Why say Paul Solotshi instead of Paul Le Roux, a name everyone is far more familiar with?
None of the evidence presented was compelling. It was circumstantial at best. Save yourself the five minutes it takes to read this article.
None of the evidence presented was compelling. It was circumstantial at best. Save yourself the five minutes it takes to read this article.
Circumstantial evidence is often strong enough and compelling enough to determine court cases. Circumstantial evidence is often better than direct evidence.
Circumstantial evidence: Stuff like DNA, fingerprints
Direct evidence: Bob's memory of the event.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstantial_evidence
But please, continue using "the evidence is circumstantial" as if it means that it's not good enough.
And eye witness testimony is often terrible. It's disappointing that circumstantial evidence gets such a bad rap.
Very unlikely things happen all the time. But beyond a certain level of unlikeliness, combined with a strong motive, it has to be enough.
And of course in practice everyone gets this because cases are decided every day by this implicit understanding.
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you
find a trout in the milk.
-- Henry David ThoreauYou can say that about most evidence. Even the classic "smoking gun" metaphor is an example of circumstantial evidence.
It's just a way for people to dismiss a claim without actually having to argue against a claim. If the evidence is tenuous or weak, explain why.
For instance, the fact that Solotshi is similar to Satoshi. That's just dumb. If you're going to pick a pseudonym to hide your identity for the long term, you don't pick one that's just a variation of your name.
However, if every other piece of evidence was much better, then dude just picked a bad pseudonym.
And we also have to consider that a lot of weak signals can become a strong signal. Like the name thing is what I'd call an extremely weak signal. But if there's an overwhelming flood of such weak signals, then it starts looking much more likely.
I have read a bit about Le Roux over the years, and I got an impression of someone who always seeks the short term benefit (albeit often a quite sizeable benefit) over a long term benefit. Among droves of other crazy things, the guy was trying to set himself up as a warlord in Somalia, allegedly aiming to provide mercenary services to highest bidder. It's really hard for me to reconcile someone like that with the thoughtful debate SN dealt in. But that's mostly my biases talking, and less an objective analysis.
I'm inclined to think there aren't many people in the world who possess the skills necessary and at the same time the need to preserve absolute anonymity at all costs.
The number of (non governmental) people in the world who intersect those two things really can't be more than a handful.
To be clear, I'm not saying I believe all this - just that there is a fair amount more to it than similar aliases. I'd be interested to see some analysis of the C++ code in both projects to see if they share any idiosyncrasies.
I don't think anyone is capable of faking that for long unless they tried to make it as generic as possible`.
The only link that the article mentions is that Satoshi used TrueCrypt. So what? TrueCrypt was the gold standard for encrypted drives which everyone in the tinfoil hat community used until it shut down.
It would be like trying to draw a link between a real person and a pseudonymous identity because both of them were known to have an iPhone.
It's no smoking gun but it's certainly interesting.
>It would be like trying to draw a link between a real person and a pseudonymous identity because both of them were known to have an iPhone.
Ridiculous. Having an iPhone is exceedingly common. Having the above mentioned qualities in common, while not unheard of, is certainly rare.