Sorry ... Page Not Found
I'm sorry, but the page you're looking for could not be found. Below are our most recent articles. Perhaps you'll find what you're looking for there.
Channel Strategic Growth Delivers $1B Milestone and ABS Upgrades
Minnetonka, MN, December 9, 2025 – Channel, a leading independent provider of equipment finance and working capital solutions to small businesses across the U.S., proudly announces a major milestone in the growth and performance of its Equipment Finance (EF) platform, surpassing $1 billion in originations in under four years.
Built de novo beginning in late 2019, the EF division moved from concept to soft launch in 2020, officially entering the market in early 2021. Without acquiring a portfolio or inheriting legacy assets, the team designed and executed the entire product from the ground up including credit strategy, processes, technology, and partner relationships. Since launch, the platform has scaled rapidly and responsibly, crossing the $1B in originations threshold through disciplined execution, strong credit performance, a deepened partner network, and a commitment to thoughtful, responsible growth.
Channel’s financial strength and consistency were further highlighted by recent upgrades issued by Kroll Bond Rating Agency (KBRA). KBRA upgraded two classes of notes on Channel’s 2022 ABS transaction and upgraded three classes of notes and affirmed one class of notes on its 2023 ABS transactions. These positive rating actions reflect solid credit support, strong investor confidence, stable asset performance, and the company’s commitment to rigorous, transparent portfolio performance. These upgrades follow a series of successful ABS issuances that have broadened investor relationships and strengthened Channel’s market position.
“This team built the EF product from scratch and crossed a billion dollars in originations in just four years, an extraordinary accomplishment by any measure,” said Adam Peterson, CEO of Channel. “The continued positive response from investors, including the recent upgrades from KBRA, reinforces the stability and strength of what we’re building. We’re energized by the momentum and look forward to further leveraging the ABS marketplace as we scale with discipline and purpose.”
This milestone reflects Channel’s ongoing commitment to delivering high-quality, well-structured opportunities to its investor community while continuing to support small businesses nationwide with reliable, accessible financing solutions.
About Channel | Established in 2009, Channel is a leading full-service independent lender offering a single source solution for both equipment finance and working capital to small businesses exclusively through equipment finance companies. To date, Channel has funded over $3 billion to more than 30,000 business in over 45,000 transactions across the U.S. With headquarters in Minnetonka, MN, the company has additional locations and business units operating from Kennesaw, GA, Mount Laurel, NJ, Des Moines, IA, and Marshall, MN.
View PostScott Pearson Is Retiring, But His Influence on Alternative Finance Will Remain
In the footnotes of virtually every legal brief detailing merchant cash advance history is Richard B. Clark v. AdvanceMe. Filed as a class action in 2008 by a restaurateur in Orange County, California, Clark alleged that the merchant cash advance he received was really a usurious loan. When the case settled in 2011 with AdvanceMe admitting no wrongdoing and agreeing to make changes, industry observers were quick to recognize that the outcome paved the way for how to operate an MCA business—then a nascent concept—in a reliably compliant manner. The case even became a front-page story for The Green Sheet, a top trade publication for the payments industry, with the headline A New Chapter Opens for Merchant Cash Advance.
“In the class action’s aftermath, many alternative funding providers indelibly reshaped the way they do business,” the story began. “And the ripple effect has spawned a new wave of innovation in this sector with seemingly unlimited possibilities and merchants as the designated beneficiaries.”
speaks at deBanked CONNECT San Diego in 2023
The case also brought further notability to Scott Pearson, the attorney representing AdvanceMe for Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP at the time.
“I think a lot of people thought that after the case was resolved, it demonstrated that the product was viable,” Pearson recently told deBanked, “and a lot of other companies came into that space.”
Pearson had already established himself in this area of law after defending a class action brought by Bistro Executive in 2004 against Rewards Network over similar allegations, which also resulted in a settlement and no admission of wrongdoing. The outcomes of both offered guidance on how to clear up language that might otherwise appear ambiguous in an MCA agreement, such as how to establish that the transactions are not absolutely repayable.
“Now you see that language everywhere. Every agreement has that same language in it, pretty much saying that, essentially, if you go out of business or if you file for bankruptcy, nothing’s owed because you’re buying a slice of the future revenue stream with an MCA,” Pearson said.
Pearson has worked on well over a hundred class actions over the course of a legal career that has spanned more than thirty years, but those two cases are especially remembered in the small business finance industry and have led to many new client relationships. In some ways that was just the beginning. Today, he’s a Partner at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, a firm with 450 attorneys and consultants that was founded 60 years ago in Van Nuys, California. Pearson has been very active on matters of compliance and regulatory enforcement over the last few years at Manatt where he leads the Consumer Financial Services group. At the end of December 2025, however, he’s hanging up the briefcase and retiring. His impact will be missed. As a regular on the conference speaker circuit and still one of the most highly sought-after attorneys in the space, his influence has been very beneficial to those around him.
