Bitcoin Forum

 We was so proud that Satoshi was probably from the UK. But it seems not.

The hard truth is that Satoshi is "North American, " if that's still in question.

We took some time to analyse, simple grammatical structures used, in his various 575 variants of informal posts. Here what we found.

'"-disablesafemode",' - post 1. English (UK) version - "-disablesafemode, "

"realized" - post 15. English (UK) version - "realised"

"criticized" - post 20. English (UK) version - "criticised"

"minimized" - post 525. English (UK) version - "minimised"

I'm certain we could use this same trick to triangulate his location, but, that task is for someone else to accomplish - if at all necessary.

Edit...


From bitcoin.pdf at bitcoin. org

"realizes" — English (UK) version — "realises"

"characterized"— English (UK) version — "characterised"

'"tape",' — English (UK) version — "tape,"

"we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed" - use of we (group of people)

"we propose begins with a timestamp server" - use of we (group of people)

"we will need to use a proof-of-work system similar to Adam Back's Hashcash [6]," - use of we (group of people)

"we don't care about later attempts to double-spend" - use of we (group of people)

"We define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures." - use of we (group of people)

We did not find any evidence of the letter I; The final references on the white paper suggests someone else "we, " was involved in the research and documentation of this paper — at least someone that seems to be from UK.

Great job. So you were tryna localise where the bloke was from based on his writing habits, found 4 grammatically localised spellings out of hundreds of posts and you jumped to a conclusion. That's ace.

Protip for next time: I'm not Australian, mate.

Great question. It's good to see some logical analysis of these results. I did consider lots of various possibilities, and other countries but UK and US has always been the main contenders. So, it seemed much more probable that someone who uses US grammar throught most of his work, if not all, would have been from somewhere within North America.

I don't know if i really want to know who satoshi is.
He wants to stay anonymous and ta is clear for me.
I only hope his baby will continue to grow.
Speculations about his identity can be dangerous, especially about his stash..

What if Satoshi was from he UK but used American-English vocabulary to decieve the Internet detectives?

That's some real detective stuff. However do note that Satoshi is intelligent. And he could pleace fake clues so people can believe that and that ;)

Satoshi may be the mastermind behind bitcoin but even then thats not to say that his spelling might be poor. Its a good idea looking into spelling as clues but even people i know from the uk get confused with spelling and use us versions over uk ones . Probably not conclusive proof.

Well, that does it!  We need to call in an expert to find out where this guy is from.  Will somebody get Noam Chomsky on the line please.  We have questions that need answers....LOL

I don't know if an analysis of spelling on browser based forums could accurately reach a conclusion in this matter due to that little red line that changes UK spellings to US spellings in the browsers.  We could, however, probably pin point a geographical origin thru linguistics....as opposed to spelling.

In my opinion, Satoshi is not just a person, it is a team of person partnered together privately without others knowing. The bitcoin maybe also owned by the partners but every one of the partners own a part private keys only. Even if you found one of the partners, you will unable to open the wallet. The reason Satoshi is still anonymous is because we do not have about information about it. Is it just a person, or a group, or even an AI surpassed the technology at that time created the bitcoin(although it is absurd.)

great idea of locating what is his nationality, but i wouldnt count 4 words on his 575 post as a hard proof of his nationality, but i think youre on to something here.
great work.

Seem like we get deeper and deeper just to find out who he really is.
I believe is still here and for he development of bitcoin i think finding him can be concider important. I truley think finding him its an exciting game :)

But why dont we jsut assume he doesn't use any VPN or Tor and lets ask about checking his IP.

I don't think the way of writing is the enough evidence to prove someone is from North America. It can be an intentional change to hide the actual identity.

