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Comment by Aqueous | Hacker News Reader

To me, the argument from silence is compelling. Bit gold is not just similar to BitCoin - it is virtually identical. The only thing BitCoin has that BitGold doesn't is that concensus is formed by the holders of a majority of the computational power, rather than the majority of nodes. This is what makes BTC byzantine resilient. And the question Wei Dai asks - why would he cite b-money and not bit gold - is precisely why I'm inclined to think it is Szabo. For him to not mention Bit Gold in light of the similarity is highly suspicious indeed.

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the citations of the paper is incomplete also, in that it does not mention finney's RPOW from 2004: http://www.finney.org/~hal/rpow/

quoting from there: "Security researcher Nick Szabo has coined the term bit gold for information objects which are provably costly to create"

bitgold as it was publicly described in 2005 was different than bitcoin in that there was a market for the tokens. bitcoin uses an agreement mechanism to establish the difficulty.

This would make sense because Szabo's initial post about Bit Gold does mention RPOW, so any search for RPOW would immediately lead back to Szabo.

Szabo also appears to have forward-dated his posts talking about implementing Bit Gold so that they appear to be written after BitCoin was released.

It's the worst date faking attempt in history if that was his intention - I think he republished his 2005 story after bitcoin to point out that he came up with these ideas.

A smart man, especially someone that understands security, would foresee the argument from silence. If anything, I think it is a deliberate red herring to make suspicion fall on Szabo.

it worked pretty well. one way to think about it: did Nakamoto want to be known? then reason from there. then consider the negation. the deeper point in all of this: why do we trust people in the first place?

i think nakamoto/szabo is ambivalent on this point. i think he cared enough to cover his tracks enough so that no conclusive evidence of his identity can be found. but he did not care enough to clear certain circumstantial evidence from the picture, such as aspects of his writing style, and the times of day he posted which link him to szabo and the aforementioned forward-dating of posts.

i think some part of nakamoto wishes to have credit for BitCoin, or at least not permit someone else to take credit - which is part of why he came out of hiding to redirect people away from dorian nakamoto. to protect him, but also to ensure that credit was not conclusively misattributed.

Ah, you remind me the "battle of wits" scene from Princess Bride [0]. If he is that smart, he could have predicted people would reason as you did, in which case being silent about bit gold was the right thing to do... and so on ad infinitum :)

[0] http://www.gametheory.net/popular/reviews/PrincessBride.html

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