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Thursday, December 5, 2013
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satoshi-mystery

The Internet did something strange last week. When a researcher named Skye Grey posted a detailed analysis of textual biases in the writing of shadowing Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto and a researcher named Nick Szabo at George Washington University, the interest was muted but optimistic. Did Grey, who declined to go into much personal detail, crack the code? Or was it, as always, just a matter of lucky conjecture.


Whether or not Satoshi is a real person, group of people, or some sort of government entity is important. It gives closure to the currency’s origin story and it can confirm or deny a whole host of rumors and innuendo bandied about in the fringier corners of the bitcoin market. If BTC were a way to get us out from under the government, why is Satoshi so secretive? While Grey’s analysis is still being proved or disproved, the process, in the end, is fascinating.


Given that Grey’s analysis was, on the surface, solid, I reached out for a short interview.



TC: Tell me about yourself. Why did you do this study?
SG: Originally it was simple curiosity that drew me to the question. I like mysteries. Then I decided to publish what I found for two reasons:

- so that other people could attack my method and findings, or validate them. I want certitudes, and keeping for me what I had found would not get me anywhere.

- so as to address people’s concerns that a “bad guy” might have created Bitcoin. I think this question is what could harm the mainstream adoption of Bitcoin in the near future.


TC: How sure are you it’s Nick Szabo?
SG: I am not certain it’s Nick Szabo, but I have quite a few independent pieces of evidence pointing in his direction, each one interesting in itself:

- text analysis (only 0.1% of cryptography researchers could have produced this writing style –again, please, attack my methods on this)

- fact that Nick was searching for technical collaborators on the bit gold project (a very similar cryptocurrency) a few months before the announcement of Bitcoin (and then the bit gold project became perfectly silent)

- lack of citation of Nick’s work by Satoshi, whereas he cited other, less related cryptocurrencies

- lack of reaction on Nick’s part about Bitcoin, whereas a decentralized currency like Bitcoin had been a major project of his for 10 years

- fact that Nick deliberately post-dated his bit gold articles to look posterior to Bitcoin, shortly after the announcement of Bitcoin


Currently I am in contact with two different persons who will be running their own independent textual analysis to confirm my own.


TC: Does it matter? What would it change if it did, in your opinion?
SG: I think it’s very important to identify Satoshi at this point in Bitcoin’s history. The “agenda” behind Bitcoin, if there is any, cannot stay in the shadow if Bitcoin is to become a mainstream alternative currency, a challenge to the world’s monetary status quo. There has been speculation that Bitcoin may have been created by a government agency (the main employers of cryptographers of mathematicians) in an attempt to make financial transactions easier to mine for interesting data patterns: we need to clear that up before we start relying heavily on Bitcoin in our lives.


I think it would be great news for Bitcoin if Nick Szabo turned out to be the mastermind behind it. Nick appears to be a remarkably brilliant, disinterested polymath academic. Who would you rather have at the origins of Bitcoin, a visionary professor and collaborators, or spooks?


TC: How has your digging gone over in the BTC community? It seems like an unpopular topic at best.
SG: It has not been received well, many people are telling me to “leave Satoshi alone”. But when one starts having a huge impact on the world, one loses his right to anonymity. Satoshi currently holds about BTC 1M, valued at USD $1B, and has the power to potentially crash the Bitcoin markets. We need to know who the people who have power over us are, and what their intentions are. This is why we require background checks on our elected leaders. In the same way we need a “background check” on the Bitcoin system before we start handing it our monetary exchanges. Next would be to know what has become of Satoshi’s BTC stash.


The anonymous figure of Satoshi probably played a role in the early adoption of Bitcoin (“we are all Satoshi”), because the mystery created a powerful story drawing in early enthusiasts. Now this anonymity has become an obstacle to mainstream adoption, because there is legitimate concern over the origins and purpose of Bitcoin.


TC: How easy is it to assess identity via written “tics?”
SG: It’s rather easy. We all use language in our own particular way: the probability distribution over rare expressions, sentence structures, and stop words in our writing constitute a “signature” of sorts. It is not nearly as uniquely discriminative as a fingerprint, or DNA, but it is discriminative enough to distinguish one person out of a few hundreds or even thousands. For some people who tend to have more particular tics, like authors or academics, it constitutes a solid identification process.


In the case of Satoshi, I identified a number of unusual content-neutral expressions used both in Satoshi’s whitepaper and in Nick’s papers. For 4 of these expressions, I was able to estimate (using Google Scholar) the proportion of researchers in the cryptography community susceptible of using these expressions in a paper. These proportions are respectively 15%, 10%, 15%, and 50%. Assuming the use of each one is independent of the use of the others, the joint probability of finding a researcher using all of them in their writing is on the order of 0.1%. So this particular combination of writing tics could identify one cryptographer out of 1000. Even if these approximations are off by a large factor, the joint probability will stay quite small.


