Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

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I don't blame you for this initial reaction, which would have been mine too had I not known who the author was. I don't mean that I automatically trust anything published by the reporter who busted Theranos (and won two Pulitzers for other major investigations). But I do mean that if John Carreyrou and his editors decided to publish something this long, that means they (and they're lawyers) are willing to die on this hill, no matter how meandering the first paragraphs of his 1st-person narrative.

Since the story doesn't end with: "And then Adam Back bowed his head and said, 'You have found me, Satoshi'", I'm guessing they preferred to go for the softer "how we did this story" first-person narrative. There is no explicit smoking gun, like an official document or eyewitness who asserts Satoshi's identity. But the circumstantial and technical evidence is quite thorough, to the point where the most likeliest conclusions are:

1. Adam Back is Satoshi

2. Satoshi is someone who is either a close friend or frenemy of Back, and deliberately chose to leave a obfuscated trail that correlates with Back's persona and personal timeline.

If Mr Carreyrou is such a good writer then he should be embarrassed to publish trash:

> In keeping with this belief, Mr. Back made his Hashcash spam-throttling software open source.

> Satoshi did a similar thing. He released the Bitcoin software under M.I.T.’s open-source license, which allowed anyone to use, modify and distribute it without restrictions.

The numerous observations such as this only seem impressive to people who don't know anything at all about the subject. Occam's Razor suggests that the reason that such irrelevant observations were included is because Carreyrou doesn't know anything at all about the subject.

> When we compared those errors with the writings of our hundreds of suspects, Mr. Back was a clear outlier. He shared 67 of Satoshi’s exact hyphenation errors. The person with the second-most matches had 38.

The article does not improve.

You’re talking about “Occam’s razor” while noticing things in an article that may not be relevant while informing huge swathes of the article.

Occam’s razor suggests you’re doing this because you want the article to be wrong and want to pretend to be a genius, not because you actually think it is

I neither want the article to be wrong nor right. I don't care who Satoshi is.

The article is written as if it's by some crazed conspiracy theorist. It's dripping with confirmation bias at every turn. Tiny coincidences are seized upon to confirm the author's suspicions whereas other explanations are minimized.

This kind of one-track reasoning almost always turns out to be wrong. Did the author accidentally stumble upon the truth? It's possible. Back has all the right qualifications to be Satoshi. But so do many other people.

wrt (2) that is if satoshi had the foresight btc would ever blow up in the way it did. obviously, he had some intuition, remaining anonymous, but deliberately creating a fake trail does not seem super plausible to me

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