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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

I thought everything pointed to Paul Le Roux being Satoshi?

> I thought everything pointed to Paul Le Roux being Satoshi?

I guess if a criminal is going to write their own encryption software (Truecrypt) it's not out of the realm of possibility they'd also create their own currency...

I recently worked with a nutcase in Toronto who repeatedly tried to convince me that he invented bitcoin, but it was stolen by an East European fellow he mistakenly shared the info with.

He got rather pissy with me when I didn't share his enthusiasm for that version of the story, and told him I'm pretty sure Le Roux is the droid he was looking for.

Crazy loons in failing fantasy quantum startups... I feel sorry for anyone who is stuck trying to separate the reality from the fiction with such people.

I'd bet $1 in Nick Szabo.

My money has always been on Hal Finney. Timing of his death and Satoshi's silence seems too coincidental, to say nothing of the fact that the first p2p transfer was between Hal and Satoshi, and Hal's credentials. Also can't ignore that the person who was falsely portrayed to be Satoshi due to his name (Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto) lived 2 blocks from Hal.

The work was probably done by Finney and Szabo together. As Satoshi is a fictional entity it could represent either or both of them. Though I think the writing under the name Satoshi was probably mostly Szabo.

That was my thinking at first as well. When I heard the name and that it was a pseudonym I thought of two things:

* a shadowy genius from a Dan Brown novel (like Ensei Tankado from Digital Fortress)

* Nicolas Bourbaki (who was a group of people)

But Le Roux is as smart as a group of mathematicians, and is much more the sort of person who would come up with ultralibertarian solutions like Bitcoin (being, you know, a criminal mastermind and all).

>Timing of his death and Satoshi's silence seems too coincidental

But does that mean he singularly created, or that some secret sharing scheme won't unlock the credentials without all inventors?

If you're referring to the coins in The Tulip Trust, I don't know that there was ever a claim that only the inventors were involved.

No, there's no guarantee that Bitcoin was singularly invented. I'm not even convinced Craig wasn't part of that team. I'm just convinced he's not the singular inventor.

Yes. Becomes more and more likely.

I mean, this is really amazing. This guy would have won the noble price in economics by now.

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