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Comment by SkyMarshal | Hacker News Reader

"The writer also notes that Satoshi typically uses British (rather than American) spellings.

So he narrows the field to people from the UK at Crypto2011."

Not Singapore, NZ, Australia, Hong Kong, India or any number of prior British colonies that use British English and spellings instead of American? (How about China? Not sure what English version they use, but wouldn't be surprised it's Brit).

Unles there was no one from any of those countries at Crypto2011, then it looks like he excluded up to 2/3rds of the solution space.

Also, I wouldn't be surprised at a skilled cryptologist who wanted to stay incognito faking his spellings to throw people off. For example, I'm not a cryptologist, am American, am not trying to be incognito, and enjoy using British slang and spellings occasionally anyway. And this guy Clear sounds like he's enjoying taking the piss out of the reporter.

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(How about China? Not sure what English version they use, but wouldn't be surprised it's Brit).

I'm well acquainted with many native speakers of Chinese who have learned English as a second language (and am married to one). There was a time when the British standard was consciously preferred by educational authorities for English instruction in both China and Taiwan. But that time is past. American English spellings are dominant in China and in a larger part of the "expanding circle" of international use of English.

http://www.pyrtvu.cn/xush/home.files/text/8.htm

http://www.inst.at/trans/15Nr/06_1/price15.htm

http://dooku.miun.se/engelska/englishB/languageprof/Student%...

http://c-faculty.chuo-u.ac.jp/~mikenix1/co/we/Future_of_Engl...

http://www.palgrave.com/pdfs/1403918309.pdf

Completely accurate tokenadult. The official Chinese curriculum still uses the "Fun With English" Oxford books, but American English (as in Korea) is fast becoming the prestige variant. The British version is fading like a vestige of the Opium Wars.

Satoshi's English was better than would be indicated by most Chinese students.

The guy seems to be an excellent developer with a very strong knowledge of crypto. He would not be "most Chinese students" (indeed he would not be "most students" at all), especially in writing.

>Not Singapore, NZ, Australia, Hong Kong, India or any number of prior British colonies that use British English and spellings instead of American?

Not to mention Ireland.

Don't forget Canada. Blame Canada.

..America's hat.

What about all the other europeans? From my experience as a researcher (on another field), europeans in general tend to use british english way more than american english...

Also I wouldn't be surprised if Satoshi was staying away from cryptography conferences.

Getting results out of this sort of process seems to depend upon making hazardous leaps. Even concluding that UK spellings mean UK English locale is a leap in logic. Who's to say the author couldn't possibly have selected the UK spellchecker in emacs?

Put another way, you can risk accidentally filtering the right answer out in exchange for good odds of finding the answer, or you can get bogged down in sifting through China.

Hell, I'm Greek and I prefer British spellings.

You beat me to this point and made it better. Kudos.

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