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FWIW my brother did his own bit of Satoshi hunting with coworkers at his hedge fund. They didn't come to a strong answer but my brother believed Nick Szabo was probably part of a group that helped edit the paper. He suspected Hal Finney was involved similarly at a minimum.
The new claim is more specific: between 1997-1999, Back proposed combining Hashcash with b-money, adding inflation adjustment via increasing computational difficulty, and using hash trees for public timestamping.
That's most of Bitcoin's architecture in one package, a decade early.
The number of people who proposed that particular combination of ideas is much smaller than the number who were merely interested in Hashcash.
But interesting as this is, there are others who fit at least as well. That bit gold was the closest proposed scheme to Bitcoin is well known, and we know the proposer of bit gold (Szabo) was actively soliciting partners to help implement it as a real system right before Bitcoin appeared.
Also, people leave mailing lists and come back randomly months later all the time. Adam could have simply been unlucky, and busy with other projects at the time of the launch. Lots of people were, and kicked themselves for it (which honestly, it seems Adam did too!).
Adam Back is credited in the Bitcoin whitepaper as the inventor of Hashcash. W. Dai is credited as the inventor of b-money. But Nick Szabo is not credited as the inventor of bit gold, by far the most mature of these ideas floating around at the cipherpunks mailing list at the time. That's a conspicuous absence.
As for the hyphen errors, they are common for people for whom English is their second language. I commit hyphen errors similar to what is described all the time because English hyphenation makes absolutely no sense. In fact, reading the list of examples, the mistakes listed makes more sense to me than the correct way of writing those.
I also switch back and forth on a lot of the phrases the article mentions.
I also switch back and forth between US and UK spelling, because I learned UK spelling at school, but was far more exposed to US spelling in practice.
This seems to me to be exceedingly weak.
I'm not sure I agree with that, but it's what I came up with after challenging myself to read the article in toto again and note 1 by 1.
It's clear it's beyond a couple tics everyone has, and when you combine that with the starting set being ~500 instead of "all 8 billion people on earth", well, it's worth mentioning.
In terms of language, I don't agree it's beyond a couple of tics everyone has at all. I also don't agree with the assumption that the starting set is ~500.
It's of course possible that it is Adam Back, but I don't find the purported evidence remotely compelling as a way of showing that it is.
I only made it to the interesting stuff because of Carreyou's name, otherwise I would have stopped.
The email timing and lack of email metadata were also strong, in my opinion. But all of this nonsense like "Wow, these guys both talk about PGP??" distracts from it.