“X” matches Le Roux
Who was X? He posted for a few weeks in Dec 2002, not only to the uK.finance group about the digital currency, but also to other lists, principally p2p. From these posts we can find out quite a lot about X.
This was a crucial time for Le Roux. He had just left his Chief Technical Officer role at SecurStar under a cloud. His thirtieth birthday was approaching on 24 Dec 2002 and he was looking for a new direction. In 2003 he would concentrate on his online pill company, Rx Limited. But in that December he must have been considering other possibilities and ideas.
So let’s look at the evidence that links X to Le Roux.
X posted from the Netherlands
X used an internet provider xs4all.nl from the Netherlands. This Netherlands connection rules out just about all the usual Satoshi suspects except for one: Paul Le Roux lived in the Netherlands from 2001 to 2004. X used a different ISP from Le Roux. But X was obsessed by anonymity, and all Le Roux had to do to disguise his ISP is to post from a coffee shop.
X claimed to be Dutch
In another post X said “I’m not a native English speaker (but Dutch)”. A Dutch Satoshi was unexpected, which is one reason why X’s posts have been disregarded.
Le Roux was not Dutch, but he would often pretend to be: “I also have some Dutch ancestry, my name in fact is the Dutch spelling of a French surname” (Le Roux, 11 Nov 1995). He grew up in Krugersdorp, where most white people spoke the Dutch variant Afrikaans as their first language. A few years after X’s posts, Le Roux would move to the Philippines where he adopted a Dutch identity as “Johan Le Roux”. Many people in the Philippines thought he was from Holland and he was even indicted under his Dutch name.
X was interested in hashing
There are a couple of interesting comments that X made about hashing. One was the potential for Big brother to preserve a record of potentially incriminating downloads and uploads: “An eavesdropping big brother just hashes the stuff and couples the hashes to your IP (and personal ID?)” Hashing would get over constraints on storage space that existed at that time. It is a similar concept to how Bitcoin hashes the previous blocks in the blockchain.
In another comment, X shows knowledge of the hashing system used by p2p file sharing applications. This is significant because the Bitcoin system utilising Merkel trees is very close to such p2p file sharing programmes.
X had many innovative ideas
- X certainly had a lot of ideas. Over a few weeks he posted one after the other:
- A virtual coin to replace the world’s monetary systems which anticipated many of the features of Bitcoin.
- A system for anonymous and untraceable p2p communications which prefigures Tor
- The idea of using direct p2p communications over wireless networks
- The concept of p2p radio stations.
- The idea of hashing files together with user id to preserve proof.
- Using gold to replace cash with ideas for testing the purity of gold
- Encrypting phone conversations to avoid surveillance
Le Roux also would come up with many ideas. As Wilfred Hafner said about him, “he came with some, how do you say, interesting, innovative ideas.”
X was an extreme libertarian obsessed with anonymity
Most of X’s posts are about using p2p to defeat “big brother”. X was certainly a libertarian and very keen on completely anonymous communication. Le Roux was also an extreme libertarian and his disk encryption software was also intended to defeat ‘big brother”.
X showed technical knowledge about gold
In one response, X recommended using gold as a currency. His brief reply was surprisingly technical, focusing on the need to assay the gold. Le Roux was the son of a mining engineer from a gold mining town. He would later become involved in sourcing his own illegally mined gold which involved testing the gold for purity.
X suggested a system for encrypting phone conversations
Most significantly, X put forward an idea for phone encryption that is a close match to a device Roux had worked on. X posted about the dangers of relying on a burner phone for anonymity:
“And you are subject to eavesdropping by Echelon or whatever name they give those Big brother systems. Voice identification systems will be far more abundant (=cheap) in the near future.” (22 Dec 2002)
“Echelon” is the “Five Eyes” surveillance program led by the United States. Echelon was something of an obsession to Le Roux to the extent that he even called his security company “Echelon Associates”. Here is Le Roux writing on the E4M website:
“Project ECHELON shows the extent to which major world governments have gone to invade everyone’s privacy. The UKUSA agreement between the U.S, U.K, Canada, Australia & New Zealand facilitated project ECHELON, which intercepts global phone calls, faxes, and email messages transmitted via satellites, if certain “key words” are detected the communication is recorded for later analysis by the intelligence agencies of the respective governments.”
To avoid eavesdropping by Echelon, X suggests encrypting phone conversations: “The answer to this is public/private key encryption not issued by a third party but generated by yourself or by well known open source software.”
How could this be accomplished? As X points out, such encryption was not available on phones. But Le Roux had actually worked on an encryption device and had looked for investors:
“Hi is there any interest out there in a voice encryption box which will basically would allow a standard phone/fax to plug into it and go secure with another similar unit.” (Le Roux, 14 Oct 2001)
Le Roux continues with enough detail to show that he must have prototyped this device, although it was not put into production. So one year before X’s post, Le Roux had come up with the same solution that X suggests to the same problem that X stresses.
Was X putting on an act?
X pretended not to be a native English speaker and often showed poor English. However, at other times he communicated complex topics perfectly well in English. The conclusion is that X was deceiving people and putting on an act.
We have an account of Le Roux at this time from Wilfred Hafner which shows this was normal behaviour for Le Roux. He would lie to a colleague when he did not need to and then brag about it: “He’s a good actor, telling a story that is completely made up to achieve something else.” This ability to put on an act, to assume another persona, was something that Le Roux would do whether he needed to or not.