
I know who 'Satoshi Nakamoto' is, says Ted Nelson - moondowner
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/19/ted_nelson_thinks_hes_outed_bitcoins_nakamoto/
======
clarkm
This is almost certainly wrong.

If you spend any time at all reading about history of Bitcoin and other
related currencies, it's clear that Satoshi was a cypherpunk. And at least an
active lurker, if not a well-known participant, in the cypherpunks mailing
list during the 1990s and early 2000s. Just look at the sources in the bitcoin
paper. Satoshi cites lots of cypherpunks, and not many mainstream academics.
The code borrows time-stamping ideas from Usenet and takes inspiration from
command-and-control architectures of IRC botnets.

The pieces of the puzzle are:

\- (1997) Adam Back's hashcash proof of work system

\- (1998) Wei Dai's b-money

\- (1998-2005) Nick Szabo's writings about git gold

\- (2004) Hal Finney's reusable proof of work (RPOW)

Satoshi brought these ideas -- _cypherpunk ideas_ \-- together to make
Bitcoin, not the ideas about improving Chaumian blind signatures and anonymous
e-cash that were being discussed in the academic crypto literature of the
time. Remember, cypherpunks (and others inspired by Tim May's crypto-anarchy)
have a long history of communicating anonymously. Anonymous remailers and
pseudonyms were expected on the list, so it's not unusual to see Satoshi
Nakamoto come out of this tradition.

There are probably people that know who the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, but
they're not going to tell. They're cypherpunks, after all. And if Satoshi
stays anonymous, it just means that everything is going _exactly as planned_.

~~~
kanzure
Here are some emails and headers that you might be interested in:

<http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/>

phrases: <http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/phrases.txt>

He might be one of these people: [http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-
satoshi/p2p-research-mem...](http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-
satoshi/p2p-research-members.txt)

Here are some forum posts timestamps: <http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-
satoshi/datetimes.yaml>

I also feel it is necessary to point out that it is completely possible to
spoof forum posts to match his writing style and C++ idioms. So there might be
someone posing as a "second satoshi" waiting to be discovered by phrase
analysis. This is one of the vulnerabilities of his pseudonym.

Happy hacking.

~~~
clicks
Wait, what, why are you guys ascribing so much importance to the dating
format? yyyy-mm-dd _is_ the format I've been using for a long, long time, and
I have no affiliation with cypherpunks nor have I ever had any. I know a lot
of non-programmers who use it too. It's just a good, solid, sensical time
format (largest to smallest, just like we already tell time: hh:mm:ss). I
think I first came across the idea of using it in everyday situations like 5
years ago on some gaming forums.

You should all use it too, because it just makes too much sense. :)

No, seriously, _please_ start using yyyy-mm-dd whenever wherever you can. It
is most especially useful when you're doing text analysis, makes life very
easy there.

~~~
kanzure
Well, no.

The file "datetimes.yaml" contains a list of serialized ISO 8601 timestamps
because that's how you represent timestamps in yaml. These timestamps
represent the different timestamps that bitcointalk.org gives to the posts
made by the Satoshi pseudonym.

I am not implying that anyone who uses ISO 8601 might be Satoshi. Rather, I am
providing you with a list of timestamps in ISO 8601 format. I am making no
claims about how Satoshi tends to write timestamps (and I don't remember if I
even looked at that, I think I got bored).

These timestamps can be used to determine which timezone he is a member of, or
which timezone he wanted you to think he was a member of, or to compare
against other email headers. For example, I would love to compare this data
against a historically-accurate cypherpunk email archive. (I do not have one
at the moment.)

However, he could have written some small amount of software to delay the
posts he wrote to the forum, but some of them look very timely. He could also
have written software to delay the times that his posts were posted, to make
it sync up with the timestamps of another cypherpunk member (which would be
hilarious and evil).

I think a more thorough analysis would have to look at each individual Satoshi
forum post and determine whether or not it was written "probably delayed",
because sometimes the delta between the post he wrote and the post he was
replying to was very tiny, which would improve the chances that he was not on
a delay timer (unless he spoofed all questions he replied to, which I also
doubt).

~~~
clicks
Oh, so bringing up his timestamps was for that... you guys weren't talking
about the format per se. Sorry about that, completely my fault for
misunderstanding.

------
betterunix
Utter nonsense; no mathematician would have created Bitcoin. Mathematicians
_criticize_ cryptographers for _not being rigorous enough_ in their proofs.
Bitcoin _does not even have a formal security definition_ , let alone any kind
of proof.

