Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto, the Inventor of Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto, the Inventor of Bitcoin

blog.sethroberts.net

29 pointsfchollet38 comments

Just for some background, previous discussion on the referenced article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6828169

Gwern's response on Reddit refuting it: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ruluz/satoshi_naka...

The blogger who suggested this hypothesis a few months ago has a new post, with a stylometric analysis of the writings of some cryptocurrency people:

http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/occams-razor-w...

(a smaller score mean a closer match. Not sure what scores stand for precisely).

Word length distribution

    Diff Nick Szabo / Bitcoin: 0.160
    Diff Wei Dai / Bitcoin: 0.241
    Diff David Chaum / Bitcoin: 0.257
    Diff Adam Back / Bitcoin: 0.337
    Diff Hal Finney / Bitcoin: 0.510

Character frequency distribution

    Diff Nick Szabo / Bitcoin: 0.191
    Diff Wei Dai / Bitcoin: 0.208
    Diff David Chaum / Bitcoin: 0.228
    Diff Hal Finney / Bitcoin: 0.284
    Diff Adam Back / Bitcoin: 0.342

Statistical analyses rely on assumptions of sample independence and random selection that are pretty hard to justify with something like this. Are all the articles on the same topic? Are they written for the same audience? Are the works independent or is there copying and/or inspiration being shared?

Regardless if he is or if he isn't, his essays are unbelievably good:

http://szabo.best.vwh.net/

Folks seem to really like [0] his writing. Anything you recommend starting with?

[0]: See sidebar on his blog: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/

I loved this one:

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/02/irreducible-complex...

But any random post of his is likely to be intensely interesting, even if you don't agree with some of his conclusions.

Yeah, we've thought for a long time he's probably involved. Along with other people (he almost definitely didn't write the code); Satoshi likely isn't just one person.

That being said, what's the point of articles like this? We will never know unless Satoshi chooses to reveal himself/themselves and proves it with a pgp key. Which won't happen. Otherwise, it's just idle speculation.

The point is that Newsweek is very likely wrong.

Link to full post: http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/03/11/nick-szabo-is-satoshi...

>>>"One was her observation that he put two spaces after a period"

Wait, was that actually one the reasons Dorian was labelled as Satoshi? Because that's true of a huge number of people. Many people who learned on a typewriter (like my parents), or who were taught touch-typing formally by those who were (like my wife) still do this. It's hardly rare enough to be any kind of discriminator.

"It's hardly rare enough to be any kind of discriminator."

Something that's true of 50% of the population under consideration, and which is uncorrelated with other measures, is still a bit of information.

> Wait, was that actually one the reasons Dorian was labelled as Satoshi?

She mentioned it, but the Newsweek storied mentioned that in the context of other (but unspecified) formatting quirks and not just double-spaces.

I like that the linked blog has high quality ads: Real book recommendations, and links to individual books. Instead of brand-spam, a potentially useful product. Only way it could be better would be to recommend books directly relevant to the blog post topic.

I'm extremely curious in understanding why he wanted to be anonymous when publishing his idea of Bitcoin. Nobody could possibly have anticipated that Bitcoin would become the most used crypto-currency today. Many experts from the cryptography mailing list were quick at discarding his idea from the beginning, so I can't imagine Satoshi wanting to remain anonymous in case Bitcoin would become a billion dollar business and people would start going after him for his money. This is why I believe Satoshi is probably just some brilliant person who's name is actually Satoshi Nakamoto (not Dorian).

There are not that many people named Satoshi Nakamoto, a few hundreds, and we have the complete list.

A number of journalists (most lately NYT's Hiroko Tabuchi) have looked into these people, and found no match (if you ignore Dorian, who has clearly nothing to do with BTC).

Maybe it is the other way round. He didn't want to damage his professional reputation which could have happened if important and vocal members of the crypto community had declared that they thought the project ridiculous.

Just like Carlo Pedersoli renamed himself Bud Spencer so as not to damage his good reputation as an olympian athlete with his movies.

