Comment by jron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jron | Hacker News Reader

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There are some interesting circumstantial connections to Satoshi:

Considered to be a "brilliant" programmer with a strong C++ background - Most people would call you crazy if you attempted to put a 6 billion dollar prize behind an internet facing application without memory safety

Author of crypto/privacy software - E4M and possibly TrueCrypt written in C++

Experience hiding identity both online and off

Millionaire - Satoshi never converted any of his btc fortune

Anti-authoritarian

Understands the benefits of digital currency - Has millions of dollars stacked in boxes

Understands the payment problem - Illegal prescription drug marketplaces

Has an interest in internet gambling software - The first version of btc actually had some code for a marketplace and poker: http://imgur.com/a/NPiIs

Multifocal - Satoshi vanished around April 23 2011 to "move on to other things"

South African spelling/phrasing - analyse, colour, defence, bloody hard

> South African spelling/phrasing - analyse, colour, defence, bloody hard

That's common across all of the Commonwealth countries. Could easily be Australia or NZ. If he calls traffic lights 'robots' you could be certain.

I was analysing the robot and this zef prawn offered me a sweetie. Fook prawns.

Satoshis original code wasn't considered brilliant, though. Not crap, but more in the style of an academic that understood programming than that of an experienced programmer.

The code was written as a basic proof of concept, not with long term maintainability in mind, and the code for the wallet client was not well separated from the code for parsing the blockchain, or from the networking code or from the mining code, etc...

No brilliant programmer would have been willing to publish such a rudimentary proof of concept when interoperability and network effects are such important parts of its main idea.

Brilliant code != beautiful code. Dan Kaminsky called Satoshi's programming alien technology with regard to security.

I haven't looked for similarities but I'm guessing someone has already compared the two using Aylin's CodeStylometry work: https://github.com/calaylin/CodeStylometry

This was a pretty amazing presentation on the above project if you're interested in stylometry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMa04HovKfs

You've never seen a genius half-ass something?

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