
Satoshi Nakamoto is probably Nick Szabo? - _ntka
https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-nick-szabo/
======
kevinpet
You 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.

~~~
cracker_jacks
I agree there the two phrases are not independent, but the joint probability
of both events is mathematically guaranteed to be lower than the probability
either event alone. As we add more phrases (events) to this distribution, it
becomes exponentially less likely to be someone else.

~~~
darkmighty
The problem is also a sample bias I think. He clearly hand picked low
probability words as evidence.

In other words, the probability that there exists a subset of words in a pair
of papers that are "globally rare" among cryptography papers is likely high.

So to answer P(Nick|Evidence) we can't use ~P(selected subset|crypto), we
better use ~P(all words|crypto) and _compare_ that to all other plausible
sources.

As a clarifying anecdote, remember low probability events happen all the time
if the sample space is simply large. Throw a dice ~8 times in a row an the
probability of that event is lower than winning the lottery or getting hit by
lightning, yet it happens every time. If you pick every word from the source
paper and multiply their relative frequencies out, you will get a number
_astronomically low_ , and that happens for any paper.

------
Doctor_Fegg
Here'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
> 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...

------
conductor
He 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
The 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.

~~~
maaku
Like Nick's blog?

~~~
foobarqux
Probably not similar enough in style to e-mail messages but maybe. You would
also need control sets.

------
sirsar
I 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://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://szabo.best.vwh.net/)

Additionally, his blogspot:
[http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/](http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/)

~~~
Aqueous
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
If 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
Except 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
For 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.

------
dylanhassinger
Sounds 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...](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm)

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?

~~~
wxspll
+Satoshi Obana

------
overgard
Do we really need to dox this guy?

~~~
kybernetikos
Yeah. 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.

~~~
adventured
There are somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 centa-millionaires in North
America. If Nick is Satoshi Nakamoto, he may need to take basic precautions,
but otherwise is likely to be fine.

~~~
kybernetikos
Those 'basic precautions' will not be cheap and would probably require the
liquidation of some of their bitcoins since they probably aren't anything like
as wealthy in non-bitcoin terms. Liquidating their bitcoins would damage their
psuedonymity, which is something that they are clearly not keen to do.

The other thing is that most of those centa-millionaires are not keeping their
holdings entirely in cash that can be moved quickly in large quantities
psuedonymously requiring only a small piece of information likely to be held
by Satoshi.

Certainly, securing multi-millionaires is not an insoluable problem (although
it fails sometimes), but I think that Satoshi is likely to be in a situation
that make the consequences of being unmasked particularly dangerous and the
difficulty of measures to keep safe particularly onerous.

------
27182818284
The 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
"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
> 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.

~~~
betterunix
You make it sound like cryptographers were stumped by the problem of digital
cash. In fact, the cryptography research community had basically solved that
problem; the only difference between Bitcoin and the academic constructions is
that Bitcoin does not have any central bank. There were almost no
cryptographers trying to find a way to remove the central bank from digital
cash systems when Satoshi came along. Nobody should be surprised by that, as
there is still no rigorous definition of digital cash that does not invoke a
central bank or authority of some kind. Had Satoshi presented such a
definition, he would have unquestionably "shown up" cryptography researchers.

At best, all you can say is that Satoshi demonstrated that cryptographers were
solving the wrong problem with digital cash. That, however, was not news in
2008. Cryptographers had thought that credit card payments were too insecure
to make sense on the Internet; the failure of DigiCash and related efforts in
the 90s proved otherwise.

------
brianbreslin
I 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
Not 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
The 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
To 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.

~~~
gibybo
Ah yes, I forgot about checkpointing. The reference client has certain blocks
hardcoded in it to signal the official chain. Only transactions in blocks made
after the latest checkpoint can be overridden in a way that the reference
client would accept. So to steal Satoshi's coins, you would also have to get
people to switch to your own client with different checkpoints. At this point,
it really wouldn't even be Bitcoin anymore.

------
ratsbane
Whoever 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
I 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...

------
natch
A 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.

------
wcummings
Am 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
Unmask _

------
ibudiallo
And 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
My thoughts exactly. I got a followup question, who is the blog posts author?
Posting such statements anonymously is just low.

~~~
gwern
Especially since, thus far anyway, they have not responded to any of the
criticism or even approved any of the comments submitted.

------
desireco42
Oh please, just leave man alone. If he/she wanted publicity, he would come out
himself, or herself.

------
cracker_jacks
His 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
His analysis is pretty terrible. He seems to have made up the method on his
own without consulting established authorship attribution scholarship.

~~~
cracker_jacks
I 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.

------
tolmasky
Are 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.

~~~
gwern
Machine translation doesn't work:
[http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~sa499/papers/adversarial_stylometr...](http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~sa499/papers/adversarial_stylometry.pdf)
"Adversarial Stylometry: Circumventing Authorship Recognition to Preserve
Privacy and Anonymity" Brennan et al 2013

Fortunately, simply trying to write like someone else does.

~~~
nikatwork
Perhaps Satoshi Nakamoto should have written in faux-Engrish in order to
really confuse people.

I can see choosing an affected writing style becoming an integral part of
creating an anonymous persona.

------
atmosx
What is the purpose of identifying who Satoshi is at this point?