Steve Denis, Executive Director of the Small Business Finance Association, said, “Scott has been an invaluable asset to the industry, a lawyer whose insight, integrity, and foresight have helped shape how we all navigate an evolving regulatory landscape. His steady and unmatched expertise have guided countless companies, and his support for the Association and for me personally has been nothing short of extraordinary.”
Lindsey Rohan, President of the Alternative Finance Bar Association, said, “Scott has been a leader in the legal community within this industry for many years. His willingness to take a leading role in establishing best practices has had a significant impact on alternative financing, and we are all better off as a result.”
How Pearson got to where he is today was a combination of hard work and the opportunity to work in an evolving area of law.
“I grew up in Arizona. I went to school in Southern California, and I think being a lawyer was something that was pretty natural for me,” Pearson said. “I was on the debate team in high school and college, for example, and I really wanted to be a trial lawyer.”
He noted that he did not really become a trial lawyer per se, but rather more of a litigator, since the vast majority of his cases were resolved before trial. Fortunately, he did get the opportunity to cut his teeth in a real battle.
“I did a six-week jury trial in New Hampshire in a trade secrets case that was all about electronic evidence and the destruction of electronic evidence, and that case was really a big thing for my career. Probably a lot of my fondest memories are from that case,” he said. “I think just being in a long trial like that is being in combat—not that I’ve been in combat—but it’s kind of like where you just build these bonds with the people on the trial team that will just be there forever.”
In the beginning of his legal career, Pearson worked under two top lawyers, one of whom handled a lot of smaller cases for banks. That provided valuable experience in financial services. He also worked on class actions for a long time until the landscape for those eventually shifted.
“I think when the Supreme Court decided that class action waivers were enforceable, that really had an impact on the amount of class action litigation out there, so that’s when I started doing a lot more enforcement work,” Pearson said.
Compliance work organically followed since he had an established reputation in the subject matter. Being in his shoes has taken tremendous effort, however, one that required six or seven days a week of his time throughout his career. When he was younger, he and his colleagues joked about looking forward to the weekends because it meant they could wear casual clothes to the office. The stereotype about lawyers working obscene hours is all too real.
“We would pull multiple all-nighters, like literally be up for two or three days in a row cranking things out,” Pearson recalled. “And maybe sleep on the floor of the office for an hour.”
The “thrill of battle,” as he termed it, made it easier to tolerate, but he also enjoyed working with people he admired, respected, and learned from. And he didn’t just defend, he also played offense, most notably by playing forward for multiple ice hockey teams in whatever downtime he managed to muster up.
Pearson recounts, “We had a bunch of guys from my law school class studying for the bar exam together, and what we did was we would go to a review course in the morning, then we’d go to the library and do all our homework, and then we went and played roller hockey in this pond in Santa Monica that had this big fountain that had been drained and the edges of the fountain could be like boards.”
One of his friends, who hailed from Minnesota, said he had to take his roller game to the ice, a challenge Pearson accepted and stuck with.
“I used to get up at like five in the morning and go take private lessons learning how to skate a lot better and how to play before I went to work, before I had kids,” Pearson recalled. After a private coach and several clinics later, he’s made the game a lifelong hobby, one among others such as fishing, golfing, and cooking. He still plays in an ice hockey league in the present day.
Despite his departure, Manatt will remain a powerhouse in the financial services space. The firm added the highly regarded Gianna Ravenscroft as a partner this past October. Pearson also noted many distinguished individuals at the firm, including Partners Charles Washburn, Bryan Schneider, and Andrew Morrison, just to name a few, as well as strong surrounding team players including an associate named Eric Knight.
Manatt describes itself as a “multidisciplinary, integrated national professional services firm known for quality and an extraordinary commitment to clients.” Pearson became a partner there in 2019 following partner titles at Ballard Spahr, Seyfarth Shaw, and Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, where he began and spent most of his career starting in 1994.
Manatt’s site says that “while most of [Pearson’s] clients are banks, fintechs, and other financial services companies (including institutional investors), he also does a substantial amount of work in real estate, sports and entertainment, retail, and other industries,” and that he’s “been repeatedly recognized as one of the top consumer finance lawyers in the United States, with clients in anonymous interviews praising his responsiveness and legal acumen.”
“Scott’s contributions to the alternative finance industry have been invaluable,” said Christopher Murray, Managing Member at Murray Legal, who also practices in the small business finance industry and is familiar with his work. “His knowledge of regulatory compliance and litigation is unmatched. It has been a true privilege to work with him and a pleasure to work alongside him. His retirement is a loss for the commercial finance space, but well earned.”
