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Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto, the Inventor of Bitcoin

blog.sethroberts.net

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Re: Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto, the Inventor of Bitcoin

#31

Post by lotsofmangos »

caycep wrote: post #17

There's probably some bayesian probability analysis that shows how likely each candidate is

I suspect it would keep coming up with probably not any of them, given the likely size of the pool compared to the number of candidates available for analysis.

Re: Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto, the Inventor of Bitcoin

#32

Post by sktrdie »

I'm extremely curious in understanding why he wanted to be anonymous when publishing his idea of Bitcoin. Nobody could possibly have anticipated that Bitcoin would become the most used crypto-currency today. Many experts from the cryptography mailing list were quick at discarding his idea from the beginning, so I can't imagine Satoshi wanting to remain anonymous in case Bitcoin would become a billion dollar business and people would start going after him for his money. This is why I believe Satoshi is probably just some brilliant person who's name is actually Satoshi Nakamoto (not Dorian).

Re: Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto, the Inventor of Bitcoin

#33

Post by carsongross »

markbao wrote: post #11
carsongross wrote: post #9

Regardless if he is or if he isn't, his essays are unbelievably good: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/

Folks seem to really like [0] his writing. Anything you recommend starting with? [0]: See sidebar on his blog: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/

I loved this one:

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/02/irreducible-complex...

But any random post of his is likely to be intensely interesting, even if you don't agree with some of his conclusions.

Re: Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto, the Inventor of Bitcoin

#35

Post by prawn »

kolev wrote: post #26

I think, more likely, it's Jed McCaleb. Also, I think a person who so carefully is trying to conserve his identity and was capable enough to come up with Bitcoin, will possibly hide his linguistic tracks as well.

I'm not so sure about hiding those tracks. Surely creating something big is challenge enough that you'd put all of your efforts towards mobilising your early adopters rather than hiding tracks just in case you became successful.

Re: Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto, the Inventor of Bitcoin

#36

Post by AdrianRossouw »

man, i don't know if i will ever be comfortable making any kind of judgement based primarily on stylometric analysis like that.

I could consider it supporting evidence in a mountain of otherwise overwhelming evidence, but I never anything to base a decision off of.

Are we going to end up having some kind of anonymizer that uses snippets taken from spam mails to compose emails, like a digital surveillance age mash up of spam lit and using words cut out from magazines for a ransom note?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_Lit

Re: Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto, the Inventor of Bitcoin

#37

Post by nly »

caycep wrote: post #17

There's probably some bayesian probability analysis that shows how likely each candidate is

A Bayesian approach would likely show how flawed linguistic analysis is. a false positive rate of say 0.1%, for example, over the 7 or so billion people who aren't satoshi would be huge

Re: Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto, the Inventor of Bitcoin

#38

Post by fchollet »

sktrdie wrote: post #32

I'm extremely curious in understanding why he wanted to be anonymous when publishing his idea of Bitcoin. Nobody could possibly have anticipated that Bitcoin would become the most used crypto-currency today. Many experts from the cryptography mailing list were quick at discarding his idea from the beginning, so I can't imagine Satoshi wanting to remain anonymous in case Bitcoin would become a billion dollar business…

There are not that many people named Satoshi Nakamoto, a few hundreds, and we have the complete list.

A number of journalists (most lately NYT's Hiroko Tabuchi) have looked into these people, and found no match (if you ignore Dorian, who has clearly nothing to do with BTC).

Re: Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto, the Inventor of Bitcoin

#40

Post by sentenza »

sktrdie wrote: post #32

I'm extremely curious in understanding why he wanted to be anonymous when publishing his idea of Bitcoin. Nobody could possibly have anticipated that Bitcoin would become the most used crypto-currency today. Many experts from the cryptography mailing list were quick at discarding his idea from the beginning, so I can't imagine Satoshi wanting to remain anonymous in case Bitcoin would become a billion dollar business…

Maybe it is the other way round. He didn't want to damage his professional reputation which could have happened if important and vocal members of the crypto community had declared that they thought the project ridiculous.

Just like Carlo Pedersoli renamed himself Bud Spencer so as not to damage his good reputation as an olympian athlete with his movies.

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