Szabo’s achievement is good news for me because we have a similarity. He was a law professor. They are not supposed to invent new and useful things.

Not saying he's wrong, but this reeks of confirmation bias.

"The clincher, for me, is that he wrote an article about the emergence of money that is compatible with my theory of human evolution."

Apparently author really wants Nick Szabo to be creator of bitcoin because they have similar views.

Previous four reasons given are way better compared to reasoning used in Newsweek article, however it is still nowhere near enough to assert that Nick Szabo is Satoshi.

Why has no one spoken with Nick Szabo?

They have. He's denied it.

Do you remember where you saw this?

Can you give a link to where he's denied it? I haven't seen anything.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/all/1

Wired, weirdly, didn't quote his denial. They just said he denied it. On his blog, he also suggested that Finney or Dai might be Satoshi.

I'm inclined to believe it's him. He's been writing about this topic passionately for years. Weirdly, though, he was still writing about "Bit Gold" and Hal Finney's attempt at an implementation in December 2008, after Satoshi posted the BitCoin whitepaper which is very, very strikingly exactly an implementation of his concept (with some major improvements, obviously), which he made no mention of.

He also seems so prolific on his blog - writing post after post of greatly historically informed academic research - that I just don't know how he would find the time to implement BitGold.

I also have not seen any of his other programming projects, and so I don't know whether or not he's a good enough C++ engineer to implement it successfully.

But of all the people so far he seems to be the best candidate.

Thanks.

He discusses fake name use in this post to Cypherpunks List in 1993. He also mentions "Digicash" in the same thread.

http://borg.uu3.net/ldetweil/medusa/originals/unpleasant

"In my limited experience creating Internet pseudonyms, I've been quite distracted by the continual need to avoid leaving pointers to my True Name lying around -- excess mail to/from my True Name, shared files, common peculiarities (eg misspellings in written text), traceable logins, etc. The penet.fi site explicitly maintains a list of pointers to the original address. All kinds of security controls -- crypto, access, information, inference -- have to be continually on my mind when using pseudonymous accounts. The hazards are everywhere. With our current tools it's practically impossible to maintain an active pseudonym for a long period of time against a sufficiently determined opponent, and quite a hassle to maintain even a modicum of decent security. Pointers to info and/or tools to enable the establishment and maintenance of a net.nym, beyond the standard cypherpunks PGP/remailer fare with which I'm now familiar, greatly appreciated. Especially nice would be a list of commercial net providers that allow pseudonymous accounts.""

There's probably some bayesian probability analysis that shows how likely each candidate is

I suspect it would keep coming up with probably not any of them, given the likely size of the pool compared to the number of candidates available for analysis.

A Bayesian approach would likely show how flawed linguistic analysis is. a false positive rate of say 0.1%, for example, over the 7 or so billion people who aren't satoshi would be huge

I think, more likely, it's Jed McCaleb. Also, I think a person who so carefully is trying to conserve his identity and was capable enough to come up with Bitcoin, will possibly hide his linguistic tracks as well.

I'm not so sure about hiding those tracks. Surely creating something big is challenge enough that you'd put all of your efforts towards mobilising your early adopters rather than hiding tracks just in case you became successful.

man, i don't know if i will ever be comfortable making any kind of judgement based primarily on stylometric analysis like that.

I could consider it supporting evidence in a mountain of otherwise overwhelming evidence, but I never anything to base a decision off of.

Are we going to end up having some kind of anonymizer that uses snippets taken from spam mails to compose emails, like a digital surveillance age mash up of spam lit and using words cut out from magazines for a ransom note?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_Lit

Both the title and URL of this HN post need to change.

What? The guy outs satoshi(supposedly) and then puts a plug in for his "Shangri-La Diet" as a great advance in health?

> I’m sure it’s <name>

tl;dr: bullshit article

"Those who know don't tell. Those who tell don't know." -Onngh Yanngh

No, I am Satoshi

I am Satoshi

i am spartacus

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