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Satoshi Nakamoto is probably Nick Szabo?
- pearjuice 13y agoPeople still chasing this guy? Bitcoin has much bigger problems than the identity of its inventor(s).
- ratsbane 13y agoWhoever Satoshi Nakamoto is, he (or she or they) must have been at least aware of Nick Szabo. I wonder if there's any coincidence to the initials: SN and NS? Of course, even if SN != NS it could be a tip of the hat or an intentional red herring.
- andy_ppp 13y agoI do constantly worry how easy it would be to become deliberately but wrongly incriminated by a malicious person(s) leaving an ordit trail to look like it was you. I'm certain the next person to run a Silk Road equivalent will already have a suitable patsy lined up to take the fall...
- andrewljohnson 13y agoIt would be a great boon to BitCoin to know the identity of the creators. Particularly if the unmasked progenitor(s) proved that they had actually destroyed the early Coins, that would help stabilize and legitimize the currency.
- markburns 13y agoCould you expand upon the feasibility and the benefits of proving you had destroyed earlier coins? I'm not calling into question what you say, just curious as to what you mean.
- gambiting 13y agoThat would (in a way) show the world that they created the currency for it to be a legitimate thing,and not just a scheme to make bitcoin popular and then cash in millions few years later. Or at least that's how some people would see it, if "satoshi" tried spending/turning into cash thousands of bitcoins he/she/they has/have.
- wmf 13y agoIf Satoshi holds ~1M BTC it means he can crash the market at any time. In some people's minds that risk reduces the value of Bitcoin. But if he could prove that he doesn't, that risk goes away. Also, if Satoshi could prove he's not rich then people will stop trying to kidnap him.
- markburns 13y agoThanks to you and gambiting for providing what I guessed may be the benefits, I'm still confused about the feasibility. Can you prove something doesn't exist?
- wmf 13y agoThat is a problem. AFAIK it is possible to generate unspendable Bitcoin addresses without any private key in a way that could be revealed later (e.g. with a PRNG or deterministic wallet), but it's also possible that Satoshi generated normal key pairs and deleted them which would leave him with no way to prove that they were deleted.
- ronnier 13y agoI am only certain of one thing when it comes to bitcoin, the creator(s) are not Japanese.
- Aqueous 13y agoFinney had the technical chops, Dai had b-money, and Szabo had the economic knowledge. They've each done a lot of misdirection to the other two in order to draw attention away from them. This lets them each say "I am not Satoshi Nakamoto" and not be lying.
- oleganza 13y agoBitcoin 0.1 probably did not require cooperation to work out well. Just one dedicated person could do it and have help of early participants to solve silly problems (e.g. famous OP_RETURN bug and integer overflow). Nick was pretty good in economics to not ask suggestions on core parameters from anyone else. And both Dai and Finney already had their input in their public writings, so no necessity to ask them for more.
- Aqueous 13y agoOne person could do it - but along with coming up with the exact solution to the global view problem, did they? Moreover is Szabo such a good programmer that Dan Kaminskey's auditing of the code for security holes would have caused him to say that he's never seen a programmer so good? That every likely bug was already found and plugged fairly early on? Whoever programmed BitCoin didn't write the prettiest code in the world, but it was very good, and certainly good enough code to be written by someone who spends a ton of time programming. Nick Szabo seems to spend a lot of his time on other things not related to programming. What makes me think it wasn't Finney was that Finney was one of the two first people to respond to Satoshi when the paper was dropped on the cryptography mailing list. There is extensive back and forth between Donald, Finney and Satoshi, mostly Finney and Donald critiquing the whitepaper and Satoshi defending it. Of course that would be the perfect thing to do if you were trying to draw attention away from yourself.
- oleganza 13y agoBtw, Hal Finney was diagnosed around 2009 with ALS (in his words, in reality it could have been earlier) which is a plausible reason for rushing source code out with unfinished market implementation and some silly bugs. Also, Hal's ALS progressed in 2011 and he retired: another reason for Satoshi to abandon the project as he (if he's Hal) could no longer support it secretly on his own.
- twotwotwo 13y agoThe "Bit gold" post's date, and only the date, had changed in the Oct 17, 2009 wayback machine crawl, though I couldn't tell you whether that means anything or not.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Houshalter 13y agoI don't support all the effort people put into identifying this person. They clearly want to remain anonymous and being publicly known could possibly be bad for them. And knowing who it was makes no difference.
- faragon 13y agoRepeat after me: correlation does not imply causation.