Anyone who is looking at professional cryptographers or accomplished
researchers is looking in the wrong place. Bitcoin is the work of amateurs and
enthusiasts, the sort of people who flood sci.crypt with claims about new
cryptosystems and ignore the experts who still take the time to post there. It
only caught on because it appeals to libertarians and anarchists, and
eventually was promoted enough that mainstream media outlets were afraid that
they would be left behind on reporting "the next big thing."

~~~
reedlaw
A pretty harsh appraisal of a system that is already trusted with accounting
for over a billion dollars worth of digital assets. Can you give some examples
of other cryptographic systems of comparable complexity being used at scale
for years without major incident? Message encryption, TLS, and Secure Shell
are generally trusted as being secure, but all pale in comparison to the
complexity of bitcoin in terms of what they attempt to achieve. Yes, bitcoin
is vulnerable to a 51% network attack, but I believe there is a social
engineering-type security built into the protocol. That is, early adopters are
incentivized by easy block rewards and currency appreciation potential. But
they also take the greater risk of 51% network attack. As bitcoin takes off,
mining becomes more decentralized and less vulnerable to 51% attack. Just last
week we saw this: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5696596> (Bitcoin
Network Speed 8 Times Faster than Top 500 Supercomputers Combined)

~~~
betterunix
"A pretty harsh appraisal of a system that is already trusted with accounting
for over a billion dollars worth of digital assets."

That it is popular does _not_ demonstrate that it was not designed by amateurs
and enthusiasts. Many popular systems were hacked together by amateurs.
Fidonet was the work of amateurs -- a global computer network that _remains_
in use to this very day.

It is also _not_ the case that systems trusted with large amounts of money
must necessarily be secure. If the past 20 years have taught us anything, it
is that security is not even within the consciousness of most users of payment
systems, at least when it comes to online payments. That credit cards were
_ever_ used for Internet payments, rather than Chaum's systems, should be
proof enough of that. All that standards between most people's bank accounts
and a potential thief is a password, yet there is little demand for smartcards
or other more secure systems.

"Message encryption, TLS, and Secure Shell are generally trusted as being
secure, but all pale in comparison to the complexity of bitcoin in terms of
what they attempt to achieve"

Why separate encryption from TLS and SSH? TLS and SSH _are_ encryption (and
authentication) systems. Here, on the other hand, is a secure multiparty
computation system that has served a large user base for over a decade without
major incident:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixmaster_anonymous_remailer>

The most major attack on remailers so far was the recent attempt to de-
anonymize the Pittsburgh bomb threats. It is unclear if the FBI was able to
break the security of Mixmaster even after compromising numerous remailers; a
man has been indicted, but the evidence (last I checked) remains secret. It
seems unlikely, unless the FBI had compromised all the remailers except for
the ones they raided prior to their investigation; that would mean that the
FBI had effectively compromised _the whole network_ , which is beyond what any
secure computation system can protect against.

Similarly, there is the Danish Sugar Beet Auction system. This system has
fewer workers than Mixmaster, and certainly less than Bitcoin, but it was
designed and engineered by prominent researchers and serves thousands of users
(only a slightly smaller scale than Bitcoin). The system has been used for a
few years now:

<http://fc09.ifca.ai/papers/15_Secure_MPC_goes_live.pdf>

"Yes, bitcoin is vulnerable to a 51% network attack"

Let's be _very_ clear here: Bitcoin is not merely vulnerable to a majority of
_parties_ behaving maliciously; that would be acceptable in a multiparty
computation system. What Bitcoin is vulnerable to is _one_ party working just
slightly harder than all the other parties. In other words, a single malicious
party, working in polynomial time, can successfully attack Bitcoin (whatever
the definition of a successful attack actually is). The attack allows one
party to deny confirmations on transactions involving another party. It allows
one party to double-spend the currency. It allows one party to prevent other
parties from being paid for mining.

This is why I said Bitcoin is the work of amateurs and enthusiasts. This is
the sort of attack that nobody in the cryptography research community would
consider acceptable. This is not merely a disconnected between theory and
practice (as is the case with PGP, TLS, and Mixmaster, all of which diverge
somewhat from their theoretical foundations); the vulnerability exists in the
very design of the Bitcoin protocol.

There are other signs that Bitcoin is the work of amateurs. The protocol
specification is hard to pin down; much of the design is documented only with
code, rather than in the original paper. There is no threat model and no
formal security definition. The security analysis in the original paper
focuses on a _specific_ method of attacking Bitcoin, without ruling out any
other methods. None of this is something you would expect to see out of expert
cryptographers, and to suggest that it is the work of an accomplished
mathematician is beyond wishful thinking.

