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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Hal Finney. Hal was a quiet, unassuming fellow who you had to get to know before you discovered he was incredibly smart.

Hal could never attend class, flip through a textbook on an unfamiliar subject, and then ace the final exam at Caltech. What would take me a solid 3 months of work.

The Satoshi thing is just the kind of prank Hal would have done.

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I'm also voting for Hal. He was responsible for large parts of PGP and the extensible protocol design there largely reminded me of Bitcoin (coincidentally I studied technical intricacies of both).

Also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20372117

I could easily see an American programmer talented enough to create something like Bitcoin using a Japanese cover name as well.

Not to mention the writing times that would rather point to someone in America rather than Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto#Characteristi...

Perhaps he projected too much of his own intelligence onto his fake personality when Satoshi went from being unable to code at all to writing a full client, albeit with some help, in a few months. But Hal’s coins are known and locked up for his daughter. He would not have lost the rest. What would he have done with them?

Crazy that I was just reading this last night. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bshZiaLefDejvPKuS/dying-outs...

Hal was one of the good guys.

You knew him personally? I've always suspected him of all the candidates.

My freshman year he was a sophomore in the next room in the hall. Hal would take us on midnight runs to Tommy's in his VW bug. We weren't buddies (I was an immature brat, some would say I still am) but Hal was always nice to me (as he was to everyone).

I always wondered if the style of writing and coding could lead to the identification of the real author.

Or was he also clever enough to change his way of writing to even hide that?

It can, it's called stylometry. There was a talk at CCC i remember. I think it was this one: https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6173_-_en_-_saal_g_-_201412291...

Iirc someone asked during Q&A if they tried to identify Satoshi Nakamoto like this and they said they think they know who it is but don't want to say.

After they allegedly uncovered JK Rowling writing under the pen name Robert Galbraith, even an average Joe like me knows that writing style is identifying (at least that's when I first heard of it being effective). I've never tried as hard to be anonymous as Satoshi has, but this seems like something s/he could reasonably have done.

I bet 'lettergram knows.

He has, to me, always seemed like Satoshi hiding in plain sight.

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