Science is hard. This reporter is no scientist, and not very good with logic, or managing context. The article feels like an amateur in a fever dream, whose conclusion is ultimately wrong.
Two of the problems with this article, among others:
> we identified 325 distinct errors in Satoshi’s use of hyphens.
> Mr. Back was a clear outlier. He shared 67 of Satoshi’s exact hyphenation errors. The person with the second-most matches had 38.
The fact that there is such a huge gap between Satoshi and Back, substantially more than the gap between Back and the next person, is a really strong indicator that Back is
not Satoshi, rather than being an indicator that he is.
> It was when I was walking him through the similarities between things he and Satoshi had written.
> Implicit in that was an acknowledgment that he had been the one who wrote the quote.
So this reporter Carreyrou is walking someone through similar quotes, and that person responds with why they may have made the statement, but Carreyrou's conclusion is that they were talking about the Satoshi quote and not their own? That seems a bit,
silly.
If I'm in a conversation comparing my similar quotes, and 2 or 3 deep into the list, do I even need to know my specific quote before responding with why I might have said something similar?
The quotes in question:
> Satoshi: I'm better with code than with words though.
> Back: I'm better at coding, than constructing convincing arguments.
Pretty sure a lot of folks in the tech community have said something along these lines, and very nearly exactly the first part.
This article seems to conclude that a specialist in a domain sounds very much like another specialist in that domain, over the span of two decades, no less, cherry picking tiny bits of output over the two decades, so therefore they must be the same person. And on top of that, ignores evidence to the contrary, like the massive gap in hyphenation errors. LoL. Science & logic this article is not.
I wonder, based on the large number of distinct hyphenation errors, whether Satoshi is even from the UK or the US. Add in the use of a Japanese alias, and the Tokyo-based anonymizer, and the evidence starts to point towards a non-UK/US origin.
And then, not cashing out any of that massive hoard of wealth, how very Zen of them.