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Comment by feral | Hacker News Reader

> - SN is fairly humble.

You are talking about some one or group who took great care (including in all their dealings with other early bitcoin users) to maintain their anonymity - which is really hard to do, in the face of the sort of scrutiny that SN has had.

Its at least plausible that, along with the name, other aspects of the SN persona were explicitly constructed.

There's all this myth around who SN is. A lot of people seem to believe SN is a benevolent crypto researcher working in their bedroom, for the benefit of humanity, with no profit motive in sight. I mean, sure, I hope that's the case too, but we should remember that we don't actually know very much at all.

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A braggart might construct a humble persona, but would a true braggart maintain such a persona for long? If they could, is there really any basis for calling them a braggart in the first place?

Being a braggart seems fundamentally incompatible with "not bragging", for years on end, about your greatest accomplishment (and barring the possibility that SN is somebody very famous, say, Putin, it is almost certain that bitcoin is the most famous thing that SN has done). Not in a "Scottish, but doesn't wear a kilt" way, but in a "Scottish, but does not live and was not born in Scotland" kind of way.

Sure he might not be humble, however if you read everything Satoshi wrote he came across as a very humble person.

Regarding his immense Bitcoin wealth, he has anonymised himself but not his Bitcoins. 99.9% of the Bitcoins he mined lay exactly where they were mined and he has made no attempt to move them or anonymise those coins. He might in the future but who knows.

In addition he made the first block unspendable so that the only block he had to mine himself to start the network would never contribute to his wealth.

It is possible that aspects of the SN persona were highly constructed but what is a simpler explanation - that everything about SN was fake or just his identity? It would have taken an enormous cognitive effort to be able to consistently demonstrate the same personality traits in post after post unless it came naturally. It seems like he was more concerned about technical discussion than hiding information about himself beyond his identity.

But of course you are right - until we know who SN is, we can only speculate.

When I hear an argument about a simpler explanation, I tend to assume there's an appeal to Occam's razor; but I'm not sure that's useful here:

What's the chances that they took so much care to obscure their identity in every other way, but decided to use their genuine personality? Doesn't that seem improbable, too?

I accept the argument about it being hard to maintain two personas - but what is enormous cognitive effort for you and me might be basic operational security for someone else.

Bitcoin is very interesting, but I'd like if there was more caution about SN, given it has has potentially endowed them with vast resources.

I consider SN to be an entity with one or more people behind it.

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