TC: Are there any close runners-up for the Satoshi identity?
SG: Nick is by far the number one candidate. I have nothing else significant enough to be worth mentioning.


TC: How many bitcoin do you have?
SG: Let’s say I have between 1 and 10 BTC. I am not heavily invested in Bitcoin, but I am definitely bullish on its adoption prospects.







12:39 PM

The Internet did something strange last week. When a researcher named Skye Grey posted a detailed analysis of textual biases in the writing ...

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Competition for listeners among digital music companies is tough (and getting tougher). But while each builds a business that it hopes will stand out enough from the rest of the pack, a new startup called Bop.fm, incubated at Y-Combinator this past summer, is blurring those distinctions a bit, with a platform that meshes all the services together on a universal platform — a “canonical home for music on the internet,” as Bop.fm’s co-founder and CEO Shehzad Daredia puts it.


Bop works like this: You can search for and listen to any song on Bop.fm: Bop.fm detects what music subscriptions you may have and provides tracks from those services first — currently it catalogues streaming services Spotify and Rdio, as well as free services like YouTube and SoundCloud, and paid-for download services like iTunes, Amazon and Google Play; it plans to add more. In cases where you do not subscribe to Spotify or Rdio, or the track is not available on either, a user is given a YouTube link, or a SoundCloud link. You also get options to buy and download tracks. In each case, what Bop.fm has done is use the digital “fingerprint” of each track effectively to map each of these services on top of each other so that you get just one option for listening to it, and one for purchasing.


Then, you can create a link to that song to share with others. That link comes back to Bop.fm, and as with your original listening experience, Bop.fm detects which services you use before serving a result.


This is a service that has been built with users in mind: it can be annoying when something is shared by someone that you cannot access. Living in London but connected to a lot of people in the U.S., I know this frustration firsthand. (I’ve lost count of the number of times that Twitter links to interesting video clips have taken me to static screens with a “sorry, not accessible in your region” message.) As Daredia tells me, “You don’t have to use the same JPEG viewer when you look at a picture, so why should I have to use the same music service?” (Note to Bop.fm: please do this for video next.)


There is also a B2B2C relevance here: publishers or site operators who want to make sure that links that they are publishing, or allowing others to publish, work for everyone who sees them, not just those in a particular region.


As Geoff Ralston of Y-Combinator describes it, “The ongoing proliferation of music services such as these make a service like Bop a near inevitability.” Indeed, without any obvious promotion, Bop.fm, in private beta, is already streaming 100,000 songs per day from consumer traffic and sites like RapGenius.com, one of Bop’s first partners, where it powers music playback.


(And now, for a little music break to demonstrate the service, a hat-tip to music services working together harmoniously:)


The Turtles – Happy Together


When I first heard about Bop.fm, I was very intrigued. It reminds me a bit of another startup called Soundrop, which also integrating track playback across different music services; the difference is that it does so in communal “listening rooms” while Bop.fm offers the experience on a single-track basis, with options to purchase tracks alongside listening. Like Soundrop, Bop.fm has piqued the interest of music portals, as well as labels. For the former, it’s a way of potentially bringing in more users to their platforms longer-term (free links can lead to paid subscriptions or paid downloads). For the latter, it will be yet another way of making sure that the marketing effort expended on an artist gets the biggest bang. In a digital music world that seems to have had fragmentation built into it, Bop.fm is providing a consumer- and business-friendly way out of that.


Between them, the two co-founders, Daredia and Stefan Gomez, know a thing or two about how to leverage the concept of aggregation to build successful, consumer-focused businesses. Daredia tells me that collectively they have worked at 11 sites built on search, including the travel juggernaut Kayak (where Daredia led user acquisition), Billshrink (eventually sold to MasterCard) and Foodily.


Longer term, you can see a lot of potential of Bop.fm, with the addition of playlists, more siloed music services, advertising, other merchandising and special pages dedicated to particular artists, and Bop getting used to power music on platforms that, like Bop.fm itself, want to see less friction and more grooving.







11:38 AM

Competition for listeners among digital music companies is tough (and getting tougher ). But while each builds a business that it hopes wil...

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11:23 AM

Instagram has invited members of the media to an event in NYC on December 12 to “share a moment” with Kevin Systrom and the Instagram team. ...

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20131204_AndrewWilliamson_popify-PR_7622

Ottawa-based Shopify, which now has a growing office in Toronto thanks in large part to the company’s recent acquisition of Jet Cooper and Rocketr, is running a pop-up retail experience in Toronto’s Kensington Market over the next few days as part of a project called ‘Popify.’ It’s something the company has done once before in Ottawa, but this time there’s less emphasis on having retailers physically present, and more focus on how to bring bricks and clicks together for better customer acquisition.


