'd hypothesize that someone who apparently used Bitcoin only some time after it was widely made public, and then used it in a rather poor manner anonymity wise (the aggregation), was the founder— other than to make headlines like this one. :(
I agree. When Shamir wrote the first Bitcoin paper over a year ago, we in the Bitcoin community eagerly awaited the paper, looking forward to the revelation of some obscure new security flaw, or other issue.
Imagine our surprise when we realized that not only did the paper not reveal anything new (Satoshi mined many of the early coins -- Eureka!), but that in order to do their analysis, they scraped the entire blockchain explorer web site to access Bitcoin's transaction history, and then commented on how difficult it was to access that history.
So little was their research and understanding of how Bitcoin works, that they misunderstood its most fundamental property: the shared public ledger that sits on the desktop of anyone running the reference Bitcoin client.
Unfortunately, it looks like they're after publicity, and not new knowledge. A big disappointment.
>When Shamir wrote the first Bitcoin paper over a year ago
You mean 'when Ron and Shamir wrote their first Bitcoin paper'? as there were several prior papers about Bitcoin; including one myself and a co-author wrote on a similar topic in 2011.
We obtained our data directly from the blockchain, using a modified version of Gavin Andresen's bitcointools which we put on github (although its now out of date).
Professional jealousy of a system which has made its creator effectively a multi-millionaire? Yet another in a long string of hatchet-job troll papers done by pro cryptographers designed to elicit (or vent) an emotional response rather than an academic one?
* There was an account/wallet that was created a week after Bitcoin mining 'commenced' in 2009.
* SN was known to have been active in the early mining. However so was Hal Finney (inventor of RPOW). They refer to it as the founder's wallet, but I think it would be more appropriate to think of it as the wallet of an early miner.
* This early miner's accumulated into it over 77,600 BTCs (mostly from mining operations)
* During June 2011 (4/6/2011 - 28/6/2011) almost all of these bitcoins were moved into a second account
* On the transaction graph, on one path, 45% of these bitcoins are are transferred to another wallet over the course of late 2012 to new year 2013. On the other path, the remaining 55% is sent to another wallet over the course of early 2012 to the same day new year 2013.
* The 45% wallet has a little of its funds sent to the 55% wallet, and then has laid dormant since a month back. In the 45% wallet in March'13, a fifth of the wallet is sent to the 55% wallet. Again, from the 14/9/13 to 23/10/13, another 15% is sent to the 55% wallet.
* However, if we look at the 55% wallet, we can see a clear link to DPR's wallet. In March'13, the 55% wallet sends 6 transfers totalling 2.5% of its balance ($1000) to another wallet, which sends this to DPR's account (as we know from the FBI's discovery of the wallet).
The authors suggest that all of these accounts belonged to the same person, this same early miner they call the founder. This is a possible flaw in their argument, as there were multiple early miners, Hal Finney being one of them.
The transactions that divided this wallet into the 45% and 55% wallets could have also split the ownership.
Lastly, it's very important to understand that while it may not be publicly recorded in the blockchain, these accounts could've changed hands by manually exchanging the private keys, and thus could bring into question the basis of this speculation.