But I don't understand that why people are behind him?? Enjoy Bitcoin and let him live his life. That sounds fair..isn't it?

lol  :D :D :D :D :D :D get some shrimp on the barbie, its cold here in Ireland  ;)

Well it is one way to know the language setting put on the Windows PC
By default it looks like Satoshi ran a UK version of spellcheck and presumably the same language pack.
(Of course that's if he was using windows he-he)

Agreed, it is better if the identity of satoshi remains unknown

im from the UK too and in my head, i spell realised with an S.. but this irritating web browser puts a red line under the word forcing me to use a Z instead of an S.

if you check his white paper that is not confined to the crappy web browser racist spellchecker.. where it gives us UK folk more freedom to talk how we brits want. then you will see that he writes like a brit.

so analysing forum posts fails, if you dont take the american spell checker defaulted into the browser into context
(i avoided auto-correct, purely to make a point)

This is a great point. Edits have been made.

That's BS. In 99,9% of academic papers, the author uses the pronomn we when referring to him or herself. It's a way to show respect both to colleagues and professors. But it doesn't mean it was written by more than one person.

I personally believe it was made by a group, but I don't need this fragile "facts" to support that idea.

Why nobody call him to show up and this whole mystery will be gone.
Maybe he could appear on youtube with mask?
 But then he could be yet another anonymous guy?

If he/she could prove why is Satoshi (not this kind of stupid proofs we see around here everyday, but REAL proof), then the mystery would be solved.

He or she is loosing a revolutionary potential his/hers words would have in the financial market as a whole.

Here in Taiwan it was pretty cold, too, last week. it even snowed in some places, which is truly an exceptional phenomenon, for an island located on Tropic of Cancer. Now it's gotten back to normal though: a light sweater does the trick  ;D.
Anyway, my point is that anyone who learned English as a second language to a reasonable level of proficiency could write like a native from whichever region they like. Learning how to speak with a proper regional accent is harder in my view, but the writing part can easily be fulfilled.
Satoshi is highly proficient in English but that doesn't make him an English speaker.

I respect ur findings but this is not conclusive.He might be a UK born but resides in some other country.

Generally if someone excels in computers and maths they do poorly in English writing skills because they spent most of their time learning programming. Most medical doctors spend at the minimum seven years doing medical training, but most of them write in illegible handwriting on prescriptions. Satoshi is a genius programmer, but said his writing skills weren't as good as his programming skills. He's probably awful at spelling, and used the default US spell checker in his browser.

I can't say for sure because as far as things go I'm not a programmer, but I heard that the first version of bitcoin wasn't so well coded? Satoshi is a genius inventor. That doesn't make him a genius programmer. I might be mistaken though, because I really can't say for myself if indeed the earliest versions of bitcoin were badly coded or not.
Your post still makes me think about these teenagers referring to Kurt Cobain as one of the greatest guitar players of all time, though. There's nothing more wrong than that. Technically speaking the guy wasn't properly speaking nowhere but really, he wasn't so great. But he had a genius for song writing, though. He was truly a master at that.
All this to say that these things are generally not connected. Mastering a means of expression doesn't make you creative, and inversely, being creative doesn't make you a technical master.

Besides, I've found that non-English speaking programmers usually had a pretty good written English, on average. This has to do with the fact that almost all the relevant information regarding computing is in English and so they read English on a regular basis. It's the same for chemists, physicists, doctors, and a lot of other specialists. Besides, if they do researches, they usually like to publish their papers in English, regardless of their native language, because it brings the potential audience to higher summits.

(And also, doctors write badly on purpose, so that average people can't read what is prescribed  :D).

I am confused, what is the point of all this?

One thing that may need to be considered is that Satoshi Nakamoto may not have even been formally educated.  He may have been self taught...or learned in a monastery...or spent time in exile reading and coding.  That would explain the informal approach he took to programming and it would explain his isolationism.

Anyone nowadays can speak and write proper English without actually coming from an country where they have English has their primary language.
It doesn't really matter to me anymore who Satoshi is, yes I am curious but I think it's best for bitcoin and Satoshi to stay anonymous.

Those are some nice indicators to determine the kind of English Satoshi speaks. But another question is aren't whitepapers usually approved or edited by some editors? And also, I'd like to know even if we did know he was North American, and did try to triangulate his location it still would be hard to filter it further.