- fiatjaf 13y agoNobody is trying to discover any causation here.
- oleganza 13y agoPlease read carefully what Nick was interested in: http://szabo.best.vwh.net http://szabo.best.vwh.net Theory of property, origins of money, methods of protecting rights, origins of joint-stock companies. Almost every article is a motivation for building Bitcoin. And Nick is not just some economist, he is a capable programmer with knowledge in cryptography too. Do you know anyone else who could understand all these long-term aspects of Bitcoin and could carefully build a practical system over two years which most of the economists and most of the engineers would immediately dismiss for tons of "shortcomings"? If it's not Szabo, it's someone who is very much like him.
- gojomo 13y agoAnother theory equally consistent with this analysis: Satoshi (or the 'Satoshi' team) contacted Szabo for help writing the paper. Thus it incorporated some of Szabo's preferred language choices, but Szabo is still "not Satoshi" and has his own deep and distinct criticisms/appreciations of the Satoshi work.
- rheide 13y agoTo up the conspiracy theories a bit, do you think it's at all possible that someone skilled in programming and cryptography, well-versed in English and with a priority for keeping his identity secret, just might attempt to obfuscate his language by altering his writing style? If you don't think that's entirely unlikely then you'd better adjust your p-value.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- EGreg 13y agoI find this pretty convincing. First JK Rowling is foxed by textual analysis, and now this. I do think it was a group, and Nick was part of it. So his denials are technically accurate. Of course, we can go further than just the paper. Why not check out Satoshi's posts and compare them with Nick's blogging style?
- dagw 13y agoJK Rowling is foxed by textual analysis Was she? The way I recall was that she was first outed on twitter and only then did the textual analysis people come out and claim that they could prove the book was written by Rowling. I'm not aware of any textual analysis that pointed the finger at Rowling prior to the twitter reveal. Tuning an algorithm to give you the right answer when you already know the answer isn't that impressive
- EGreg 13y agoSo in this case, can we go further and analyze Satoshi's posts and emails?
- desireco42 13y agoOh please, just leave man alone. If he/she wanted publicity, he would come out himself, or herself.
- highCs 13y agoThis is unfortunate that the described method tends to prove nothing.
- mebreuer 13y agoThis is how a witch hunt begins - if he wanted everyone to know his name, he wouldn't be using a pseudonym.
- sard420 13y agooh oh.. this again.
- daraosn 13y agohttps://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25854.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25854.0
- sirsar 13y agoI was recently (Thanksgiving) discussing this with the owner of a small tech company. Our consensus was that if Satoshi was not Szabo, Satoshi at least read Szabo's works. The article doesn't spend as much time on the similarity of Szabo's ideas to those of the Bitcoin whitepaper, but I encourage anyone who is interested in this topic to read some of Szabo's stuff. His website, http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ is currently experiencing capacity issues, so here's a cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://... Additionally, his blogspot: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/ http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jey 13y agoWei Dai is another relevant person, with his b-money ideas and bitcoin's use of the crypto++ library. But who cares?
- clarkm 13y agoWell, Wei Dai and b-money are cited in Satoshi's original white paper.
- gwern 13y agoOnly because someone else pointed out to Satoshi that he should cite them.
- clarkm 13y agoI know Adam Back introduced Satoshi to b-money, but (correct me if I'm wrong) this was back before Satoshi had formalized his ideas. When he first posted the paper to metzdowd's cryptography list, the b-money citation was there.
- 13y ago
- simbolit 13y agoWhy is it important who Satoshi is?
- pfortuny 13y agoIt is not important: it is interesting for some people. A historian might use the term "important" but curiosity is the source of a lot of human endeavours.
- simias 13y agoIf bitcoin is successful in the long run then Satoshi will become extremely rich, maybe one of the wealthiest people in the world. I think it makes finding out who it is more than mere "voyeurism". Imagine if some extremist group hides behind the Satoshi sockpuppet for instance. At that point I'd say it's unlikely but far from impossible.
- pfortuny 13y agoI did not try to sound critical: curiosity is what drives my research as a mathematician.
- natch 13y agoWe might not know the answer to why it is important, until we know who he is.
- tlrobinson 13y agoIt's not particularly important, but it would be interesting to know, and if Bitcoin succeeds he could easily become the wealthiest person in the world.
- nemof 13y agoI honestly prefer the mystery to remain, but therein lies the challenge for those whose noses twitch at a good mystery and a show of intellectual prowess that is demanded to unmask a supposedly ghost-like figure.