~~~
jrochkind1
What is the purpose of 'Satoshi' remaining anonymous/psuedonymous at this
point?

~~~
chime
I 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.

~~~
jrochkind1
we've all got our preferences I guess.

------
oleganza
Please 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.

------
rasengan
Give this man his privacy.

------
gojomo
Another 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.

------
gwern
See also the reddit discussion
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ruluz/satoshi_naka...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ruluz/satoshi_nakamoto_is_probably_nick_szabo/)
and in particular, my criticisms:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ruluz/satoshi_naka...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ruluz/satoshi_nakamoto_is_probably_nick_szabo/cdr2vgu)

------
Aqueous
Finney 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
Bitcoin 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
One 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
Btw, 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.

------
Houshalter
I 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.

------
rheide
To 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.

------
simbolit
Why is it important who Satoshi is?

~~~
CitizenKane
It's important because whoever Satoshi is controls a significant number of
bitcoins [1]. This gives them a large ability to affect the market for
bitcoins and is a potential risk if they ever choose to do so. I'm sure for
many people, they'd like to protect their investments into bitcoin, so knowing
the identity of Satoshi is important to them.

[1] [http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/bitcoin-mints-its-first-
bil...](http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/bitcoin-mints-its-first-billionaire-
satoshi-nakamoto)

~~~
joosters
How does this relate to knowing who Satoshi is? Are you implying that Bitcoin
investors should pressurise or threaten Satoshi in some way? That is
disturbing...

~~~
CitizenKane
Whoa, talking about going overboard. I'm implying no such thing.

What I am saying is that if you're investing into bitcoin it's intelligent to
know what you're getting into. Satoshi currently controls around 12% of all
bitcoins. And even with the maximum number Satoshi will control 7% of all
bitcoins.

This is huge potential to disrupt the market and knowing what the person or
people who are Satoshi might do has a potentially huge investment impact.
Hence the reason that people have the desire to know who Satoshi is.

~~~
joosters
And you think that if you know the true name of Satoshi, you will have a
chance of knowing what they might do? How exactly does that work? Will they
suddenly put up their hand and say "Yup, it's me. From now on, I'm going to
give advance notice of everything I will do that is bitcoin related" ? That
makes no sense.

So, there's a wallet with a large number of bitcoins in it. Does it matter who
owns it? Is it likely that the owner (named or otherwise unknown) is going to
give you a heads-up before they sell any?

------
mml
Do 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).

~~~
officemonkey
"Colour" and "favour" are predominate in every English-speaking country except
the U.S. (eg: Canada prefers "colour.")

~~~
arrrg
Yeah, 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
It'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.

~~~
arrrg
Are English teachers in many European countries native speakers?

I have only very limited experience, but from my experience in Bavaria
(education is a state responsibility in Germany, that’s why I’m constantly
only talking about Bavaria) I can say that none of the foreign-language
teachers I’m aware of (of any available foreign language, English, French,
Spanish, Czech) were native speakers. They were all Germans.

------
gruseom
I wonder what randomwalker, who has done serious research on textual
deanonymization, thinks about this.

~~~
gwern
I've suggested it to him in the past. He apparently is not interested.

------
EGreg
I 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
_JK 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
So in this case, can we go further and analyze Satoshi's posts and emails?

------
oleganza
Can we find code written by Szabo and see find if the style or certain idioms
are close to Bitcoin 0.1?

------
jccalhoun
Clearly Satoshi Nakamoto is the guy who did the Max Headroom pirate broadcast.

------
twotwotwo
The "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.

------
ekm2
>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.

------
saraid216
Satoshi 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
Satoshi Nakamoto = SN. Nick Szabo = NS. SN & NS.

------
daraosn
[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25854.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25854.0)

------
stevewillows
Is there also a chance that whoever Satoshi is asked Nick to write a paper,
since he would understand the content and technology?

------
mebreuer
This is how a witch hunt begins - if he wanted everyone to know his name, he
wouldn't be using a pseudonym.

------
joshguthrie
Okay, 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/))

------
skizm
Are 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.

------
andrewljohnson
It 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
Could 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.

~~~
wmf
If 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
Thanks 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
That 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.

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par
Even if it is him, leave him be. I don't want the feds on his ass! :p

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l0stb0y
The 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...

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bachback
Very unlikely. Much more likely explanation is that Satoshi was influenced by
him and uses similar terms. AFAIK Szabo is a lawyer / historian.

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betterunix
"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
Did 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
Did 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.

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tux
If Nick is Satoshi then its brilliant idea. Because it removes any heat from
him while having shit load of BitCoins ^_^

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ronnier
I am only certain of one thing when it comes to bitcoin, the creator(s) are
not Japanese.

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highCs
This is unfortunate that the described method tends to prove nothing.

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pretense
This whole thing reads like "Bible Code" logic.

    
    
      I went looking for an obscure pattern and found an inconclusive curiosity, therefore, apocalypse!

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pearjuice
People still chasing this guy? Bitcoin has much bigger problems than the
identity of its inventor(s).

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sard420
oh oh.. this again.

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faragon
Repeat after me: correlation does not imply causation.

~~~
fiatjaf
Nobody is trying to discover any causation here.

