Wired, weirdly, didn't quote his denial. They just said he denied it. On his blog, he also suggested that Finney or Dai might be Satoshi.
I'm inclined to believe it's him. He's been writing about this topic passionately for years. Weirdly, though, he was still writing about "Bit Gold" and Hal Finney's attempt at an implementation in December 2008, after Satoshi posted the BitCoin whitepaper which is very, very strikingly exactly an implementation of his concept (with some major improvements, obviously), which he made no mention of.
He also seems so prolific on his blog - writing post after post of greatly historically informed academic research - that I just don't know how he would find the time to implement BitGold.
I also have not seen any of his other programming projects, and so I don't know whether or not he's a good enough C++ engineer to implement it successfully.
But of all the people so far he seems to be the best candidate.
"In my limited experience creating Internet pseudonyms, I've been quite distracted by the continual need to avoid leaving pointers to my True Name lying around -- excess mail to/from my True Name, shared files, common peculiarities (eg misspellings in written text), traceable logins, etc. The penet.fi site explicitly maintains a list of pointers to the original address. All kinds of security controls -- crypto, access, information, inference -- have to be continually on my mind when using pseudonymous accounts. The hazards are everywhere. With our current tools it's practically impossible to maintain an active pseudonym for a long period of time against a sufficiently determined opponent, and quite a hassle to maintain even a modicum of decent security. Pointers to info and/or tools to enable the establishment and maintenance of a net.nym, beyond the standard cypherpunks PGP/remailer fare with which I'm now familiar, greatly appreciated. Especially nice would be a list of commercial net providers that allow pseudonymous accounts.""