- deleted 13y ago
- kevinpet 13y agoYou can't exactly use "digital signatures" and "cryptographic proof" as distinguishing characteristics among crypto researchers. Many of the phrases noted are similar overly verbose academic writing. "It should be noted" at 5% and "can be characterized" at 1% do not add up to a 0.05% chance of non-Nick Szabo writing the paper. Even if we agreed with the statistics, the "one in a thousand" would be relevant if we had some other reason to suspect Szabo. He could simply be that one in a thousand who matches. The article is somewhat persuasive, but more certain than the evidence presented seems to justify.
- cpleppert 13y ago>>Even if we agreed with the statistics, the "one in a thousand" would be relevant if we had some other reason to suspect Szabo. He could simply be that one in a thousand who matches. Except we aren't dealing with a massive amount of people who may use those phrases just a couple of people. If we already have reason to suspect something and we are given independent persuasive evidence this should be taken together to make it very unlikely that our hypothesis is not true. The great thing about textual stylistic analysis is that everyone has a specific way of communicating that can be identified unless one takes steps to actively hide it. This happens in all languages and can usually identify authorship regardless if someone tried to copy someone else's style.
- wreegab 13y ago> "The great thing about textual stylistic analysis is that everyone has a specific way of communicating that can be identified " How scientifically well supported is this assertion?
- natch 13y agoA lot of this seems plausible. The one part that is really weak, though still interesting, is the way the textual analysis was done. Robust stylometric analysis uses the frequency of use of the most frequent words (think stop words, like it, of, an, the, or, on, etc.), not the topic-bearing words.
- gruseom 13y agoI wonder what randomwalker, who has done serious research on textual deanonymization, thinks about this.
- gwern 13y agoI've suggested it to him in the past. He apparently is not interested.
- mml 13y agoDo Japanese use anglicized "colour" & "favour" etc? If so, I would only expect an inconsistent application of this spelling if he were impersonating a Japanese person writing in English (though the same could be assumed if there were multiple writers).
- chatmasta 13y agoThe usage of "-our" vs. "-or" will not tell us anything because any author attempting to conceal his identity would obviously be aware of the perceived differences in usage. So it's essentially irrelevant.
- officemonkey 13y ago"Colour" and "favour" are predominate in every English-speaking country except the U.S. (eg: Canada prefers "colour.")
- arrrg 13y agoYeah, but what are people who learn English taught? For example, the books in my Bavarian school seemed to slightly prefer the British English spelling (but the vocabulary always also included the American English spelling and later on we were reading lots of American and British text intermixed) and for tests the teacher always told us that she didn’t care which spelling we picked, all that mattered to her was that we were consistent (i.e. use either only British English or only American English). I always picked American English but the preference of the books of British English screwed me up somewhat, so I will sometimes mistakenly use both variants in one text. For me it would consequently not seem obvious that someone using both variants is a native speaker who tries to fake another spelling variant.
- officemonkey 13y agoIt's my experience that Europeans are taught British English in schools (due to the easy availability of teachers from the U.K.) Japan, Korea and China very likely are mixed between British English teachers (from India and Australia) and American English teachers (from the U.S.) In Japan in the late 80s-early 90s, there was a definite preference for American English teachers.
- atmosx 13y agoWhat is the purpose of identifying who Satoshi is at this point?
- parfe 13y agoTo add drama to the bitcoin discussion. If someone finds a name then we get to talk about an arrest record, read interviews with an ex spouse or neighbors, get to discuss his or her political positions and personal motivations, perhaps nefarious! People aren't interested in a name. They want a story. It'll be like E! For HN. Just look at how snowden himself garnered as much disscussion as the activities he revealed.
- vladd 13y agoThe original developer is most likely the person that mined the initial block-chains and is most likely owning a fortune due to the ability to market successfully that particular mining-validation algorithm to the world.
- 1337biz 13y agoAnd? Has owning a fortune by become a reason to dox somebody?
- jrochkind1 13y agoWhat is the purpose of 'Satoshi' remaining anonymous/psuedonymous at this point?
- moocowduckquack 13y agoFor Satoshi, I suspect it might be nice to not have to pay for security personnel.
- chime 13y agoI prefer Satoshi being an anonymous techie than a fallible human. Imagine Bitcoin grows 10-100x over the next few years. I don't want Satoshi's divorce to threaten the entire ecosystem.
