Study Suggests Link Between Silk Road's Dread Pirate Roberts and Bitcoin Inventor Satoshi Nakamoto

Via Economic Policy Journal:

NYT reports:

Two Israeli computer scientists say they may have uncovered a puzzling financial link between Ross William Ulbricht, the recently arrested operator of the Internet black market known as the Silk Road, and the secretive inventor of bitcoin, the anonymous online currency, used to make Silk Road purchases.

Dorit Ron, a computer scientist at the Weizmann Institute, and Adi Shamir, a pioneering cryptographer who is a member of the applied mathematics faculty at the Institute, will publish a paper Sunday exploring how the 29-year-old Mr. Ulbricht, who was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in October and has been charged with a murder-for-hire scheme and narcotics-trafficking, acquired and protected the estimated millions he made in commissions operating Silk Road. The researchers say Silk Road, at the time of Mr. Ulbricht’s arrest, had sales of $1.2 billion, generating $80 million in commissions. A huge run-up in the value of bitcoin in the last month has exponentially increased those amounts.

However, the researchers added, they believe the F.B.I. has seized only about 22 percent of the commissions they have identified, and that they themselves have only been able to trace about a third of the total[...]

Mr. Ulbricht was arrested last month, the scientists used public information to begin tracing Silk Road-related transactions. Among their discoveries was a particular transfer to an account controlled by Mr. Ulbricht from another that had been created in January 2009, during the very earliest days of the bitcoin network, which was set up the previous year.

Although the authors state that they cannot prove that that account belongs to the person who created the bitcoin currency, it is widely believed that the first accounts belong to a person who identifies himself as “Satoshi Nakamoto,” but who has remained anonymous and has not been publicly heard from since 2010[...]

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