The Popify store, which I had a chance to check out before their public opening at an event last night, features a number of stores contained within a relatively tight shop in an area of Toronto known for its trendy independent stores and restaurants. Within the single storefront are housed 12 individual stores, from Shopify customers Areaware, Au Lit Fine Linens, Best Made, Biko, Joulies, DODOcase, Grain Audio, Holstee, JM&Sons, Oru Kayak, Partouche, and Poler.


Each shop represented had physical product present, but not necessarily any staff. Near each demo product was an iPad, equipped with a Shopify dongle for accepting credit card payments, with a super simple version of their mobile storefront selling just the items available to check out at the shop. Some shops were offering special discounts for the event, including free shipping on items.


The idea, according to Shopify VP of Growth Craig Miller, is to help answer the question of how Shopify customers can grow their customer base. The issue, he says, is that a lot of people on the platform love setting up their stores and find it super easy, but then have trouble with the next step, which is making sure that the right people find and see their wares and then hopefully, become customers.


20131204_AndrewWilliamson_popify-PR_7886


To help with that, something like the Popify stores is an idea Shopify is testing out. Andrew Peek, who came on with the acquisition of his company Rocketr, is heading up a sort of experimental skunkworks within Shopify, and this Popify concept shop is the first example of the kinds of projects he’s working on there. It brings together “URLs with IRL,” as Shopify Designer Chris Appleton put it.


The phenomenon of showcasing is well documented in our age of digital selling: The idea is that stores like Walmart and Best Buy provide physical showrooms for products that customers can use to try things out, and then those same buyers go online to complete the transaction with a competitor like Amazon where they can get a lower price. According to Peek and Miller, the theory is that giving people access to a showcasing environment that’s cost-efficient and run by Shopify itself will help give its clients the benefit of the showcasing effect while keeping the entire shopping cycle within Shopify’s control.


The acquisition of Jet Cooper earlier this year began a string of major announcements from Shopify, all of which point to a company that’s not resting on its laurels, but is instead seeking new ways to add value to the online storefront platform that started the company. Along with Hootsuite, this is one of Canada’s leading independent tech companies, and its growth of late has been very impressive. With projects like Popify, it’s also showing that it can still be nimble like a startup, despite enjoying the status of a more established player.


Photos courtesy Andrew Williamson.







11:09 AM

Ottawa-based Shopify , which now has a growing office in Toronto thanks in large part to the company’s recent acquisition of Jet Cooper and ...

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Clever launched about a year and a half ago to provide a standardized API for K-12 schools that allows them to unlock and share data with outside developers. It’s managed to get 10,000 schools signed up to use its tools since then. Now, according to our sources, the company has raised $10 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital.


The funding comes as Clever is finding ways to make schools more connected and accessible for developers. Most schools today use a variety of legacy Student Information Systems (SIS) as a way to store student data. But many of those systems tend to be outdated or custom-built, meaning that the information held within — which includes class lists, attendance, and grades — can’t be shared or accessed by outside developers.


For developers, that means integrating with individual schools on a one-to-one basis, and that just doesn’t scale. Clever, by contrast, provides a single, universal API that will allow developers and education companies to access all the data that has been locked up in legacy silos and use it in their apps.


To remove any and all friction to getting its system more widely deployed, Clever offers the API free to schools and districts. Instead, it sells to online learning companies and developers who are looking to integrate their software with and use data from all the various Student Information Systems. By doing so, it believes that software companies can use the data to build better learning tools and improve the overall quality of education.


That’s a value prop which seems to be resonating with school systems. When we checked in with Clever about a year ago, the company had signed up 2,000 schools to connect with its APIs. That number has ballooned over the past twelve months, with more than 10,000 schools integrated into its system.


And that, in turn, has attracted the attention of investors. A source with knowledge of the situation has confirmed that Sequoia led the company’s most recent round of funding. And Sequoia partner Bryan Schreier, who has taken a keen interest in the ed tech space with investments in companies like Inkling and MindSnacks, will be joining its board of directors.


Clever had previously raised $3 million in seed funding from a prominent list of angels that included SV Angel, Mike Maples of Floodgate, SoftTech VC’s Jeff Clavier, Google Ventures (Kevin Rose), Bessemer Venture Partners, Mitch Kapor, Ben Parr, and Ashton Kutcher. But it also had investment from multiple angels from well-known education companies, including the co-founder of The Princeton Review, 2tor and Noodle John Katzman, Inkling co-founder and CEO Matt MacInnis, Chegg co-founder Aayush Phumbhra, and GSV Advisors CEO Deborah Quazzo.







