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Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

You need someone who read Back's obscure 1997-1999 cypherpunks posts about combining Hashcash and b-money, implemented exactly that system a decade later, independently came up with the same non-technical analogies and trivia, wrote with the same hyphenation errors, and then happened to be active during the exact window Back went silent. The more you flesh out the "someone who read Back" profile, the more it just sounds like Back.

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Someone who has read his material would be likely to repeat the same analogies and trivia.

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.

At some point "Satoshi was a devoted reader of obscure 1997 Adam Back mailing list posts who shares his hyphenation errors, his Napster vs Gnutella analogy, his celebrity email filtering idea, his FDR gold ban interest, his 'burning the money' metaphor, his 'Achilles heel' description of DigiCash, his 'better with code than words' self-assessment, his energy-vs-banking defense, his British spellings mixed with American ones, his double-spacing habit, his it's/its confusion, his sentence-final 'also' tic, his 'proof-of-work' hyphenation, his WebMoney references, and who went active the exact week Back went silent" is just a longer way of saying it's Adam Back.

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.

Where does your 500 come from? Why can't Satoshi be someone who simply had no deanonymized online presence?

Your entire first paragraph boils down to me as someone who admired Adam Back and who may or may not have English as a second language, coupled with the one additional coincidence of when he was around.

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.

As a Swede I also do all of these things. And it doesn't feel like anything special, I imagine hundreds of thousands of people do the same.

Yeah, I'm Norwegian, and maybe the Scandinavian languages makes us extra likely to make those mistakes, but overall English hyphen rules to a large extent boils down to feels. Words "graduate" to hyphens over time as and when they start to become seen as a unit, and then sometimes eventually fuse into words. E-mail to email is one of those. And that pipeline is also not uniform geographically so different English speakers will disagree about what should have hyphens where and when...

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