I find it a lot more plausible that someone can adapt their style to their audience. Satoshi wasn't selling an academic idea, but a practical implementation whi

I find it a lot more plausible that someone can adapt their style to their audience. Satoshi wasn't selling an academic idea, but a practical implementation which he hoped people would use. It's a lot more natural to include source in such a thing. But that part would be amazing from just about anyone. Thing is, you don't have to assume it if you posit that Nick Szabo, Wei Dai, or Hal Finney - or some combination of them - wrote it. They were working on a very closely related concept, Bit gold. Szabo's Bit gold paper may be the academic counterpart to Satoshi's technical white paper directed at the crypto mailing list community. It's also plausible, but more farfetched, that a senior cryptographer like David Chaum could have done it. This would still be impressive, since they would have had to have done the groundwork in secret (unlike if it's Szabo and friends, in which case it would be in public in the form of the Bit Gold stuff). But someone like Kleiman - no.