4 ms·

A paper gives you dozens of phrases through which you could fish for the ones that point towards your desired author, if you wanted. It's sort of like how given

A paper gives you dozens of phrases through which you could fish for the ones that point towards your desired author, if you wanted. It's sort of like how given a list of my inheritable traits and two potential fathers, you could make a list with a few traits that match with either one of them. If the list is long enough (say you have thousands of SNPs to root through), you might even be able to find a few _rare_ traits that match. [Edit: speaking of which, interesting to see that a past attempt to out Satoshi claimed a combination of textual and other evidence pointed at a particular group of researchers who filed a patent right before bitcoin.org was bought: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto] The poster's suggesting they ran an automated analysis against a bunch of authors, and that it clearly pointed to Nick. Particularly if _still_ it points that way even if restricted to content-neutral phrases (so it effectively picked Nick out of all crypto researchers, not just out of those that talk about timestamp servers etc.), that's more persuasive: programs won't fish (though you could still repeatedly change the algorithm until it gets the result you want). Publishing it would be interesting. As is, this is interesting but seems preliminary or shallow--doesn't deal with any other text Satoshi or Nick wrote, doesn't deal with code, and doesn't give us full raw data or scripts. I'm not sure Satoshi is Nick Szabo. Also, the post-dating had occurred by the Oct 17, 2009 Wayback Machine crawl, but the post content didn't visibly change, only the date. I have no idea if it was anything interesting or not.

cs02rm0 13y ago
Publishing the program would be interesting. And persuasive, if it's all as suggested.
twotwotwo 13y ago
Ha, I don't think this has any value as evidence, but it's kind of funny that in a comment on one of the eventually-postdated blog posts (originally April 2008), Nick explained that the mechanics of the bit gold market would be nonobvious to most people and therefore the idea could use a demonstration project, and asked, "Anybody want to help me code one up?" http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.html http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.ht...
- gwern 13y ago
  That's evidence against Satoshi=Szabo; IIRC, somewhere Satoshi says he started coding up the prototype in 2007, so if Szabo is suggesting someone write it in 2008...
  - jferguson 13y ago
    Or it could be intentional misdirection, as with "favour". Not that I'm particularly invested in Satoshi==Szabo, but if I were interested in deflecting suspicion, that would be one obvious-looking way to do it.
  - twotwotwo 13y ago
    If I saw strong evidence Szabo wrote some of Satoshi's words (and I haven't yet!), then maybe someone took him up in Apr 2008, they pretty quickly refined some things and got 0.1 out the door, Szabo contributed some text, and they changed the post date to after Bitcoin's release/threw in some British spellings/made incorrect claims about when work started [or the implementer really had started earlier, or something] to add noise for anyone trying to trace Satoshi back to actual people. Still, that all kind of assumes there was 11-dimensional chess going on to conceal who worked on Bitcoin, and I think the reality was likely simpler. However, that scenario would allow for some of Szabo's post-Bitcoin statements to be sincere even if he was involved: could be true that he hasn't audited the code and that he's not entirely sure if certain bit gold -> Bitcoin changes are features or bugs, since any refiner/implementer presumably had some independence and collaborators never agree on everything. And Szabo being involved is at least a saner notion than previous ones: we at least know he found proof-of-work e-gold interesting. But I'm speaking without having dug deeply into what they both wrote, which would probably probably a prereq for developing useful priors. I don't think I know much here, and I certainly don't think the comment alone is evidence for Satoshi=Szabo (or Satoshi-involved-Szabo).
  - twotwotwo 13y ago
    Another thought 'cause I can't stop myself: if Satoshi is a collaboration, anyone outing themselves as part of it is making it harder for others to keep their roles secret. So if Nick + friend(s) were Satoshi, you couldn't well expect him to talk about it.

cs02rm0 13y ago

Publishing the program would be interesting. And persuasive, if it's all as suggested.

twotwotwo 13y ago

Ha, I don't think this has any value as evidence, but it's kind of funny that in a comment on one of the eventually-postdated blog posts (originally April 2008), Nick explained that the mechanics of the bit gold market would be nonobvious to most people and therefore the idea could use a demonstration project, and asked, "Anybody want to help me code one up?" http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.html http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.ht...

gwern 13y ago
That's evidence against Satoshi=Szabo; IIRC, somewhere Satoshi says he started coding up the prototype in 2007, so if Szabo is suggesting someone write it in 2008...
- jferguson 13y ago
  Or it could be intentional misdirection, as with "favour". Not that I'm particularly invested in Satoshi==Szabo, but if I were interested in deflecting suspicion, that would be one obvious-looking way to do it.
- twotwotwo 13y ago
  If I saw strong evidence Szabo wrote some of Satoshi's words (and I haven't yet!), then maybe someone took him up in Apr 2008, they pretty quickly refined some things and got 0.1 out the door, Szabo contributed some text, and they changed the post date to after Bitcoin's release/threw in some British spellings/made incorrect claims about when work started [or the implementer really had started earlier, or something] to add noise for anyone trying to trace Satoshi back to actual people. Still, that all kind of assumes there was 11-dimensional chess going on to conceal who worked on Bitcoin, and I think the reality was likely simpler. However, that scenario would allow for some of Szabo's post-Bitcoin statements to be sincere even if he was involved: could be true that he hasn't audited the code and that he's not entirely sure if certain bit gold -> Bitcoin changes are features or bugs, since any refiner/implementer presumably had some independence and collaborators never agree on everything. And Szabo being involved is at least a saner notion than previous ones: we at least know he found proof-of-work e-gold interesting. But I'm speaking without having dug deeply into what they both wrote, which would probably probably a prereq for developing useful priors. I don't think I know much here, and I certainly don't think the comment alone is evidence for Satoshi=Szabo (or Satoshi-involved-Szabo).
- twotwotwo 13y ago
  Another thought 'cause I can't stop myself: if Satoshi is a collaboration, anyone outing themselves as part of it is making it harder for others to keep their roles secret. So if Nick + friend(s) were Satoshi, you couldn't well expect him to talk about it.