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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

The fact he lived very close to Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto (2 blocks away) is the most damning evidence to me. Explains why he selected that name - he thought it was a good name and he noticed it! Secondly him being the first person to respond to Satoshi is highly suspect to me, he could have been responding to himself.

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I'd take that as evidence that Hal was not Nakamoto. I didn't know Hal very [1], but I'm pretty sure he was smart enough to realize that if doing something under his real name might have negative consequences, doing it under someone else's real name might bring them negative consequences. I'm also pretty sure he would consider bringing such negative consequences down on someone without their permission unethical and not do it.

[1] He was a senior engineer at APh working on Intellivison and Atari VCS games [2], when I was a fresh out of college junior engineer there. (And he was amazing at it [3]).

[2] http://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/APh_Technological_Co...

[3] One of the big projects while I was there was the next generation Intellivision. It would have a significantly more powerful graphics processing chip than its predecessor. The prototypes for the new chip implemented via discrete logic on big wire wrapped card in a big card cage. We were all working hard to get some games working on the prototype, which was going to be shown in some closed demos at CES.

This was made difficult for most of us programmers because the hardware guys were still fiddling with the design. We'd work very late until we could not stay awake anymore, and go to sleep for a few hours. Then we'd wake up and head back to work...and many times we would then find a note on our development system that the hardware guys had made a revision, and replaced some of the boards with updated ones.

Those updates would often do things like change the function of control registers, or the number of sprites, or the way color worked. That sent most of us into at least a couple hours of changing our code to work with the new hardware. (This was all hand written assembly).

Not Hal.

Hal would spend just a few minutes, and his code worked again. Oh, and his code was also better performing than the rest of ours, and made better use of memory.

I worked at Aph for a while, and did one of the video games (Roulette).

Hal wrote a Basic interpreter to fit in 2K of ROM. To save bytes, it had only one error message:

EH?

Still my favorite error message.

Of course, all of us at Aph were idiots. We had everything needed to make a killer consumer microcomputer, did not, and missed out on being billionaires!

Another Hal anecdote: Caltech at one point had a contest against MIT about who could write a Gomoku program that could beat the other. On a lark, Hal decided to enter a program he wrote over the weekend. It beat MIT.

That was when I found out Hal was not your average bear. Usually, he was just the friendly fellow who was always up for taking as many students as would fit into his VW bug to Tommy's at 3AM. I was small enough at the time to fit in the luggage slot behind the back seat.

And article says Hal was "the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto." That is too coincidental. Probably he sent it to himself as a test and to start the ball rolling with more forum users sending coins.

Huh, that's an interesting fact! I wonder what percentage of people outside of Japan live that close to someone named Satoshi Nakamoto?

That's a terrible reason!! Name your alias as Other Guy in My Town? What kind of idiot would do that? He's not collecting packages.

I mean, more likely to be primed by a name of a guy in the town then randomly selecting a low prevalence name that happens to ALSO be the name of the guy in the town.

It’s not that the marginal probability of using a known name is high, it’s that for a fact the name used IS a known name that makes it suspect.

People do choose aliases by odd relations like this.

Yes, but I'd expect the inventor of Bitcoin to be a little not-dumb about it.

Also the timing of his death and satoshi presence...

Source?

Easily googled.

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