If you want to compare Bitcoin to the work of experts, why don't you take a
look at the work of experts? Here, for example, is some important work in the
field of secure multiparty computation:

<http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~rafail/PUBLIC/57.pdf>

Does the original Bitcoin paper even _remotely_ resemble this? Here is an
earlier, shorter work; can you honestly say that the original Bitcoin paper
even resembles this:

[http://www.math.ias.edu/~avi/PUBLICATIONS/MYPAPERS/GMW87/GMW...](http://www.math.ias.edu/~avi/PUBLICATIONS/MYPAPERS/GMW87/GMW87.pdf)

~~~
reedlaw
Regarding credit card security (or lack thereof)--protection lies mainly in
the massive fraud prevention efforts of the credit card companies (hence the
large fees). It gives more protection to consumers than merchants (it's easy
to request chargebacks). Bitcoin offers an alternative security model, known
as caveat emptor. There's no way to reverse a transaction. All consumer
protection devices, such as escrow, are outside the scope of the protocol. So
bitcoin by itself may or not be an acceptable means of payment, depending on
the use case.

I understand the risk of a single party attacker who controls more than half
the network. But at this point, what kind of attacker can muster up that much
computing power? Only a nation-state, billionaire, or large corporation could
conceivably do so. And it's daily growing beyond their reach. Not only that,
but their motive must be not just to make gains. They would have to want to
destroy the bitcoin economy. Interestingly, the bitcoin economy has already
survived a 24-block split without major calamity[1].

I had a look at the papers you linked to. The Canetti paper certainly seems
more rigorous and formal. But the Danish Beet Auction paper actually doesn't
seem too far from the Bitcoin whitepaper. The bitcoin paper is certainly the
most concise.

Amateur or not, bitcoin may be the "worse is better"[2] solution to low
transaction fee, decentralized, online payments. If a better solution comes
out, I'd love to hear about it.

1\. <http://bitcoin.org/chainfork.html> 2\.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better>

~~~
betterunix
"at this point, what kind of attacker can muster up that much computing
power?"

There is already a single mining pool that nearly controls that much computing
power. In general, though, it is a bad idea to ask these sorts of questions;
what is really important is not "who might amass this much power" but rather,
"what will the honest users do about it?" In the case of Bitcoin, once an
attacker amasses enough computing power for the attack, the honest users would
have to increase their own computing power to prevent the attack -- but the
attacker would only have to add as much to their own computing power as the
honest users add to theirs.

By comparison, Mixmaster uses 1024 bit public keys. Suppose someone amassed
enough computing power to compute the corresponding secret keys, thus breaking
the security of Mixmaster. Without adding any additional worker nodes,
Mixmaster could be updated to use 2048 bit keys, or 4096 bit keys, or even
larger keys. This would result in an exponential increase in the work needed
to attack the system, at the cost of only a small increase in the work needed
to run Mixmaster (small to the point of probably not requiring any new
hardware).

"Not only that, but their motive must be not just to make gains. They would
have to want to destroy the bitcoin economy."

I would also be wary of trying to guess an attacker's motives. The attacker
may only be interesting in blocking confirmations on transactions involving a
specific party (e.g. maybe the US government wants to prevent Wikileaks from
receiving donations). The attacker may have some goal that we cannot even
imagine without knowing the attacker's particular circumstances.

"Interestingly, the bitcoin economy has already survived a 24-block split
without major calamity[1]."

Yes, but that incident was (apparently) accidental. The fact that such a thing
can _accidentally_ happen is pretty bad news. To borrow Bruce Schneier's
analogy, a house can _accidentally_ burn down; an arsonist will _maliciously_
cause that to happen, and will do so in the worst way possible. An attacker
will try to _trigger_ such a fork, whether by spending a large amount of
computing time or by exploiting some implementation bug (e.g. maybe the
attacker will do only slightly more work than other miners, searching for that
one block that triggers a subtle bug in some version of Bitcoin).

Compare this to a secure multiparty computation system in the malicious model.
In such a system, a node cannot _accidentally_ break a security property --
because _no_ node can deviate from the protocol in a way that breaks the
security property.

"the Danish Beet Auction paper actually doesn't seem too far from the Bitcoin
whitepaper"

There are a few key differences:

1\. The security model is precisely defined: the adversary corrupts a minority
of the worker nodes, any number of clients, and no node will deviate from the
protocol.

