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Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto, the Inventor of Bitcoin
- kbar13 13y agoI am Satoshi
- AdrianRossouw 13y agoi am spartacus
- Robby2012 13y agoNo, I am Satoshi
- Aqwis 13y agoLink to full post: http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/03/11/nick-szabo-is-satoshi-nakamoto-the-inventor-of-bitcoin/ http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/03/11/nick-szabo-is-satoshi...
- awt 13y agoWhy has no one spoken with Nick Szabo?
- Aqueous 13y agoThey have. He's denied it.
- marcell 13y agoDo you remember where you saw this?
- codezero 13y agoCan you give a link to where he's denied it? I haven't seen anything.
- Aqueous 13y agohttp://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/all/1 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/all/1 Wired, weirdly, didn't quote his denial. They just said he denied it. On his blog, he also suggested that Finney or Dai might be Satoshi. I'm inclined to believe it's him. He's been writing about this topic passionately for years. Weirdly, though, he was still writing about "Bit Gold" and Hal Finney's attempt at an implementation in December 2008, after Satoshi posted the BitCoin whitepaper which is very, very strikingly exactly an implementation of his concept (with some major improvements, obviously), which he made no mention of. He also seems so prolific on his blog - writing post after post of greatly historically informed academic research - that I just don't know how he would find the time to implement BitGold. I also have not seen any of his other programming projects, and so I don't know whether or not he's a good enough C++ engineer to implement it successfully. But of all the people so far he seems to be the best candidate.
- awt 13y agoThanks.
- Aqueous 13y agoHe discusses fake name use in this post to Cypherpunks List in 1993. He also mentions "Digicash" in the same thread. http://borg.uu3.net/ldetweil/medusa/originals/unpleasant http://borg.uu3.net/ldetweil/medusa/originals/unpleasant "In my limited experience creating Internet pseudonyms, I've been quite distracted by the continual need to avoid leaving pointers to my True Name lying around -- excess mail to/from my True Name, shared files, common peculiarities (eg misspellings in written text), traceable logins, etc. The penet.fi site explicitly maintains a list of pointers to the original address. All kinds of security controls -- crypto, access, information, inference -- have to be continually on my mind when using pseudonymous accounts. The hazards are everywhere. With our current tools it's practically impossible to maintain an active pseudonym for a long period of time against a sufficiently determined opponent, and quite a hassle to maintain even a modicum of decent security. Pointers to info and/or tools to enable the establishment and maintenance of a net.nym, beyond the standard cypherpunks PGP/remailer fare with which I'm now familiar, greatly appreciated. Especially nice would be a list of commercial net providers that allow pseudonymous accounts.""
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- kzrdude 13y agoI like that the linked blog has high quality ads: Real book recommendations, and links to individual books. Instead of brand-spam, a potentially useful product. Only way it could be better would be to recommend books directly relevant to the blog post topic.
- markbao 13y agoJust for some background, previous discussion on the referenced article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6828169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6828169 Gwern's response on Reddit refuting it: 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...
- carsongross 13y agoRegardless if he is or if he isn't, his essays are unbelievably good: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ http://szabo.best.vwh.net/
- markbao 13y agoFolks seem to really like [0] his writing. Anything you recommend starting with? [0]: See sidebar on his blog: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/ http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/
- carsongross 13y agoI loved this one: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/02/irreducible-complexity-of-society.html http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/02/irreducible-complex... But any random post of his is likely to be intensely interesting, even if you don't agree with some of his conclusions.
- quchen 13y ago> I’m sure it’s <name> tl;dr: bullshit article
- patmcc 13y ago>>>"One was her observation that he put two spaces after a period" Wait, was that actually one the reasons Dorian was labelled as Satoshi? Because that's true of a huge number of people. Many people who learned on a typewriter (like my parents), or who were taught touch-typing formally by those who were (like my wife) still do this. It's hardly rare enough to be any kind of discriminator.
- dllthomas 13y ago"It's hardly rare enough to be any kind of discriminator." Something that's true of 50% of the population under consideration, and which is uncorrelated with other measures, is still a bit of information.
- mpyne 13y ago> Wait, was that actually one the reasons Dorian was labelled as Satoshi? She mentioned it, but the Newsweek storied mentioned that in the context of other (but unspecified) formatting quirks and not just double-spaces.
- auctiontheory 13y ago"Those who know don't tell. Those who tell don't know." -Onngh Yanngh
- gkoberger 13y agoYeah, we've thought for a long time he's probably involved. Along with other people (he almost definitely didn't write the code); Satoshi likely isn't just one person. That being said, what's the point of articles like this? We will never know unless Satoshi chooses to reveal himself/themselves and proves it with a pgp key. Which won't happen. Otherwise, it's just idle speculation.
