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From a limited experience with either of their writings, I don't think it's Szabo. I've read a lot of Satoshi's emails and Satoshi's writing style seems at the
by Aqueous 13y ago
From a limited experience with either of their writings, I don't think it's Szabo. I've read a lot of Satoshi's emails and Satoshi's writing style seems at the same time less academically formal but also more technical. Nick Szabo's writing, at least on his blog, seems less technical but more academically formal. Nick Szabo also seems to heavily discuss history and historical concepts. I do not see a lot of technical content on his blog. Satoshi seems to have a greater command of - and focus on - computers. This doesn't rule out the possibility the Szabo is some kind of Newton-like polymath who has command of a vast quantity of knowledge, but it seems more likely that Satoshi is more technical-minded than broad-based in his knowledge, despite being very smart. They might use a lot of the same phrases and idioms but this could just be a function of the fact that Satoshi was heavily influenced by Szabo. Regardless if they are writing about the same topic they are likely to use a LOT of the same words and phrases, and it might be more useful to filter out any words or phrases that are specific to the topic at hand.
- michaelt 13y agoIf your aim is not to be identified, I can understand keeping your mouth shut about matters of opinion, especially if you hold distinctive opinions you have given out in public before. One of Ulbricht's reported failings [1] was talking about Mises and the Austrian School as both Ulbricht and DPR. Keeping your anonymous persona's mouth shut about history, politics, economics, sociology, art theory and human nature is good 'opsec'. [1] http://grugq.github.io/blog/2013/10/09/it-was-dpr/ http://grugq.github.io/blog/2013/10/09/it-was-dpr/
- cpleppert 13y agoExcept that Nick Szabo's main interest in bit gold was to stop inflation. He says flat out that "the most pernicious of which has probably been inflation" when discussing problems with money. That seems to also be a main motivation behind bitcoin was well(at least from the early proponents who seemed to be more philosophically motivated than they were by practical considerations)
- michaelt 13y agoFor sure you'd expect the creators of cryptocurrencies to have certain opinions in common, such as disliking the flaws of fiat currencies. I'm thinking more in terms of expressing multiple opinions that come together to give a fingerprint. To use a computer analogy, if I told you I run Firefox I haven't told you much, but if (in a single post or across many) I tell people I run Firefox, OS X 10.7, flashblock, and I refuse to run the Java plugin? Taken together that's a fingerprint that could really narrow down a list of suspects (even if it didn't uniquely identify a single individual). A set of political opinions could serve the same purpose, if they're distinctive enough.
- fchollet 13y agoI would tend to agree with you: the Bitcoin client looks like the work of a developer, not that of an academic. So it would not have been created by Szabo. The author of the blog post mentions that Szabo could have had technical collaborators, so maybe he could just have been the person writing the Bitcoin paper.