Let's say his married with a North American person and he dictated to her {or the other way around}? We could also consider that it was a group of

people with one individual responsible for the communication. So you just managed to possibly identify one person from the group. There were a bunch

of analysis done on his writing and when it was done, and they came up with nothing. Let it go...  ::)

You shouldn't believe everything that comes out. Maybe Satoshi is trying to mislead everyone so that it will be harder to find out who he/she/they are.
I am completely fine with that. Look at what happened to all the people that came out to claim that they are Satoshi. Governments will be after them.

Here's some HARD TRUTH about the identity.....no one cares!!!

Pretty sure when he mentions "we", he is referring to, either the miners/general users/community, don't think it means it was group of people but that's just my opinion.


Apparently, this will help closing down the location.

And what about the possibility that Satoshi used the American English to make us think that he come from North America ? I'm sure that he even don't come from an English-speaking country. About the use of "we", an user said on another topic that it was the "royal we". As for me, I proposed that he was talking for the whole Bitcoin community. By the way, I don't know why there is so many topics talking about Satoshi's identity today.

It is a common practice to write "We" when they release a paper. You can pick any published paper, you would find "We propose"

True, I would think that an intelligent person like Satoshi would know enough to code his language.  It is not hard, with the internet, to easily fake being from a location.  I would expect that Satoshi would deliberately throw off his trail.

I'm quite surprised and confused with the second part of OP post.  ???

Is the use of "we" supposed to prove that Satoshi is a group of person and not a single individual ?

I don't know how it works in english, because it's not my mothertongue, but in french we usually use the "we" even for only 1 person if it is in an "academic paper" to present an idea or a project. The use of "We" instead of "I" is supposed to increase objectivity  and distance between the author and what he says...

So from my point of view, it doesn't mean Satoshi is a group of person, but he could have an european academic background if it helps with you Sherlock Holmes job  ;D

Great effort, annalysing the way of writting to get closer to the real identity...

Is there any handwritten piece of text by him? Handwritting could also be analysed to get more clues.

Just brainstorming.

No, unfortunatly, I'm sure that there's no handwritten text from him since he stayed anonymous all the time.

Honestly i dont care about satoshis identity does not matter how rich he is or how many BTC he have

and i dont understand why people are after his identity ?

Your research and findings make for good reading but they serve no purpose.Even if we find which country Satoshi belongs to,locating his whereabouts is still not possible.

It does however serve a purpose for some people. Let's say you are a politician and you are part of some legislative council to decide if Bitcoin should

be regulated or not, or simply be banned. If the findings were valid, it could make this decision easy or more difficult. The origin of something, seems

to be very important to some people. We have spent Billions of dollars on space exploration and other technologies, to find the answer to the "Creator"

of the universe.  ::)

Lol that is very true. And when they are talking on a call, they could use a voice modifier.

If satoshi doesn't want to reveal his identity, then why should he. People need to realise this.

Probably he wants to stay anonymous, who know why but those are his reasons.
I don't know why people even wants to know who is he..

He definitely wants to stay anonymous. If he didn't want to, he would have already revealed his identity.

With regard to the intensive and intrinsic research over the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto's I don't think it could provide enough evidence to prove someone is from North America. It can be an intentional change to hide the actual identity. I feel it is all the more important for us to study the effects of Bitcoin on human society and find out remedies to help reorganize the structure of the virtual currency to benefit the human society as a whole.

Now Many think How to make money on the Internet and so I recommend investing only invest in proven projects.

Might be me; but it would look as if he is a programmer that probably writes a lot of notes in his preferred text editor. Yes with a few text worthy typos. ::)


FROM WHAT WE KNOW IM BETTING HE WAS A LINUX OR BSD USER!

I agree, I think it's very difficult to determine his identity with this type of information. And anyway, my thoughts are that it's probably a group of people who have written the Bitcoin whitepaper...

this still can not be made as a reference someone comes from where, many things are made into consideration,
what if he uses tools such as Google translator  ???