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Comment by nawitus | Hacker News Reader

I'm betting on Satoshi being Wei Dai.

My clues:

a) He lives in London. Satoshi's mining has been timezoned to indicate that he probably lived in the UK. The genesis block had a quote from The Times ("chancellor on brink of second bailout").

b) Wei is an expert C++ programmer, and the bitcoin client was written in C++

c) Wei created cryptopp, a C++ cryptographic library, so he definitely knew how to implement cryptographic features in C++. The bitcoin client heavily used the cryptopp library. The code seems similar too.

d) Wei Dai published 'b-money' system in 1998

e) 'British formatting in his written work implies Nakamoto is of British origin. However, he also sometimes used American spelling, which may indicate that he was intentionally trying (but failed) to mask his writing style, or that he is more than one person. ' - Bitcoin wiki

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> a) He lives in London. Satoshi's mining has been timezoned to indicate that he probably lived in the UK. The genesis block had a quote from The Times ("chancellor on brink of second bailout").

Doesn't Dai live in Washington...?

> d) Wei Dai published 'b-money' system in 1998

And Szabo says he first wrote about Bitgold around then too, so? Lots of people have written about digital currency over the years.

First of all, I wouldn't be surprised if you had reasons to try to discredit my claims :).

>Doesn't Dai live in Washington...?

I don't know. His website says that he's a lecturer at 'Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus'. His current location is irrelevant though, it's only relevant where Wei lived around 2007-2010. Do you have information on that?

>And Szabo says he first wrote about Bitgold around then too, so?

b-money is quite similar to bitcoin. Satoshi would be familiar with electronic money schemes, maybe even a public author.

>Lots of people have written about digital currency over the years.

Yes, and? I'm not saying that being an author of a digital currency means the he or she is Satoshi. I'm saying that it's evidence that he or she may be Satoshi, because authors of digital currencies probably want to have said currencies implemented.

All the voices in people's heads agree: Gwern is Satoshi.

> First of all, I wouldn't be surprised if you had reasons to try to discredit my claims :).

Well, if I were Satoshi, wouldn't I be encouraging you to fixate on Wei Dai...?

> I don't know. His website says that he's a lecturer at 'Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus'.

It does? Are you sure you are looking at the right Wei Dai, the Wei Dai of http://www.weidai.com/ ? It's not a unique name. There's more than one of them.

> However, he also sometimes used American spelling, which may indicate that he was intentionally trying (but failed) to mask his writing style, or that he is more than one person.

Note, non-exhaustive hypotheses. I've lived in England my whole life, but I've done a lot of talking to Americans online. I don't think I'm consistent with my locale, because I don't care enough to pay attention. (Also I don't even remember which of -ise and -ize is which, despite occasionally looking it up.)

Not only that but programmers become used to using American spellings in identifiers. That can can come through in online communication simply through muscle memory. I even have problems typing 'with' without my fingers automatically making it 'width'.

interesting. at what odds would you bet? I think the distribution is fairly flat, because it could be a random, unknown guy who just happen to work on it his whole life. it seems to me that satoshi had to be non-academic.

it seems unlikely that it was an unknown guy who threw out a workable solution on his first attempt. If it wasn't his first attempt, he must have left an internet footprint somewhere with prior ramblings.

Much like DPR and silkroad.

This looks interesting:

https://web.archive.org/web/20061202010422/http://www.weidai...

not so sure. the main ingredient is the torrent principle. incidentally that was also written by one guy in a basement. the risk of floating a half-baked proposals is too high, so it seems likely satoshi did it all in one go, or had very private discussions. question really if anonymity was on his mind from the beginning or not.

>Satoshi's mining has been timezoned to indicate that he probably lived in the UK.

It's possible that 'Satoshi' deliberately scheduled things to give the appearance of living somewhere else.

And lots of computer people working on systems designed to span timezones prefer to just use GMT everywhere from the beginning. (My short foray into GPU mining used rigs on GMT, and all VMs or cloud systems for my web projects always exclusively use GMT.)

Satoshi also mined using a lab of computers so could have done it afterhours on a campus somewhere which explains the time difference.

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