- cracker_jacks 13y agoHis analysis is fairly compelling. I imagine if a few others were also able to confirm this with their own independent textual analysis, it is extremely likely this is Satoshi Nakamoto. The author needs to give more details of how he performed this: "an open, unbiased search of texts similar in writing to the Bitcoin whitepaper over the entire Internet, identifies Nick’s bit gold articles as the best candidates". If true, this is the most convincing argument I have seen thus far.
- foobarqux 13y agoHis analysis is pretty terrible. He seems to have made up the method on his own without consulting established authorship attribution scholarship.
- cracker_jacks 13y agoI agree that his methods are not rigorous enough to complete the argument, but it is going in the right direction. This is why it would be great to have confirmation from a few more textual analysis methods.
- overgard 13y agoDo we really need to dox this guy?
- seiji 13y agoWhen talking with nerds and you ask "Do we really need to do X?" the answer will always be yes regardless of the implication of the action.
- overgard 13y agoMost hackers think that way when they believe what they're doing is harmless or their victim is some faceless institution. I think people trying to dox this guy haven't really considered that they could (potentially) be causing innocent people a lot of damage with their "investigations".
- salient 13y agoOr they considered it, and didn't care, because if they get it right, they'll always be the "guy who unmasked Satoshi".
- interstitial 13y agoShall we call this Seiji's Law?
- kybernetikos 13y agoYeah. I mean, I'm quite interested from a personal curiosity point of view, but considering that they're probably currently living a reasonably ordinary life, to out them as a target for kidnapping in order to acquire the vast stash of bitcoins, just seems like a really mean thing to do.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- adventured 13y ago
- 27182818284 13y agoThe attempts to pin Satoshi on to one person strikes me as odd. In other threads on HN, everyone agrees the work was well done, like a peer-reviewed academic paper of sorts, but then nobody seems to entertain the idea that it might be, say, 2-3 people with Nick or someone else just being one of the team. Are there solid reasons for discounting a team of researchers, post-docs, or something similar?
- betterunix 13y ago"Are there solid reasons for discounting a team of researchers, post-docs, or something similar?" Yes, if you read the Bitcoin whitepaper that Satoshi originally sent out, and then compare it to the work done by teams of researchers and postdocs. Here are some things to think about: 1. Bitcoin can be attacked in polynomial time. This is a sharp and very extreme break from the typical expectations we have about cryptosystems, yet Satoshi did not devote any time to this in the Bitcoin paper. 2. The security analysis presented in the Bitcoin paper assumes a specific attack strategy, without ruling out others or even mentioning the possibility that another attack strategy could exist. 3. The security goal of Bitcoin was never clearly stated in the Bitcoin paper, and there is no clear threat model. 4. Almost none of the related work was mentioned, not even to distinguish Bitcoin from that work. Digital cash has been extensively studied by cryptographers, but that mountain of work was not mentioned at all. Bitcoin is a multiparty computation system meant to operate on a massive scale, yet at no point did Satoshi mention the even larger body of work that has been published on secure multiparty computation. Satoshi did not even mention the various ways that distributed systems can be attacked, which are presented in the unmentioned related work. These are not signs that experienced researchers are behind Bitcoin. From where I sit, these all point to Bitcoin having been the work of a cryptography enthusiast, probably a high school or college student with some extra time on his hands.
- fkssaa 13y ago> these all point to Bitcoin having been the work of a cryptography enthusiast, probably a high school or college student with some extra time on his hands. If true, that's just embarrassing for the cryptography community. Having worked on the problem for years and then be shown up by an amateur who creates a system that hasn't been cracked despite a $multi-billion incentive to do so.
- conductor 13y agoHe analyzed only the white paper. There is some more text written by Satoshi in the emails [0] provided by Dustin Trammell. [0] - http://www.dustintrammell.com/files/Satoshi_Nakamoto.zip http://www.dustintrammell.com/files/Satoshi_Nakamoto.zip
- foobarqux 13y agoThe style of writing is different in technical papers. You would need to compare it to the purported authors informal cryptocurrency writings which may not exist.
- brianbreslin 13y agoI think eventually we will find out who he/she is. Satoshi's wallet is holding 1M BTC right now, so close to a BILLION US $ worth of value. Would be interesting to see if it keeps rising, and goes up 30-40x from now over time if satoshi could end up being the wealthiest individual in the world.
