Bitcoin Forum

Satoshi Nakamoto is (probably) Nick Szabo
by John Biggs  the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch.

https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-nick-szabo/comment-page-1/#comment-96

I recently became interested in identifying the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. I started from the Bitcoin whitepaper

• published in late 2008, and proceeded to run reverse textual analysis –essentially, searching the internet for highly unusual turns of phrase and vocabulary patterns (in particular places which you would expect a cryptography researcher to contribute to), then evaluating the fitness of each match found by running textual similarity metrics on several pages of their writing.

Read the complete article here: https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-nick-szabo/comment-page-1/#comment-96

To busy watching the price dropping. No time for who satoshi really is.  :-[

Yeah, we're bored with the primeval mystery of the identity of SN. FWIW, latest theory is that he is one of these guys:

http://www.prometheus2-movie.com/media/engineer_reads_prometheus.jpg

As with every theory, there are more people debunking it than believing it.
The problem is that if Satoshi really moved on and only posted with his own account, then analyzing this would only show who has the most alike language to Satoshi. I'm sure that 'the whole internet' in this search was greatly confined to articles about bitcoin and similar content. This would lead ultimately to having a likely answer coming out very probable.

As for the picture above. I got a gut feeling that Satoshi may have a little bit more hair than that, haha. :D
(no offense to bald people I'm losing hair myself)

debunked: http://unenumerated.blogspot.nl/2009/05/liar-resistant-government.html

Why talk about yourself in the third person...

Satoshi has been reading Nick's work, and its most likely based off it. But I do not believe its him. Why reference yourself 3 months after you released something...

If you're trying to keep your pseudonym disconnected from you, hiding in plain sight using misdirection seems logical to me.

The author of the original article makes a good point:


This is simply a rebuttal, I'm not sufficiently convinced either but the evidence this author presents is intriguing.  

There are so many Satoshi Nakamoto suspects it's not even funny. Yes, Nick Szabo is one of them, but there are so so so so so much more, and it is more likely it is another person than Nick Szabo because Nick Szabo last time I checked was very good at writing papers and concepts but is not an expert cryptographer or mathematician himself.

There are so many suspects, people have been suspecting Nick Szabo since forever and there are much better suspects than him, trust me. Sometimes I think it is a little too obvious who he is because of the evidence available that might spotlight one or a group of these suspects, but when you think you know who it is, all of a sudden you find some evidence that shows it might not be him/them after all.

The blog that this post first made appearance have no history of posting and most likely was newly created, I suspect the author maybe trying to lead people astray in their searches of Satoshi.

Can't we leave Satoshi alone with his decission ?

Definitely. Every other day I am hearing about some individual being "accused" as Satoshi. If media can't find his real identity (they don't even know whether Satoshi is a single individual or a group of individuals), then why they are trying to fry our brain?

Some people are just nosy fucks and won't leave people alone, the second a person who's untrustworthy will find them, word will spread, the media will get involved and then he will be targeted for assassination by governments so as to set an example or arrested as a financial terrorist. There's a very good reason that he's keeping anonymous and it's because of all the bullshit that would follow if he revealed his identity and it doesn't take a genius to figure it out when you look at how particularly the U.S has treated people like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange.

The difference between him and them though is they clearly calculated what would happen if they revealed themselves after posting this stuff up which is why we haven't heard a thing from 'them' ( still think he could be a girl or an alien :D ) so I really wish people would stop being such assholes about this. I can actually see governments totally overreacting to this sort of thing soon enough and they'll start kicking down innocent peoples' doors and arresting them or getting them killed just because the media had a verbal diarrhoea moment on national television like they always do.

Well, for what it's worth, he is kind of a public figure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_figure).
He'll have to deal with it. That's probably precisely why he chose to stay anonymous.

Please edit title to include date format as outlined in sticky at top of thread.  Helps when we search archive.  Thanks

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=246823.0

I find efforts to "find satoshi" to belong in one of two camps:

1.) They are simply too stupid to understand that the person or persons deliberately chose to be anonymous. Don't go sniffing where someone doesn't want you to, you naive idiot.

2.) They have an agenda, where revealing the creator or creators of Bitcoin would allow close personal scrutiny of their lives, likes and dislikes, providing fodder for those that oppose or fear Bitcoin in general. "See, he was a member of this group - obviously bitcoin was meant to be a subversive terrorist weapon against our country!!"

Anyone who participates in the search, writes about it, or just in general keeps this idea going - is a complete fool at best, and at worst, an enemy to anyone who values the freedoms that Bitcoin provides.