On matters of compliance, Pearson explained to deBanked that even a small startup financial services company should take some basic steps toward compliance—things like carefully drafting agreements and providing proper training for senior management. And as a company gets bigger, it requires a continuous and larger investment into compliance—real compliance. Some founders and executives, for example, can overestimate their preparedness and require professional help to get where they need to be. He’s seen that before. If there’s anything he hopes people take to heart in his coming absence, however, it’s this: remember that your customers are people too.
“When you think about someone on the other side of the phone, think about it being your grandmother or somebody who is maybe a little vulnerable,” Pearson advised. “I think that if you treat people well and if you’re nice to people, I think that ends up really benefiting your business. And I think the more companies that really commit to that, the better off they’ll be because compliance really flows from that basic concept of ‘do the right thing for people.'”
View PostYES Leasing Expands Credit Facility With BMO
Miami, FL – December 8, 2025 – YES Leasing, a Miami-based commercial equipment leasing and finance company, today announced the successful renewal and increase of its senior credit facility with BMO. The facility provides YES Leasing with ample capacity to support its nationwide growth and fund an expanding portfolio of equipment finance transactions.
“The increased credit facility reaffirms our business model and our disciplined approach to serving small businesses with non-prime credit,” said Quade Koffler, Chief Operating Officer at YES Leasing. “With BMO’s support, we will continue advancing our vision of becoming the most trusted, efficient, and client-centered leasing partner in the non-prime market. BMO’s deep industry expertise and longstanding commitment to equipment finance make them an exceptional partner.”
Tony Syracuse, YES Leasing’s Chief Revenue Officer, added, “This facility enables YES Leasing to expand upon our 50-year track record of getting tough deals done. By working with YES Leasing, our brokers are converting more deals for their vendors than ever before.”
The renewed facility enables YES Leasing to fund a wide range of commercial equipment up to $350,000, including construction, landscaping, utility and specialized industrial assets.
About YES Leasing
YES Leasing is a small-ticket equipment financing company founded in 1975 with offices in Miami, Florida and Atlanta, Georgia. The company specializes in providing commercial equipment leasing and financing to business owners without established credit. YES Leasing funds leases directly and serves a nationwide network of referral partners. For more information, visit www.yesleasing.com or contact sales@yesleasing.com.
Can You Trust the Funder? Are They a “Secure Funder”?
When Aquamark debuted earlier this year, their target demographic was brokers that were tired of being backdoored. The product was a unique watermarking tool that could permanently identify a broker’s claim to having originated a document. Brokers liked that sort of thing and the response that Aquamark received from the industry was overwhelming. But what stood out the most to them was the number of funders that also wanted to get involved.
“Since launching, we’ve had funders that genuinely want to do things the right way, reaching out to us, asking things like, ‘how can we do better? How can we be part of the solution?'” said Christina Duncan, Aquamark’s founder.
On the advice of a solid advisor, Duncan was encouraged to exhibit at the B2B Finance Expo in Las Vegas this past October. And the trip paid off. A lot of people had heard of her and Aquamark but had not been formally introduced. Now they were finally talking. There were also people there she knew but had never technically met.
“I was able to meet people that for the last 15 years I’ve either communicated with via phone or in like a FaceTime setting, but not in person,” Duncan said. “So I was able to meet people that I’ve known for so long in person for the first time too.”
The experience increased their momentum and now Aquamark is even announcing a second product, Secure Funder.
“There aren’t any clear guidelines around how files should be handled or what actually makes a funding source secure and trusted,” Duncan said. “And so over the last few weeks, we’ve been collaborating with some pretty major funders on defining what those minimum standards should look like.”
The objective is to perform a unique third party certification to determine if a funder is secure and trustworthy. “Secure Funders” that meet guidelines will get a digital badge and be placed in a premium directory of funders.
In an industry where everyone tells brokers to trust them, funders find themselves competing against others that are making the same promises. Now, this new product aims to serve as an independent source of validation.
“The program was developed as a neutral, third-party initiative,” said Duncan in the official release. “We’re not affiliated with any broker, funder, or lead provider. We simply want to see business owners get the capital they need—without having to worry about where their sensitive information ends up.”
Along with the announcement is a batch of name-brand funders that have already signaled their support to be part of it. The hope is that brokers will see the list of who they’ve certified and have actionable information about who they can trust with their files. Aquamark is encouraging other funders to participate as well.
“I think by the end of next year, my hunch is that if you’re not on the list, you’re probably going to start seeing less business,” Duncan said.
View PostNMEF Completes $502 Million Acquisition of Midland Equipment Finance Portfolio
December 3, 2025 | NORWALK, CT – North Mill Equipment Finance LLC (“NMEF”), a leading independent commercial equipment lender and lessor headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, is pleased to announce that it has completed the acquisition of substantially all of the equipment finance portfolio of Midland States Bancorp, Inc. (“Midland”) (Nasdaq: MSBI).
