3 ms·

Can it help to find the real author of bitcoin?

• gwern 12y ago
  Hard to say. This is analogous to drug testing or terrorist hunting: even if you have a highly accurate test, you're going to want to apply it to thousands of programmers, and suddenly, when you do the Bayesian calculation, your high accuracy turns out to still be a low probability of having correctly identified the true author. And then you have to justify your closed-world assumption: how do you know Satoshi (under his real name) was even in your dataset? Maybe after Bitcoin he went back to closed-source work or commercial projects, and none of his source code other than Bitcoin appears in your dataset. Then the guy your analysis picked out isn't 'Satoshi' so much as 'the guy who looks the most like Satoshi (but actually isn't)'.
  • avodonosov 12y ago
    We can find a number suspects, and then analyze other facts about them.