How the NSA Identified Satoshi Nakamoto

medium.com

11 points·arunc··8 comments

Fails the sniff test, why would anybody at the NSA risk going to prison to tell this guy this story? It's easy to figure out which one of his friends told him this if it was true. If it was a random, why did they pick him, and not say, the guardian?

Also it is very hard to imagine that the implementation details would be that simple. Seems like he has the same template when he wrote his licence plate scanning story.

I don't think anything in this article is real. It looks like an ad for a product.

Agreed.

For what product? Unless I missed something, the only thing he mentions is an open-source project for attempting to defeat stylometry.

Anonymouth. There is a github link at the very bottom of the article.

This article seems to be full of baseless claims with no proof, I agree with others, looks to just be a product ad. If they knew who he was, and he had committed any offenses he would have already been arrested.

...but won't tell us.

TL;DR, analysis of writings attributed to him/her/them, cross referenced with data from mass surveillance.

I actually had these thoughts when reading the bitcoin whitepaper. It seemed to me that the author had surely written other research whitepapers, and thus there should be definitive artifacts and writing styles that can be used to attribute authorship [1].

I don't see why this has to be limited to the capabilities of an intelligence agency. Perhaps they have the motive, but I'm sure private citizens could perform the same data mining queries (without mass surveillance).

Either way, this post presents zero information and just unsubstantiated speculation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry

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