Bitcoin Forum

It seems Satoshi is from England as he included part of the following article into the Genesis block

The date of article in the Times and the Sunday Times is 3rd of January 2009

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article5434660.ece

From The Times
January 3, 2009
Chancellor Alistair Darling on brink of second bailout for banks

Anybody could read that online.

He also uses non-American spelling. For example, he uses "colour" in the code. I don't know which usage is typical in Japan.

According to Google translate, "色".

If you write color, it will translate to 色 too.

 ::)
I meant the usage taught in English courses in Japan.

He uses a mixture of the British spelling -ise and the American spelling -ize in his posts.

For instance, in this post he writes "optimise"

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=955.msg12248#msg12248

In this one he writes "criticize"

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2151.msg28228#msg28228

This suggests that he is not a native English speaker. They tend to use either form exclusively, depending on where they went to primary school.

Or even where they went to university. For words that can be spelled either way, Oxford University (and Oxford Dictionary) uses -ize and Cambridge uses -ise.

Until World War II, -ize was standard for the UK (http://www.metadyne.co.uk/ize.html), but in the past 65 years the use of -ise has become more common.

Anyway, Satoshi is very careful about hiding his identity, so I expect his choice of -ise or -ize is deliberate and does not reveal any information about him.

I am a native English speaker and routinely mix British and American spellings in what I write. The software industry is standardized on American spellings so if you are raised with the British spellings and become a programmer you can't really avoid getting them mixed up sometimes.

I love how we have our own Julian Assange.

Perhaps more of a John Galt... Except he set his sights on the banking industry instead of... well, industry.

Same here. the ise/ize endings I routinely switch between (prefer the -ise endings though), whereas other words like colour I always use the British spelling.