The author of the 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper was identified through textual analysis of his writing.
Actually, that's incorrect. Nick Szabo is a candidate to be Satoshi Nakamoto, but the post claiming to use stylometry to out him is garbage. Gwern (who is no stranger to stylometry[1]) explains: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ruluz/satoshi_naka...
Stylometry was only used on JK Rowling after a tip-off from an anonymous source. Even then, it's not clear how useful it was in outing the author. Tools and algorithms are getting better, but even modern stylometric methods will give you false positives on a large corpus. People simply aren't that unique.
Actually, that's incorrect. Nick Szabo is a candidate to be Satoshi Nakamoto, but the post claiming to use stylometry to out him is garbage. Gwern (who is no stranger to stylometry[1]) explains: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ruluz/satoshi_naka...
Stylometry was only used on JK Rowling after a tip-off from an anonymous source. Even then, it's not clear how useful it was in outing the author. Tools and algorithms are getting better, but even modern stylometric methods will give you false positives on a large corpus. People simply aren't that unique.
1. http://www.gwern.net/Death%20Note%20script#stylometrics