- judk 13y agoNot gonna happen, the depth isn't there. Even today's $1k BTC is speculation at the edge of the market, 1million BTC as a batch only fetch about $50m worth of interested buyers. Here is one ting I don't understand, though: suppose I am a billionaire black hat VC, and I wanted to steal Satoshi's coins. Could I invest a half billion dollars and brute force a majority-coup attack on the blockchain? Of not now what about when those $ figures are 10x? Even if bitcoin gets 100x more popular, it won't be 100x more network miners, it will be people buying BTC and trusting the block chain published by coinbase and whoever.
- gibybo 13y agoThe computational power to attack the network grows significantly faster than the price of Bitcoin (and this is pretty much guaranteed to continue, by design). Attacking Satoshi's coins would be among the hardest, because you would have to attack the very earliest parts of the Blockchain which have tens of thousands of blocks protecting them. Half a billion dollars wouldn't come close at the current difficulty level. Further, performing this attack would invalidate all Bitcoins created after that point (which is the vast majority of them), so the Bitcoins you stole would be worthless.
- javert 13y agoTo add to this: The "official blockchain" is the one with the most computational work expended to create it. A 50+% attack operates by rewriting history back to a certain depth in the blockchain by providing a new chain of blocks with more computational work, back to a certain point. I think the bitcoin devs also put in certain "checkpoints" just to be even more certain... i.e. blocks that are "officially permanent" (which also makes all prior blocks in that chain "offiically permanent"). Maybe someone could tell us about that.
- rasengan 13y agoGive this man his privacy.
- betterunix 13y ago"Satoshi Nakamoto was a highly skilled computer scientist" Nonsense. If you actually look at Satoshi's work, he was almost certainly an amateur and a cryptography enthusiast. That some software is popular is not an indication that it is the work of a highly skilled computer scientist; here is a simple and obvious counterexample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Kernel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Kernel
- nixme 13y agoDid you even read the article? That statement is prefaced by "According to what seems to be a widely accepted origin story of Bitcoin, ...", meaning that's what many people assume. Then right after, his thesis is to contrast that: "I would argue that Satoshi is actually Nick Szabo himself, probably together with one or more technical collaborators"
- betterunix 13y agoDid you read the article? He is saying that Satoshi was someone with experience as a researcher, someone who had authored many articles in the past. The Bitcoin whitepaper and Bitcoin itself suggest nothing of the sort; they suggest that Bitcoin was the work of someone with limited research experience.
- haliax 13y agoI'm guessing this has something to do with your username, so what is the better unix? BSD? Minix?
- betterunix 13y agohttp://www.uniforum.org/publications/ufm/aug96/unix-nt.html http://www.uniforum.org/publications/ufm/aug96/unix-nt.html
- oleganza 13y agoCan we find code written by Szabo and see find if the style or certain idioms are close to Bitcoin 0.1?
- par 13y agoEven if it is him, leave him be. I don't want the feds on his ass! :p
- bachback 13y agoVery unlikely. Much more likely explanation is that Satoshi was influenced by him and uses similar terms. AFAIK Szabo is a lawyer / historian.
- ibudiallo 13y agoAnd we complain about the right to privacy on HN with all the post about the NSA, Facebook, Google and so on. Whoever he is, it is non of our business. leave the man alone already.
- viseztrance 13y agoMy thoughts exactly. I got a followup question, who is the blog posts author? Posting such statements anonymously is just low.
- gwern 13y agoEspecially since, thus far anyway, they have not responded to any of the criticism or even approved any of the comments submitted.
- joshguthrie 13y agoOkay, all this witch hunt is becoming crazy. I'll come clean: I am Satoshi. And Spartacus. And possibly Batman. Any questions? (Related: http://www.leasticoulddo.com/comic/20090330/ http://www.leasticoulddo.com/comic/20090330/)
- tolmasky 13y agoAre there "text mixing" services you can use to anonymize your writing? Seems like analysis like this could prove to be dangerous for free speech in the future. Perhaps just round-trip babble fishing a few times.
- bliker 13y agoThere are many Text Spinners online that do the trick for many cheating students and spammers.
- duskwuff 13y agoNot even students. The modifications performed by spinners are frequently silly - they amount to taking some percentage of words, looking them up in a thesaurus, and replacing them with a randomly chosen synonym. It's pretty common that the synonym is inappropriate for the context, so the results are ridiculous. For instance, here's what a spinner does with this paragraph: Not even understudies. The alterations performed by spinners are oftentimes senseless - they measure to taking some rate of statements, turning them toward a thesaurus, and reinstating them with a haphazardly picked equivalent word. It's pretty regular that the equivalent word is unseemly for the connection, so the effects are ludicrous. Case in point, here's what a spinner does with this paragraph: It's good enough for spammers, I suppose, but it's easy to spot. The overall sentence structure isn't changed, either, so that's still ripe for analysis.