2\. While the security model is weak, the authors (a) acknowledge that it is
weak, (b) give a justification for choosing a weak security model, and (c)
explain how to strengthen the security model and what the trade-offs would be.

3\. There is a formal proof of security, which rules out all polynomial time
attacks within the security model.

The Bitcoin paper has none of the above. There is no clear security model, no
justification for accepting the attack described in the paper itself, and no
evidence that other attacks do not exist. The paper does not spend any time
considering an attack conducted by some colluding subset of nodes, not even to
explain why such an attack is unlikely or will not be considered.

"Amateur or not, bitcoin may be the "worse is better"[2] solution to low
transaction fee, decentralized, online payments."

Perhaps, but so what? The point was that Bitcoin was almost certainly not
designed by a mathematics or cryptography researcher. Amateurs can certainly
create systems that become popular. The Linux kernel was originally written by
an amateur; if this were 1993 and someone tried to tell you that Ken Thompson
was behind the Linux kernel, would you have believed it?

~~~
reedlaw
I appreciate your thorough responses and patient explanations about the
weaknesses of bitcoin. I agree with you that bitcoin is not perfect, nor is
Linux, but I enjoy using both. By your standard, we may have to wait a very
long time to enjoy decentralized digital currencies. Bitcoin could go the way
of Linux and over many years see gradual improvement in security and
usability. Or it could suffer a debilitating attack and cause a massive loss
of confidence. Either way, it's here today and that's better than potential
currencies with formal security proofs that are years off.

------
elux
Utterly flawed reasoning. See: "Prosecutor's fallacy"

<http://www.conceptstew.co.uk/PAGES/prosecutors_fallacy.html>

~~~
Kiro
So is yours. See "Defendant's fallacy" at the bottom of the page.

~~~
mistercow
That does not make elux's reasoning flawed, because they did not say that
Mochizuki definitely was not Nakamoto.

------
fearlessleader
I can't seem to find any indication that Shinichi Mochizuki has done any
published programming, and then to suddenly write very good crypto software in
C (by himself, who does that) seem implausible. Mathematics Genius != Crypto
Programming Genius.

------
wellboy
Ok his 3 identification features are, he is a very smart professor, he doesn't
rely on peer review and he works very hard.

There are probably 10000 people who fit this profile and the profile of the
bitcoin creator even better. This is dumb

~~~
jckt
Also, he's Japanese and Nelson thinks Nakamoto is actually Japanese because
everyone who says he isn't Japanese is falling for committing "ethnocentric
cluckery". Dumb indeed.

------
lifeformed
Isn't it a little dangerous throwing around claims like this? If everyone
believed that I had a secret stash of a hundred million dollars, I would be
slightly worried for my safety.

------
jgrahamc
Nope. It's still definitely me.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5692317>

~~~
alfiejohn_
Bad Luck Brian:

Finally reveals the true identify of Satoshi Nakamoto, Nobody believes him.

------
RockyMcNuts
Bitcoin is engineering, not math. Isn't the crypto all based on 70s and 80s
math? Why would a pure mathematician get involved? And Bitcoin took
evangelizing, not just the work of a hermit.

Methinks Ted Nelson is pulling someone's chain. Maybe he can tell us the
identity of The Joker, or Fuzzy Dunlop from The Wire.