11:09 AM

Clever launched about a year and a half ago to provide a standardized API for K-12 schools that allows them to unlock and share data with ...

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A postulate stating that quantum-entangled black holes in our three-dimensional universe are connected by microscopic wormholes created when the black holes are pulled apart might be correct, researchers Andreas Karch and Kristan Jensen have found. The suggestion, put forth by physicists Juan Malcadena and Lenny Susskind, "is a very exciting but somewhat speculative proposal," Karch, a professor of physics at the University of Washington. "We show that a somewhat weaker version of this can actually be established with only mild assumption."


11:09 AM

A postulate stating that quantum-entangled black holes in our three-dimensional universe are connected by microscopic wormholes created wh...

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Startup AddVenture Summit is a new conference to hit the European circuit. Unusually, it’s run in Kiev, Ukraine, which turns out to be a rather good idea because Russians can easily travel there without a Visa, and so can Western Europeans, as can many people from Central and Eastern Europe and CIS countries. That said, most of the startups were from the CEE/CIS region, which is generating a lot of heat at the moment – a topic I’ll be returning to in due course. And like all tech conferences these days it features a tech startup pitch competition – in this case themed around a boxing match. TechCrunch was there to check the companies out and here’s what we found.


Cutting to the chase: the winner of the event was Play Canvas (UK, AngelList). This is a “cloud-hosted game development platform” with is a collaborative editing tool with a rich community site. It’s a pretty spectacular site for creating an sharing games across any platform. Worth checking out. It has been incubated at TechStars London.


They get a a €25,000 convertible note investment from 500 Startups and Cross Border Angels and a kickass boxing belt (pictured).


The runner up was Lead Scanner (Russia/Ukraine, AngelList). This is a lead generation tool which helps small and medium business (SMB) owners find prospective clients in social media and boost sales. Using proprietary algorithms, LeadScanner finds social media users who have an intent to buy specific products or services. It has been incubated at the Skolkovo IT Cluster in Moscow.


Applications to the competition were run through Angel List since April, which indicates that there was some decent filtering going on. The rules were that the companies had to have raised less than $2 million and be a European company.


They got over 500 applications, and after 35 semi finalists were interviewed, 10 finalists were selected. They then went to Kiev a week ago for three days of pitch training with event founder Vitaly Golomb.


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Here are the rest of the finalists and how they describe themselves.


Concept Inbox (Spain, AngelList)

“Concept inbox is a web tool that lets designers to share their work with their clients and get feedback from them quickly.”

Incubator: Wayra Spain


Priceless.ly (Italy – Russian/Ukrainian Team, AngelList)

“Pricelessly is an exposure-producing and fundraising platform that enables influential figures (celebrities) to mobilize their fans to raise funding and awareness for social causes, as well as widely engage and incentivize their fan-base with minimum effort.”

Incubator: TechPeaks


Landinghi (Poland, AngelList)

“Landingi is an app that helps you create landing pages for many marketing campaign purpose without designer and web developer.”

Incubator: Innovation Nest


Jumpido (Bulgaria, AngelList)

“Jumpido is an educational software product that combines primary school maths, game-based learning and natural user interface. It is focused on transforming the way children learn mathematics in school and the approach teachers take to engage their classes with this interesting, but challenging subject.”

Incubator: LAUNCHub


Limk (Turkey, AngelList)

“Limk is a content distribution and discovery platform that helps websites grow traffic while reaching highly engaged audiences. Websites can bring qualified new users&#8212those most likely to engage&#8212to their own sites by exposing their content on contextually similar sites at Limk Shuffle.”

Incubator: none


Advice Wallet (Ukraine, AngelList)

“Advice Wallet is a mobile loyalty program to attract, keep and understand customers. It empowers any local business to create a customized acquisition and loyalty program online in minutes.”

Incubator: Happy Farm


InHiro (Slovakia, AngelList)

“Professionals don’t browse through job portals – get to them via social networks. With InHiro, you’re able to create an innovative job ad (template creator), share it through social neworks (gamification based mechanics) and manage candidates (funnel talents through each step of your hiring process).”

Incubator: None


Moku (Italy, AngelList)

“Moku provides a common space to store and find documents, take rich notes (highlightings, text annotations, drawings) and collaborate with their classmates (while respecting their privacy, too), just with a browser. A “moku” is a collection of documents, where every document is securely stored on the cloud and available on any devices. It can be annotated on transparent layers (as if they were pieces of tracing paper) that don’t modify the original document. Annotations can stay private or can be shared with other users with read or write permission.”

Incubator: H-Farm







10:23 AM

Startup AddVenture Summit is a new conference to hit the European circuit. Unusually, it’s run in Kiev, Ukraine, which turns out to be a ra...

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