With the addition of the Midland portfolio, NMEF continues to expand its scale and diversification across the equipment finance market, bringing total gross receivables under management to nearly $3 billion. NMEF partnered with funds managed by Oaktree Capital Management, L.P. (“Oaktree”) for this transaction, which underscores the strong institutional demand for high-performing commercial finance assets originated and managed by NMEF. NMEF has partnered with Orion First, a Concord company, to service the Midland portfolio, ensuring continuity and excellence for customers.
“This transaction marks a strategic success for all parties and underscores NMEF’s strength in sourcing, structuring, and executing complex transactions that deliver meaningful value to our stakeholders.” said David C. Lee, Chairman and CEO of NMEF. “Completing the acquisitions of both the Midland portfolio and Pawnee in 2025 is a remarkable accomplishment—either one alone would have made this an exceptional year.”
“The Midland portfolio acquisition and institutional funding partnerships with the likes of Oaktree further demonstrate our disciplined approach to capital deployment and portfolio management,” said Mark Bonanno, President and Chief Revenue Officer of NMEF. “By combining the Midland portfolio with our established funding channels, we were able to unlock significant economic value through both gain-on-sale income and recurring servicing revenue.”
“The coordination between our team and Oaktree was exceptional,” said Tom Lyle, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. “This was a highly structured transaction that required speed, trust, and precision. We are proud of the collaborative effort that brought it to a successful close and look forward to welcoming those former Midland employees who are joining the NMEF family.”
From Oaktree’s perspective, the partnership is a natural fit with their investment strategy. “We’re pleased to partner with NMEF to support the next phase of growth for their FMV platform and bring long-term value to their customers,” said Rana Mitra, Managing Director at Oaktree. “We are excited to partner with an extremely high-quality originator and servicer like NMEF as we continue generating attractive asset-backed finance exposures for our investors,” said Brendan Beer, Portfolio Manager for Oaktree’s Asset-Backed Finance and Structured Credit strategy.
Stephens Inc. served as financial advisor to Midland. Macquarie Capital served as financial advisor to NMEF on its partnership with Oaktree for this transaction. Truist Bank and Deutsche Bank AG, New York Branch provided debt financing to the Oaktree funds. Barack Ferrazzano Kirschbaum & Nagelberg LLP served as legal counsel to Midland, Moore & Van Allen PLLC served as legal counsel to NMEF, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP served as legal counsel for Oaktree, and Morgan Lewis and Bockius LLP served as legal counsel for the banks.
About NMEF
NMEF is a premier lender working with third-party referral (TPR) sources to finance small to mid-ticket equipment commercial leases and loans ranging from $15,000 to $3,000,000 and up to $5,000,000 for investment grade opportunities. NMEF accepts A – C credit qualities and finances transactions for many asset categories, including medical, construction, franchise, technology, vocational, manufacturing, and material handling equipment. NMEF is majority owned by an affiliate of InterVest Capital Partners and is headquartered in Norwalk, CT, with regional offices in Irvine, CA, Fort Collins, CO, Plymouth, MN, Voorhees NJ, and Murray, UT. One of NMEF’s controlled affiliates, BriteCap Financial LLC, is a leading non-bank lender providing small businesses with fast, convenient financing alternatives such as working capital loans since 2003 from its main office in Las Vegas, NV. For more information, visit www.nmef.com and www.britecap.com.
About Oaktree
Oaktree is a leader among global investment managers specializing in alternative investments, with $203 billion in assets under management as of March 31, 2025. The firm emphasizes an opportunistic, value-oriented, and risk-controlled approach to investments in credit, equity, and real estate. The firm has more than 1,200 employees and offices in 25 cities worldwide. For additional information, please visit www.oaktreecapital.com.
Comments On the CFPB’s Proposed Changes to Section 1071 Applicability
With the CFPB having proposed a revision to the Small Business Lending Data Collection Rules, public commentary is being accepted on it through December 15th.
Fifty-two comments have been submitted so far with the majority of them being publicly accessible online. “Agencies review all submissions and may choose to redact, or withhold, certain submissions (or portions thereof),” the Federal Register says. “Submitted comments may not be available to be read until the agency has approved them.” Comments can be signed on behalf of an individual, an organization, or anonymously. Comments can be submitted here.
If you are planning to submit a comment, consider consulting with an industry trade association before doing so.
View PostThe Moment Growth Becomes Risk: Scaling Your MCA Operations Without Losing Control
David Roitblat is the founder and CEO of Better Accounting Solutions, an accounting firm based in New York City, and a leading authority in specialized accounting for merchant cash advance companies.To connect with David or schedule a call about working with Better Accounting Solutions, email david@betteraccountingsolutions.com.