~~~
clicks
> _And Bitcoin took evangelizing, not just the work of a hermit._

I don't think it took evangelizing. Did Linux take evangelizing for it to get
big? Bitcoin was something that, once properly implemented, was bound to get a
lot of attention from cypherpunks. The big feat. here is actually coding it up
and having it work without too many issues. As for it getting big this year
(with the value of BC going really high a month back), it was just one more
way to get 'rich', so people jumped on it. It has an intrinsically viral
nature.

~~~
RockyMcNuts
depends on your definition of evangelizing... search for Satoshi Nakamoto's
voluminous posting history ... just putting software in a forum where people
can see it, discussing it at length and getting people to participate and
contribute is different from dumping a proof and declining to explain it.

for some definition, Linus Torvalds has awesome collaboration/evangelizing
skills. a lot of otherwise great engineers can't be bothered to communicate
and get people to adopt/contribute, sometimes they think evangelizing is a
dirty word.

------
lucb1e
The video: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emDJTGTrEm0>

If he had wanted to speak to the man directly, he could have cryptographically
done so. Tell the world that you know who he is, but not reveal the name, then
publish a cryptographic hash of his name. That probably catches the real guy's
attention (regardless of whether Ted got it right or not).

------
mindcrash
Reminds me of this blog post by a rather 'unknown' blog poster called Ashwin
Dixit, which was posted to HN weeks ago claiming that Satoshi Nakamoto
actually is Shinichi Mochizuki
[http://ownlifeful.blogspot.com/2013/05/bitcoin-creator-
satos...](http://ownlifeful.blogspot.com/2013/05/bitcoin-creator-satoshi-
nakamoto.html) (and after lurking in the shadows of HN for, uhm, eons, this ,
hopefully informative, comment on HN is my first step out of the shadows. Hi
guys :) )

------
tzs
> Mochizuki doesn't use the conventional scientific peer review process.
> Rather, his habit is to publish, and leave it to other mathematicians to
> sort their way through his reasoning

Wrong:
[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_vis=1&q=Shinichi+Mo...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_vis=1&q=Shinichi+Mochizuki&hl=en&as_sdt=1,48)

I see a lot of papers there in ordinary peer-reviewed journals.

------
dsrguru
The following seems a lot more likely. From Wikipedia:

Fast Company's investigation brought up circumstantial evidence that indicated
a link between an encryption patent application filed by Neal King, Vladimir
Oksman and Charles Bry on 15 August 2008, and the bitcoin.org domain name
which was registered 72 hours later. The patent application (#20100042841)
contained networking and encryption technologies similar to Bitcoin's. After
textual analysis, the phrase "...computationally impractical to reverse" was
found in both the patent application and bitcoin's whitepaper. All three
inventors explicitly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto#Identity>

------
denzil_correa
Nelson apparently has said that if Mochizuki denies being Satoshi he will
donate to charity of his choice [0].

    
    
        Nelson tells Quartz that he is offering to donate to charity if Mochizuki denies 
        being Satoshi Nakamoto. "If that person denies being Satoshi, I will humbly give 
        one bitcoin (at this instant worth about $123) to any charity he selects.  If he is 
        Satoshi and denies it, at least he will feel guilty. (One month time limit on 
        denial-- bitcoins are going UP.)
    

[0] [http://qz.com/86255/the-mysterious-creator-of-bitcoin-
could-...](http://qz.com/86255/the-mysterious-creator-of-bitcoin-could-be-
japanese-mathematician-shinichi-mochizuki-says-the-inventor-of-hypertext/)

~~~
hkmurakami
$123 seems way too small a sum for this to be of any consequence for either
party

~~~
denzil_correa
There's a reason he chose to dedicate a bitcoin and not 123 USD despite being
its current price value.

------
teeja
Ted's impression of a Sherlock, Watson conversation alone is worth the price
of admission.

------
state
I find it extremely hard to believe that bitcoin is attributable to a single
person.

~~~
Hermel
I find a single person standing on the shoulders of giants quite plausible. A
single talented person can achieve much more than most committees.

~~~
27182818284
"committees" is a pretty loaded term, right? I mean replace "committees" with
a 2-4-member team and you have Apple, Facebook, Google, etc. Personally I
always thought it was a rogue Post-doc until reading PG's post about it. PG
convinced me a government was, indeed, involved. For me now it is a question
of "which gov?" and "why that gov?"

------
valgaze
Ted Nelson: _"EVERYBODY thinks they can design great interfaces and almost no
one can (...)"_

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk&t=7m34s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk&t=7m34s)

------
wallflower
More on Shinichi Mochizuki and the ABC conjecture

<http://projectwordsworth.com/the-paradox-of-the-proof>

~~~
kruhft
Funny how after the hype around the ABC proof that now somebody thinks he's
Satoshi. I'd be a bit more convinced of this 'unmasking' if Shinichi hadn't
been all over the news last week.

------
jckt
What's HN's opinions on Nelson himself? Barring this article, I've mostly read
about his ideas about Xanadu, etc, and while they're not _bad_ per se, they
seem rather unfocused and on the whole rather vague -- almost like,
engineering/technology in a purely essay tradition. Can anyone point me to his
best work? I hear a lot about him but never found much to justify his repute.

~~~
jleader
I'm hardly representative of "HN's opinions", but describing Nelson's ideas as
"unfocused" and "vague" is kind of like the student who complained about
Shakespeare's works being "derivative and full of cliches".

Sadly, Xanadu never became the success that Nelson forsaw, but "Computer
Lib/Dream Machines" was full of all sorts of incredible new ideas, some
Nelson's, some from others that he just collected in one accessible place.
Keep in mind that the book was first published in 1974, two years before Jobs
& Wozniak formed Apple Computer to sell the Apple I, and seven years before
the first IBM PC.

------
ethanaustinite
Has anyone just asked Shinichi Mochizuki if he had anything to do with
bitcoin?

I assume he would be honest and deny it if he had no involvement. (but still
would be cool to get this amazing guy's opinion about bitcoin tech)

If he was involved with bitcoin, I doubt he would lie about it. Instead he
would simply not respond, and thus confirming he really might be "Satoshi".

------
ronnier
If I had to bet on this, I'd say Satoshi isn't Japanese.

