Pretty compelling story. Not necessarily for its revelations, but for the fact that John Carreyrou and the NYT decided to publish it at all. If it were by anyon

Pretty compelling story. Not necessarily for its revelations, but for the fact that John Carreyrou and the NYT decided to publish it at all. If it were by anyone else, I would have stopped reading after the first thousand words of meandering narrative, but Carreyrou is staking his massive and impeccable investigative journalistic reputation on this mountain of circumstantial evidence and statistical analysis. Him torching his reputation (especially with Elizabeth Holmes fighting hard for a pardon/clemency!) would be as interesting as a story as actually finding Satoshi's real identity. The evidence is good. What was more interesting to me is the section where he explains how he eliminated all the other asserted and likely candidates. Since the story is already a very long read, I imagine much of this section got left out. So some of the reasons for eliminations are too brief to be convincing on their own. For example: > What about other leading Satoshi suspects, I wondered? Were there any who fit the Satoshi profile better than Mr. Back? A 2015 article in this newspaper put forward the thesis that Satoshi was Nick Szabo, an American computer scientist of Hungarian descent who proposed a Bitcoin-like idea called “bit gold” in 1998. Mr. Szabo remained at the top of many people’s lists until recently, but a heated debate that played out on X about a proposed update to the Bitcoin Core software exposed his ignorance of basic technical aspects of Bitcoin. A 2015 article in this newspaper — Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Birth of Bitcoin, by Nathaniel Popper [0] [Szabo] proposed a Bitcoin-like idea called “bit gold” in 1998 — Szabo's post on his Blogger site [1] but a heated debate that played out on X about a proposed update to the Bitcoin Core software exposed his ignorance — links to a Sept 29, 2025 tweet by Adam Back replying to Szabo, who had tweeted: > Good info thanks. Follow-up questions: (1) to what extent is such an OP_RETURN-delete-switch feasible in practice? (I know it is feasible in theory, but there are many details of core that I am not familiar with). (2) has such a thing been seriously proposed or pursued as part of Core's roadmap? exposed [Szabo's] ignorance of basic technical aspects of Bitcoin — links to another reply tweet by Back in October 2025 [3]: > Nick, you're actually wrong because there is a unified weight resource. eg byte undiscounted chain space reduces by 4 bytes segwit discounted weight. no need for insults - people who are rational here are just talking about technical and risk tradeoffs like rational humans. Szabo's tweet was: "Another coretard who thinks their followers are mind-numbingly stupid." ---- Can someone explain why this relatively recent tweet fight is convincing evidence that Szabo is too ignorant to have been behind Bitcoin? I know he went silent for a bit when Bitcoin first got big, but he hadn't revealed his ostensibly overwhelming ignorance until a few months ago? [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/business/decoding-the-enigma-of-satoshi-nakamoto-and-the-birth-of-bitcoin.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/business/decoding-the-eni... [1] https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html [2] https://x.com/adam3us/status/1972888761257415129 https://x.com/adam3us/status/1972888761257415129 [3] https://x.com/adam3us/status/1981329274721149396 https://x.com/adam3us/status/1981329274721149396