There is a peculiar irony at the heart of every successful merchant cash advance company: the very growth its founders dream of is often what nearly destroys it. This paradox plays out with remarkable consistency. A small team, two or three people working from a modest office, builds something that works. The CRM handles the volume. Spreadsheets track deals and daily payments well enough. Then volume triples, deals close faster, syndicators come calling, and what once felt like a well-oiled machine starts grinding against itself. Reconciliations that took an afternoon now consume days. Syndicator payouts lag behind collections. Team members duplicate each other’s work or, worse, leave critical tasks undone because everyone assumed someone else was handling them. The founders, who used to spend their days funding new deals and building relationships, now spend them firefighting.
This is not failure. It is something more interesting: the natural consequence of success meeting its own limitations. What serves a $5 million portfolio beautifully will buckle under a $50 million one. The difference between companies that plateau and companies that break through to the next level is rarely about talent or ambition. It is almost always about infrastructure.
Consider what actually breaks when MCA companies scale. Most do not collapse because they funded bad deals. They stumble because their internal systems, designed for a simpler era, cannot support a more complex present. The cracks appear in predictable places. Financial reporting is usually the first casualty. Early-stage funders get by on Google Sheets, basic bookkeeping, manual reconciliations. These tools are not wrong; they are merely insufficient at scale. When the number of merchants, syndicators, and advances multiplies, a single missed entry can cascade into inaccurate financial statements, strained relationships with syndicators, and the slow erosion of investor trust. Process control is the second vulnerability. Tasks that were once intuitive, handled by whoever happened to be nearby, now require explicit ownership and documentation. Without clear internal controls (who approves, who reconciles, who verifies), errors slip through unnoticed. Sometimes fraud does too. The third weakness is visibility itself. You cannot manage what you cannot see. When daily cash flow, default rates, and syndicator balances require hours of digging to surface, decisions get made in the dark. And decisions made in the dark have a way of looking foolish in the light.
At Better Accounting Solutions, we encounter these challenges constantly in companies that are, by most measures, thriving. Talented people, profitable operations, genuine momentum. Their systems simply have not kept pace with their ambition. The encouraging news is that this moment of strain, properly recognized, can become a turning point rather than a dead end.
The solution is not to work harder at what you have been doing. It is to change how you operate. Standardization, for instance, sounds dull until you realize it is the foundation of everything else. In the early days, flexibility is a genuine advantage. As you scale, consistency becomes more valuable. Standardize your chart of accounts, your naming conventions, your reconciliation methods, your reporting cadence. Everyone working from the same playbook beats everyone improvising their own. Separating duties matters more than most founders initially appreciate. No single person should control every part of a transaction. One staff member initiates payments; another reconciles them. One prepares financial statements; another reviews and approves. These boundaries are not bureaucracy for its own sake. They prevent honest mistakes and protect against dishonest ones. Automation, done intelligently, amplifies what your people can do. Integrated systems connecting your CRM, accounting software, and ACH processors mean that daily payments, collections, and RTR updates align automatically. Manual uploads disappear. Your staff can spend time on analysis instead of data entry. And perhaps most importantly, you must learn to forecast cash flow rather than simply record it. Fast-growing MCA operations fall into reactive mode with alarming ease, forever chasing yesterday’s numbers. True scaling requires financial models that look forward, anticipating capital needs weeks or months ahead. That visibility keeps you agile. It keeps you investor-ready.
When volume surges, clarity becomes everything. Strong internal reporting is not just about compliance, though compliance matters. It is about how you steer the ship. An MCA operation’s financial heartbeat depends on knowing, at any moment, where money is flowing, what capital remains deployed, how repayment behavior is shifting. The faster you spot trends forming, the faster you can respond: adjusting advance sizes, tightening collections policies, rebalancing syndication exposure before small problems become large ones. Firms that lack this visibility find themselves perpetually reacting. They learn about performance only in hindsight, after shortfalls or liquidity squeezes have already hit. The companies that scale effectively build systems where accuracy and timeliness become reflexive, not heroic.
There is another dimension to all this that founders sometimes underestimate: credibility. As portfolios expand, scrutiny from investors, auditors, and potential acquirers intensifies. Documentation that once seemed optional (signed syndicator agreements, precise RTR recognition, clear merchant performance records) becomes the foundation of trust. If you ever want to attract institutional funding, that trust must be demonstrable on paper. Clean, GAAP-compliant books do not just protect you from trouble. They make you more valuable. Audits go faster. Valuations strengthen. Investor onboarding smooths out. Many firms discover that once their accounting achieves proper structure, opportunities begin materializing that were previously out of reach: new lines of credit, stronger partnerships, greater confidence from the very funders who once kept them at arm’s length.
