

Bitcoin Creator ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ Unmasked as Nick Szabo - fchollet
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/04/16/bitcoin-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-unmasked-again/

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acjohnson55
I think the headline should probably be changed. This isn't really an
unmasking, and the original article uses a question mark, which makes its
headline sound less definitive than this. As mentioned by others, Nick Szabo
as Satoshi is an old theory. While this adds to the case, without conclusive
evidence, it's not a big story.

~~~
dang
I just spent several minutes trying to come up with an accurate title, then
found that users had overwhelmingly flagged this article anyway.

The title on this post is outright false. The HN guidelines call for making
titles _less_ misleading, not more.

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fchollet
A previous text analysis had identified the same person (as well as a number
of converging clues):

[http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/occams-
razor-w...](http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/occams-razor-who-is-
most-likely-to-be-satoshi-nakamoto/)

[http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-
nakamo...](http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakamoto-is-
probably-nick-szabo/)

------
cyphunk
it is only more thorough than prior efforts because they list the names of the
other people they applied the same textual analysis to. HOWEVER, this type of
analysis is too subjective. It may help when you definitively know the suspect
is one of 12 or 20 but it is useless when it could be literally anyone. You
might as well water board random people on the street demanding they tell you
who Satoshi is.

Szabo is definitely a candidate but the onion of who Satoshi is requires you
look at much more information. Such as what the target was doing 2 years
before the publication (this is the known timeframe of when he started working
on bitcoin), the style of coding, the times of coding which indicate sleep
patterns and what happened the end of last year to Satoshi (nov 2013) which
lead him to diverge control of all final assets (known from whois records for
bitcoin.net and bitcoins.org, confirmed by theymos). If you cant complete
that, don't bother writing an article on who Satoshi is and don't bother
telling a journalists about your textual pseudo-suspicions.

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jeremyt
"A group of 40 students and researchers at the university studied the writing
of 11 candidates...It’s important to stress that the team isn’t saying its
study points conclusively to Mr. Szabo, only that of the people it studied, he
appears – on the basis of his writing – to be the most likely candidate."

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Shinkei
This is old news in the Bitcoin community... but it's far from definitive
proof.

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pipeep
\- They only compared people they already suspected.

\- Satoshi should've already known about linguistic analysis.

\- It's likely Satoshi had someone read and rewrite his works to avoid
linguistic analysis. Nick Szabo would've been a logical choice for this.

~~~
azm1
In that case that would mean that Nick is single point of failure which does
not help much. It's single proxy. Although we do not know whether transparent
or not.

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pyalot2
1) Old news

2) Nick already denied being satoshi years ago

3) Really old news

4) Failure to use google isn't journalism

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logfromblammo
At the least, a writing style analysis is stronger evidence than the last pile
of shaky not-even-coincidences used to point the finger at someone.

I'm far more likely to believe Satoshi is Szabo--or a collaborative group that
includes Szabo--than someone who is not actually a recognized expert in
cryptography.

