Also whether he primarily used Windows as Satoshi seems to have done - Back feels like more of a GNU/Linux kind of guy, but I could be wrong

This is notable as it argues against a lot of the candidates who are American, but I would say this is relatively easy to fake if you were privacy minded.

It would be somewhat harder the other way (American pretending to be British) as American English is much more prominent, but I think I could convincingly pretend to be American in text if necessary if I was only participating in generally technical discussions (and nobody asked me about cultural stuff like NFL etc.)

It's a silly topic to spend (waste) time on, but I can't help it, I just find it sort of fascinating.

It's a mystery where you have to try and put together different pieces of evidence, match things up, try and look for hidden connections - a certain type of human mind (mine, I guess) just finds that process rewarding.

I've gone down most of these rabbit holes and my 2c is it's one of these two people, not any of the most common candidates: Len Sassaman or Paul Le Roux.

Sassaman is dead and Le Roux is in federal prison in the US, which explains why the coins haven't moved

Le Roux was not in prison before 2020, it makes no sense to me that he was spending his time trafficking drugs when he was sitting on billions.

Of course at this point the only "sane" reasons for someone to not touch the wallet is that they are sitting on so much BTC anyway, they don't want to cause the price to drop, or the keys are lost (but the person is alive), or the person is dead.

If someone has access they can hire security for a few billion dollars and still have some change.

If we count "insane" reasons then of course there are quite a few more. Such as ideological motivations.

Your timeline is a bit off - he got arrested on 26 September 2012 (around the time Satoshi disappeared), and he became a DEA informant after his arrest which is why he didn't finally get sentenced for 8 years.

So at the time of his arrest (after which he was in federal custody and the DEA were monitoring all his use of electronic devices) Bitcoin had only been in existence for three and a half years.

The drug trafficking and Le Roux's various other criminal enterprises all started happened in the mid-late 2000s, before Bitcoin was worth anything

Thanks for the details! I assumed he had at least some access, control or leverage.

(But losing keys is very easy, especially if the feds take your devices and your means of buying new ones, and freely accessing potential backups.)

We'll never know but I honestly think it might be him, there's other evidence:

Commonwealth English speaker (grew up in Rhodesia/SA) - Sassaman was american and it would be odd for him to adopt British english as Satoshi

Known Windows user and there are supposedly similarities in the tech stack and code between early Bitcoin client versions and TrueCrypt which Le Roux is widely believed to have developed

Early Bitcoin client versions included poker game code for some reason - Le Roux is known to have been interested in this and at one point was considering opening an online casino

On the other hand, evidence against Le Roux and in favour of Sassaman:

The whitepaper has weird references that suggest the author was involved in cryptography academically in the Benelux countries. Le Roux did live in the Netherlands at one point but afaik wasn't involved in anything academic whereas Sassaman very much was

If you store a whole session of traffic from today you can break the key exchange with a quantum computer in the future.

AES probably can't be broken but that's irrelevant because in this scenario you have the key in plaintext from the key exchange

China has understood their dependency on seaborne oil for years and been actively working to mitigate it with EVs etc. Their electricity mix is coal, renewables and nuclear with not a lot of natural gas.

International law doesn't really exist and if it did, the US and particularly Israel have committed far worse violations (including the most taboo one of all, genocide). Redrawing some borders on a nautical chart by force is minor in comparison

Can also add: made it clear that hosting US air bases on your territory is a liability, not an asset

Maybe your motives are benevolent, but you're arguing two things:

1) We can broadly trust the US government 2) We should adopt new encryption partly designed and funded by the US government, and get rid of the battle tested encryption that they seem not to be able to break

Forgive me for being somewhat suspicious of your motives here

[We can broadly trust the US government] not to promote broken encryption to its own agencies.

It's 40+ degrees every day in the summer with high humidity, nobody who can afford a car is cycling in any of these cities.

It's not really about town planning it's just how it is

They've been flying straight into sites that would normally be heavily defended with 4th gen airframes, it's not that surprising that Iran finally managed to get one

LLMs can be a massively transformative and valuable technology, and this would still be a bubble, there's no reason those two things can't be true at once.

In fact "pure" bubbles where the focus item is of literally no value (tulips, NFTs) are quite rare. Much more common are the bubbles based on an actual real transformative innovation (canals, railways, radio, internet, LLMs).

Railways did absolutely transform how travel worked in the UK, while simultaneously almost everyone who invested in them lost their shirts