There comes a moment in every MCA company’s evolution when hustle alone stops being enough. Processes must replace instincts. Systems must replace improvisation. This is not a loss of the entrepreneurial spirit that built the company. It is the necessary evolution from founder-driven to professionally managed. Think of it this way: scaling is not about building a bigger engine. It is about tuning the engine so it can run at higher speeds without burning out.
Growth should be exciting, not exhausting. When your systems are sound, your reports reliable, your finances transparent, growth need not mean chaos. It can mean confidence. The difference between an MCA company that peaks early and one that scales sustainably often comes down to a single question: readiness. Are your systems built for the volume you are chasing? Are your reports investor-ready? Can your team process ten times more transactions without losing accuracy or visibility? If the honest answer is “not yet,” then now is the time to prepare. The stronger your financial foundation, the smoother your next phase of growth will be. Success, after all, is not just about closing more deals. It is about building an operation strong enough to handle them all.
View PostDebunking Jameson Lopp’s Rebuttal on the ‘Jack Dorsey is Satoshi Nakamoto’ Theory
Back in February 2025, prominent Bitcoiner Jameson Lopp attempted to debunk the theory that Jack Dorsey was Satoshi Nakamoto. Unfortunately, almost all the information he relied on for his arguments were either wrong or required leaps of the imagination. While I addressed this immediately after he posted them here and here, they’re being republished here:
Lopp: “During the time period of 2009 & 2010, Jack Dorsey was not only Chairman of the Board of Twitter, but also the CEO of the fledgling startup Square. It’s quite clear that he was an extremely busy person not only overseeing multiple companies, but traveling around the world meeting important people, doing press interviews, speaking at conferences, promoting philanthropic causes, and more. His activities do not fit the profile of someone who had the time and mental bandwidth to also be building a completely new financial system from scratch while maintaining perfect anonymity.”
Counter:
Twitter: Jack was fired from Twitter in mid-October 2008. He was made “silent” Chairman with no active role in the company and did not return in an active capacity at Twitter until March 28, 2011. So there is no conflict with his role at Twitter as he did not have an official job function there during the time period in question.
Satoshi Nakamoto published the White Paper on October 31, 2008 and sent his last farewell email in April 2011. This reinforces the plausibility that Jack is Satoshi since Satoshi appears right after Jack leaves Twitter and exits right as Jack returns to Twitter. Also, Jack published a reference to the name Satoshi in March 2011, showing that it had been the first tweet ever made by his best friend & love interest (Crystal Taylor) on the beta version of Twitter.
Square: Was Jack too busy launching Square? The company was founded February 11, 2009 and didn’t launch until December 2009. Coincidentally, Satoshi complained about being too busy with work during the same time period.
June 14, 2009 – Satoshi Nakamoto: “Thanks, I’ve been really busy lately.”
July 21, 2009 – Satoshi Nakamoto: “I’m not going to be much help right now either, pretty busy with work, and need a break from it after 18 months development.”
May 16, 2010 – Satoshi Nakamoto: “I’ve also been busy with other things for the last month and a half. I just now downloaded my e-mail since the beginning of April. I mostly have things sorted and should be back to Bitcoin shortly.”
July 8, 2010 – Satoshi Nakamoto: “I’m losing my mind there are so many things that need to be done.”
August 27, 2010 – Satoshi Nakamoto: “Sorry, I’ve been so busy lately I’ve been skimming messages and I still can’t keep up.”
April 23, 2011 – Satoshi Nakamoto: “I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”
So if Lopp’s argument is that Jack would’ve been really busy with launching Square then Satoshi complaining about being really busy during the same time period actually reinforces the plausibility of it being Jack.
Lopp: “Jack Dorsey worked with the US Federal Government to visit several countries (Iraq, Mexico, Russia) on behalf of the US tech industry. Does anyone truly believe that Satoshi Nakamoto, who was extremely wary of gaining attention from governments, would be working directly with them?”
Counter: A lot of people truly believe Satoshi worked with the government or was the government. The characterization that Satoshi was “extremely wary of gaining attention from governments” is not based on anything, unless he was referring to the incident in which Satoshi advised people not to donate Bitcoins to WikiLeaks. That incident ironically makes it more plausible that Satoshi was Jack Dorsey because Twitter received a secret court order regarding WikiLeaks (December 14, 2010) a day apart from Satoshi’s last activity on the Bitcoin forum (December 13, 2010). Square was also courting a relationship with Visa, which had made it a policy to restrict funds to WikiLeaks. The Square / Visa partnership was announced on April 27, 2011, four days after Satoshi’s last farewell email.