- hershel 13y agoThere's some preliminary research software for this : http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/6197-anonymouth-hides-identity.html http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligenc...
- gwern 13y agoMachine translation doesn't work: http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~sa499/papers/adversarial_stylometry.pdf http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~sa499/papers/adversarial_stylometr... "Adversarial Stylometry: Circumventing Authorship Recognition to Preserve Privacy and Anonymity" Brennan et al 2013 Fortunately, simply trying to write like someone else does.
- tux 13y agoIf Nick is Satoshi then its brilliant idea. Because it removes any heat from him while having shit load of BitCoins ^_^
- skizm 13y agoAre we even sure it is one person? I've heard the algorithms and techniques used make it probable that more than one person was behind this. I would have no idea where to begin searching so anyone's guess is a good as mine.
- wcummings 13y agoAm I the only one who thinks it kinda uncouth to try to unmark this guy? He wants to be anonymous, this seems pretty stalker-y to me. EDIT: not to mention potentially damaging peoples reputations by incorrectly accusing them.
- wcummings 13y agoUnmask
- saraid216 13y agoSatoshi Nakamoto: single-handedly turning HN into a tabloid magazine for the cryptographic paparazzi. Except that no one gets paid, so that makes it okay, right?
- toxickg 13y agoSatoshi Nakamoto = SN. Nick Szabo = NS. SN & NS.
- Doctor_Fegg 13y agoHere's a couple more stylistic quirks that jump out on a very cursory glance at Nakamoto's public postings. (Disclaimer: I know nothing about Bitcoin but am a pretty experienced copy-editor. None of these are remotely conclusive, just more incremental evidence.) Satoshi Nakamoto uses double spaces after sentence-final; so does Nick Szabo. "Interestingly" is a distinctive word, especially at sentence-initial. Both Nakamoto and Szabo use this. Hyphenated "e-mail" has been on the way out for a few years; I still use it but I've been in a minority for a long time. Again, both Nakamoto and Szabo use this. (I'd be interested to see if anyone can find Szabo starting paragraphs with "Right, ...": that's a definite tic in Nakamoto's postings.)
- Mikeb85 13y ago> Satoshi Nakamoto uses double spaces after sentence-final; so does Nick Szabo. So does every single person of my generation who went through the Canadian school system (and no doubt others world-wide). Double spaces after sentences is 100% standard here. In fact, it was only recently I found out some people use a single space...
- atondwal 13y ago> "Interestingly" is a distinctive word, especially at sentence-initial. Both Nakamoto and Szabo use this. > (I'd be interested to see if anyone can find Szabo starting paragraphs with "Right, ...": that's a definite tic in Nakamoto's postings.) AFAIK these are both extremely common among [CS, Math, Physics] professors.
- gwern 13y agoSee also the reddit discussion http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ruluz/satoshi_nakamoto_is_probably_nick_szabo/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ruluz/satoshi_naka... and in particular, my criticisms: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ruluz/satoshi_nakamoto_is_probably_nick_szabo/cdr2vgu http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ruluz/satoshi_naka...
- pretense 13y agoThis whole thing reads like "Bible Code" logic. I went looking for an obscure pattern and found an inconclusive curiosity, therefore, apocalypse!
- dylanhassinger 13y agoSounds pretty legit. But I'm wondering, where does the NSA paper “How to Make a Mint” fit into this story? http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money... Could contributor Tatsuaki Okamoto be Nick’s partner? Satoshi Nakamoto kinda sounds like a combination of their names. Maybe Nick was the ideator/philosopher/writer, and Tatsuaki was the programmer/crypto nerd?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wxspll 13y ago+Satoshi Obana
- jccalhoun 13y agoClearly Satoshi Nakamoto is the guy who did the Max Headroom pirate broadcast.
- ekm2 13y ago>Repeated use of expression “trusted third party” That is like saying you uniquely identified someone based on repeated use of the expression "Q.E.D" in a mathematics paper.
- stevewillows 13y agoIs there also a chance that whoever Satoshi is asked Nick to write a paper, since he would understand the content and technology?
- l0stb0y 13y agoThe Feds created Bitcoin and used it as a honeypot. The whole currency will dissolve due to its links to the criminal underground. That's my guess...