~~~
Natsu
Well, the English is certainly native level and they appear to make none of
the common mistakes second language learners do, like forgetting or misusing
'the', but that doesn't mean Satoshi isn't ethnically Japanese. Frankly, for
all we know, Satoshi could be a woman.

People raised in the Japanese culture express themselves very differently,
though, and I'm not seeing that in this writing. This tends to survive, even
when they're highly skilled in English, because they're not saying anything
incorrectly, just differently. For example, one of my friends always refers to
Earth as "our Earth" instead of "the Earth" (I rather like that one,
personally).

------
maxk42
I would like to remind people: If you know who Satoshi is, for crying out loud
_keep it to yourself!_ If this man's identity is revealed, it will be a likely
death sentence.

~~~
SCdF
Why?

~~~
wilfra
Because he likely has 9 figures in Bitcoin that - by design - could not be
recovered were they ever stolen from him.

------
dllthomas
Has anyone done (publicly) any statistical textual comparison between
Satoshi's writings and those of any of the plausible candidates?

~~~
dmix
So far someone already conducted some language analysis to determine his
nationality and it's either British or Japanese. Possibly a brit in Japan.

------
darkhorn
The creator of Bitcoin is Neal J. King

[http://www.fastcompany.com/1785445/bitcoin-crypto-
currency-m...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1785445/bitcoin-crypto-currency-
mystery-reopened)

<https://www.facebook.com/neal.j.king>

~~~
clarkm
This is also almost certainly wrong.

Those patent applications don't really have anything to do with Bitcoin. But I
guess if you're a journalist, anything crypto related looks like it has to do
with Bitcoin.

And if I remember correctly, the bitcoin.org domain was registered by Satoshi
using anonymousspeech.com, so that's also a clue.

~~~
simonster
Looking at Neal J. King's Facebook posts, his politics seem mainstream
liberal, not libertarian. I'm not sure Satoshi would be such a big fan of Paul
Krugman and vocally advocate increasing the debt ceiling. He also has a post
back in 2011 specifically responding to the suggestion that he created
Bitcoin.

~~~
darkhorn
It is like saying Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is too handsome to be a bomber.
[http://now.msn.com/dzhokhar-tsarnaev-is-too-handsome-to-
be-g...](http://now.msn.com/dzhokhar-tsarnaev-is-too-handsome-to-be-guilty-of-
the-boston-bombings-teen-girls-say)

Okay this example is too harsh but his few posts doesn't meant that he didn't.

------
ics
This dead post on HN made the same claim:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5692179>

Was there a date on Nelson's? I don't really buy it as being correct, but hey.

~~~
lucb1e
There is a date. See his youtube video:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emDJTGTrEm0>

------
bitwize
The last time I read a story about reclusive Japanese mathematicians putting
out government-confounding cryptosystems -- it was the terrible Dan Brown
novel _Digital Fortress_.

Reality is getting Hollyweirder by the minute...

~~~
habitue
Well see, that's just it. This harebrained theory is way too hollywood, and
light on evidence.

In reality, a mathematician doesn't make significant contributions to two
different completely separate fields that both get widespread media attention
within the span of a few years.

------
reeses
This is painfully embarrassing. I love Ted Nelson but it's much, much easier
to find out who 'Satoshi' is than those tortured comparisons.

------
wmf
This reminds me of some of the theories about who wrote Shakespeare,
particularly the "Oxfordian" theory.

------
inselkampf
How would you correctly pronounce 'Satoshi Nakamoto'?

~~~
Natsu
Sah-toh-she Nah-kah-moh-toh.

Japanese is rather easy to pronounce once you learn which vowels to use and a
few small tricks. The 'long' vowels are really just two separate syllables
that get blurred together a little when adjacent. For example, 'ai' == ahh +
eee blurred together and sounds like the word eye.

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ianstallings
Snitches get stitches Ted.