- jonny_eh 13y agoThe point is that Newsweek is very likely wrong.
- caycep 13y agoThere's probably some bayesian probability analysis that shows how likely each candidate is
- lotsofmangos 13y agoI suspect it would keep coming up with probably not any of them, given the likely size of the pool compared to the number of candidates available for analysis.
- nly 13y agoA Bayesian approach would likely show how flawed linguistic analysis is. a false positive rate of say 0.1%, for example, over the 7 or so billion people who aren't satoshi would be huge
- fchollet 13y agoThe blogger who suggested this hypothesis a few months ago has a new post, with a stylometric analysis of the writings of some cryptocurrency people: http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/occams-razor-who-is-most-likely-to-be-satoshi-nakamoto/ http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/occams-razor-w... (a smaller score mean a closer match. Not sure what scores stand for precisely). Word length distribution Diff Nick Szabo / Bitcoin: 0.160 Diff Wei Dai / Bitcoin: 0.241 Diff David Chaum / Bitcoin: 0.257 Diff Adam Back / Bitcoin: 0.337 Diff Hal Finney / Bitcoin: 0.510 Character frequency distribution Diff Nick Szabo / Bitcoin: 0.191 Diff Wei Dai / Bitcoin: 0.208 Diff David Chaum / Bitcoin: 0.228 Diff Hal Finney / Bitcoin: 0.284 Diff Adam Back / Bitcoin: 0.342
- greendestiny 13y agoStatistical analyses rely on assumptions of sample independence and random selection that are pretty hard to justify with something like this. Are all the articles on the same topic? Are they written for the same audience? Are the works independent or is there copying and/or inspiration being shared?
- lotsofmangos 13y agoSzabo’s achievement is good news for me because we have a similarity. He was a law professor. They are not supposed to invent new and useful things. Not saying he's wrong, but this reeks of confirmation bias.
- TrainedMonkey 13y ago"The clincher, for me, is that he wrote an article about the emergence of money that is compatible with my theory of human evolution." Apparently author really wants Nick Szabo to be creator of bitcoin because they have similar views. Previous four reasons given are way better compared to reasoning used in Newsweek article, however it is still nowhere near enough to assert that Nick Szabo is Satoshi.
- jonny_eh 13y agoBoth the title and URL of this HN post need to change.
- kolev 13y agoI think, more likely, it's Jed McCaleb. Also, I think a person who so carefully is trying to conserve his identity and was capable enough to come up with Bitcoin, will possibly hide his linguistic tracks as well.
- prawn 13y agoI'm not so sure about hiding those tracks. Surely creating something big is challenge enough that you'd put all of your efforts towards mobilising your early adopters rather than hiding tracks just in case you became successful.
- waterfowl 13y agoWhat? The guy outs satoshi(supposedly) and then puts a plug in for his "Shangri-La Diet" as a great advance in health?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- sktrdie 13y agoI'm extremely curious in understanding why he wanted to be anonymous when publishing his idea of Bitcoin. Nobody could possibly have anticipated that Bitcoin would become the most used crypto-currency today. Many experts from the cryptography mailing list were quick at discarding his idea from the beginning, so I can't imagine Satoshi wanting to remain anonymous in case Bitcoin would become a billion dollar business and people would start going after him for his money. This is why I believe Satoshi is probably just some brilliant person who's name is actually Satoshi Nakamoto (not Dorian).
- fchollet 13y agoThere are not that many people named Satoshi Nakamoto, a few hundreds, and we have the complete list. A number of journalists (most lately NYT's Hiroko Tabuchi) have looked into these people, and found no match (if you ignore Dorian, who has clearly nothing to do with BTC).
- sentenza 13y agoMaybe it is the other way round. He didn't want to damage his professional reputation which could have happened if important and vocal members of the crypto community had declared that they thought the project ridiculous. Just like Carlo Pedersoli renamed himself Bud Spencer so as not to damage his good reputation as an olympian athlete with his movies.
- AdrianRossouw 13y agoman, i don't know if i will ever be comfortable making any kind of judgement based primarily on stylometric analysis like that. I could consider it supporting evidence in a mountain of otherwise overwhelming evidence, but I never anything to base a decision off of. Are we going to end up having some kind of anonymizer that uses snippets taken from spam mails to compose emails, like a digital surveillance age mash up of spam lit and using words cut out from magazines for a ransom note? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_Lit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_Lit
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]