Lopp: “The first version of the Bitcoin software was Windows only, meaning that Satoshi developed it on Windows. I’m sure Jack used Windows at some point in his life, but he has been a die-hard Apple fan ever since the original iPhone came out. You can find many posts where he refers to various Apple devices he uses. I personally recall speaking with him several years ago and learning that he doesn’t even use laptops or desktops, but sticks to iPhones and iPads. It appears that may have even been true back in 2010. While reading through his 6,200 tweets I saw many referencing Apple products but none regarding Microsoft or Windows.”
Counter: Windows had a 95% share of the entire desktop OS market in 2009. No serious developer that was planning to appeal to mainstream desktop users would’ve developed for anything other than Windows even if they were a “die-hard Apple fan.” Regardless, Jack used Windows, MacOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Blackberry OS, and several flavors of Linux including Gentoo.
Lopp: “I think the best we can do is to show that the person was out and about doing things while Satoshi was known to be sitting at a keyboard.”
Counter: Lopp assumed that posting comments to the internet in 2009 and 2010 required one to be “sitting at a keyboard” despite Jack being a prolific Blackberry user (since at least the year 2000) and later an iPhone user.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because on November 6, 2009 Jack tweeted “Late lunch with @fredwilson” and 5 minutes after that, Satoshi committed code to the Bitcoin SourceForge repository. I’m not sure what this is supposed to imply. Is it not possible that Jack was going to have a late lunch with Fred Wilson but committed code before heading out to do that? Lopp makes the assumption that Jack has to be sitting at the table with Wilson when the tweet is sent for this supposed conflict to be true. Lopp forcing whatever narrow meaning he wanted to tweets to fit his narrative and making the additional assumption that Jack could not post from a smart phone to the internet under the Satoshi name are the basis for his entire rebuttal. Not very good.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because on November 27, 2009 Jack tweeted that he was furniture shopping with Alyssa Milano and that 35 minutes prior to that Satoshi posted to the forum. Not sure what this is supposed to imply. Satoshi can’t post to a forum and then go shopping? Have people never posted to a forum and then gone somewhere afterwards? Would it not be possible for Satoshi to post to a forum from a phone even if it means he did it while shopping? Ironically, I’ve posted previously about the possibility of Alyssa Milano specifically being in on the Satoshi secret. Not very good.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because on December 9, 2009, Jack tweeted that he was walking to meet the Mayor of Paris at City Hall (in Paris) and then 18 minutes later Satoshi posted to the forum. Lopp presumes that Jack was not capable of posting to an online forum while waiting at City Hall to begin the meeting. When did the meeting start? How long did he wait? People post online while they sit and wait for meetings. I have personally sat in government buildings and waited for meetings with officials and passed the time by posting to forums. Why is this considered to be impossible? Answering emails and posts is and was a commonplace thing to pass the time. Not very good.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because he attended a long company meeting on February 26 that ended at 10pm and Satoshi made posts on the forum at 6:17pm and 6:48pm. Okay? He couldn’t have posted before the long meeting? Pretty weak. Not very good.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because on May 20, 2010, Jack tweeted that he was in a car with his brother to go out to dinner with his family and 10 minutes later Satoshi posted to the forum. Was it Jack driving or his brother? Because if it’s his brother, then Jack can post from his phone to the forum while they’re driving. But if it’s Jack driving, then how is he also tweeting? Hmmmm…. Or did they get to the restaurant already and they are waiting and Jack is posting to the forum from the restaurant. I’m still lost on why Jack couldn’t post to a forum from his phone. Why are these things conflicts again? I myself was posting to forums from my phone in 2010. Not very good.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because on May 26, 2010 he tweeted that he was headed to meet Senator Cory Booker at 5:01pm and Satoshi posted to the forum at 5:16pm (with a file attached) and again at 5:34pm. Booker tweets at 7:32pm that he had just met Jack and Jack tweeted at 7:45pm that he had just met Booker. It seems like they actually met late then, perhaps around 7pm. Not sure why it’s considered impossible for Jack to say that he’s headed to a meeting and subsequently post to a forum (with an attachment) before actually being in the meeting itself, which doesn’t appear to have taken place for a while. Maybe Jack left later than he said he was leaving or maybe Jack got there and ended up waiting around for a very long time before the meeting and played on his phone and posted to the forum as people do when they’re bored. Not very good.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because on Saturday, July 10, 2010, Jack tweeted at 6:17am local time that he was getting ready to go on stage and present Square, followed by Satoshi posting four sentences to the forum at 6:36am local time, followed by Jack tweeting “Boom.” at 6:45am. (The screenshots says 9:17 and 9:45 respectively because they show my timezone) Lopp presumes that “getting ready” means that the presentation, which he believes to be at Square’s headquarters, was starting within minutes or seconds of that first tweet and that the subsequent tweet of “Boom” meant it was over. Satoshi posting in between these times therefore makes it impossible to be Jack.