Trust me there are people who have already figured it out yet purposely do not announce it, due to camp number 3:

3.) They figure out who he or they are just due to natural human curiosity, but because he or they wish to remain anonymous, they let him or them be anonymous and give out zero clues to who he or they are. They do not announce their search, they do not announce any clues, they just let him or them be.

Actually who knows if they have figured it out or not? No one is certain who Satoshi really is, but they have their own theories and answers, yet at the same time do not purposely give it out loud.

I agree with this theory, that Nick Szabo is Satoshi.

To me, the biggest piece of evidence that very few people discuss, is the fact that Nick Szabo attempted to post-date his "bit gold" post from 2005 to 2009, after the release of Bitcoin.

Hear, hear. Yes, I agree.

There is another possibility: he is not Satoshi, but he knows who Satoshi is.

Satoshi Nakamoto is the project name for cryptocoins.
It all started in 1996 with NSA.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm#Introduction

Stop hunting ghosts.

That's funny. So the witch hunt continues. Anyway Nick Szabo created the "bitgold" after getting inspiration from Wei Dai (who in 1998 created the digital currency b-money). And Dai was inspired by David Chaum, who first proposed cryptographic system for untraceable payments in 1982. The list will go on and on.......

And who was satoshi that was writing on mail lists and here on the forum?
(Please say that it was an ai computer and not some agents or something)

But why would Nick Szabo suddenly attempt to post-date his "bit gold" post, literraly 2 months after the Bitcoin whitepaper was published?

Also, the design of bit gold is a lot closer to bitcoin, than b-money or what Chaum worked on.

But why would Satoshi, who was so thorough in hiding his trails, settle with the name 'Bitcoin', despite its apparent similarity to ' bit gold'? If he was familiar with Szabo's work he should not have overlooked this, especially he should not on one hand coin such a name, and on the other hand pretend to have no knowledge of Szabo's work.

Your looking at it from the wrong perspective, Satoshi doesn't have to care, he is MIA.
If Szabo would be Satoshi... now then you're looking at a whole bunch of dead give-aways. Similarity in name, Similarity in design, same time frame.
The logical assuming to make though (most likely scenario) is that Satoshi read about Szabo's work, and got inspired by it. Then all of a sudden some of Satoshi's earlier comments would also make more sense.
"I'm better with code than with words. Until I knew I could figure out all the code problems, I wasn't sure to post." *note paraphrasing here, can't be bothered to look up the exact wording.
And all of a sudden, the picture of Satoshi becomes much different. He doesn't have to have the economics, he doesn't have to have the math. (All that stuff was done by Szabo) All that is needed it a brilliant computer programmer, who understand crypto (which just means that he had to have been doing some work on program / communication security) and has a liberal mindset.
Only one problem, this would put Satoshi from a candidate range of a hundred into a range of thousands if not ten thousands.

Satoshi improved Szabo's math, so he indeed needs to have the math.  In fact he made a number of decisions when examined retrospectively revealing very profound, perhaps above public knowledge understanding of cryptography, hashed address being one example, secp256k1 in place of secp256r1 being another.

That being said, I believe it was indeed common sense within a small circle about what economic characteristics  maybe desirable in such a currency, just the implementation details are lacking.

Also, the psychological implications of mining for speculators maybe his unique insight or unintended consequences, we may never know.

Intelligence and knowledge being one thing, the determination to go at it alone for many years being another, also, the self-restraint to not premine, the openness and communication skills to build a society around you, the friendliness he displayed when interacting with people, and the grace to exit and vanish are all characters you can't find on everyone, some of which are important to get Bitcoin kick-started in the first place.

Simple: because Satoshi/Szabo isn't perfect. He committed small mistakes. Szabo loved the system he invented so much that he spent non-negligible time thinking about a name for it (bit gold)! So, then he implements it, and it was hard for him to not take inspiration from the name bit gold that he loved, so he comes up with bitcoin. Perhaps he thought about people commenting on the name similarity, but he may have thought "what the heck, I love the name, it's just a name, I am fine with it being similar".

This seems to be the most possible conclusion. And we should remember that Bitcoin and Bitgold are not similar at all, despite their names suggesting otherwise.

Don't count me out, I want to be Satoshi!  ;D

You are kidding right? Bit gold is incredibly similar to Bitcoin, it has:
- decentralization
- chains of proof-of-work
- timestamps (ie. ordering in the block chain)
- digital signatures to represent transactions

Many of us who are bullish on Bitcoin prices would prefer that Satoshi's identity remain a secret. If he was ever identified, without a doubt, there would be much less incentive for him to leave his mined coins untouched. In fact, Satoshi might have to sell some of those coins to pay for security and other inconviences that comes with being a controversial public figure.