This presentation was taking place at the Sun Valley Conference in Idaho, an invite-only event for major tech moguls. Jack was even at the Sun Valley on Ice show that evening. There is no evidence I have seen to suggest that “Boom” meant he had finished giving his presentation but Lopp needs us to believe that in order to create a conflict in the timeline to support his argument. Not very good.
Lopp points to the fact that Satoshi posted to the forum precisely during the short window that Jack was meeting with the President of Chile in Santiago on July 14, 2010. Satoshi posted at 9:10pm UTC time on the forum which would have been 5:10pm in Santiago.
Jack:
(1) says at 3:36pm that he’s on the way to meet him and that they will spend an hour together
(2) suggests that their meeting was already over by 5:03pm.
At 4:10pm a tweet goes out from the President’s account about their meeting. It does not confirm they are actually together yet even if it implies they are.
Satoshi posts to the forum at 4:25pm.
Jack signals the meeting is over with a tweet at 5:03. Satoshi posts at 5:10pm local time. While narrowly outside the perceived window, it is outside of it, and we don’t know when the meeting actually ended. It could have been over at 4:45, for example. A tweet at 5:03 doesn’t mean it ended at exactly 5:03.
It is well documented that Jack and the President met but it is not known for precisely how long. It could have been 10 minutes as these are how these things go, particularly with important figures like a head of state. Lopp takes the hour at face value and combines it with his belief that Satoshi did not have access to a cell phone in order to make his debunking work. Besides, couldn’t Jack have typed up his forum post prior to the meeting and then finally posted it after the meeting? Not good enough
On July 21, 2010, Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because Jack was at an Apple Store in Chicago where his company was hosting a demo of Square starting at 12 noon all while the forum shows that Satoshi posted at 11:07am and 12:31pm local time that same day. I’m not sure why Satoshi being in a computer store would imply it would be impossible to post a message from a computer or from a phone. The more substantive post of the two that Lopp relied upon was the one that was made an hour before the demo. For this to be a conflict, it would require Jack to literally be doing a Square demo himself during the exact minute of 12:31 when Satoshi posted. Not very good.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because on July 28, 2010, Jack was attending a baseball game while Satoshi was posting on the 28th. Unfortunately Lopp got the dates wrong. Jack was at the baseball game on the 27th, not the 28th, as evidenced by the 9:19pm PT tweet on July 27, 2010 that he uses as his evidence.
Lopp misread the dates.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because he tweeted on August 14, 2010 that he was walking to meet with Scott Harrison for lunch and that an hour and 18 minutes later Satoshi posted two sentences on the forum that he had solved an issue with compiling the Bitcoin software. Ok? Which means what? Which means we have to presume that Satoshi had been busy doing this work exactly during the lunch time window and then rushed to post about it immediately to the forum? Satoshi couldn’t have solved it earlier and then posted it on the forum later when he got around to it like right after a lunch meeting? Not very good.
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because he tweeted on August 22, 2010 at 4:25pm that he was listening to music while on the highway when Satoshi posted to the forum at 3:51pm, 4:01pm, 4:21pm, 4:55pm, and 4:57pm local time. I like this one to Lopp’s credit because there’s a link in Jack’s tweet to a purported photo of Jack behind the wheel looking out through the windshield. And so the argument here is that Jack can’t be posting to the forum because Jack is too busy driving! But we only know this because Jack is tweeting! And with a photo too? So if Jack is really driving, he is still apparently capable of taking a photo while driving and tweeting while driving, which hurts the case that he couldn’t also be capable of posting to the forum. Or there’s the possibility that someone else was actually driving and he was busy posting to the forum from his phone. Or… that Jack actually made that tweet about being on the highway hours or days after it actually happened. Or it never happened at all and it was online content for engagement or a dream of something nice. But if we give this one the benefit of the doubt and say Jack was really driving at that time, we can’t ignore that the evidence of him driving is a result of him playing on his phone while doing it. These “conflicts” are not very good at debunking Jack as Satoshi because they require leaps of the imagination
Lopp says that Jack can’t be Satoshi because he tweeted on September 19, 2010 that he walked 1,256 steps in the span of 425 minutes and that Satoshi posted to the forum twice during this time period and made a code commit. I did the math and it seems 1,256 steps is only 0.6 miles and 425 minutes is over 7 hours. This seems to actually support the theory of someone sitting around all day and builds on the case that Jack is Satoshi to make the code commit. Not very good and even supports Jack as Satoshi
Lopp: “I find the aggregate of all the evidence to provide so much doubt that a reasonable person would conclude that it’s far more likely that Satoshi was someone else.”
Counter: Try again.
View Post
