The article points out a wide range of 'coincidences' between the activities of nick Szabo and Satoshi. Too many to call them just coincidences or to ignore them.
A) Nick acknowledged that .... he was among a small group of people who .... laid the foundation for Bitcoin and created many parts that later went into the virtual currency.
B) Nick's most notable contribution was a Bitcoin predecessor known as bit gold that achieved many of the same goals using similar tools of advanced math and cryptography.
C) In 2014, Nick joined Vaurum, a Bitcoin start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif., that was operating in stealth mode and that aimed to build a better Bitcoin exchange. After his arrival, Mr. Szabo helped reorient the company to take advantage of the Bitcoin software’s capability for so-called smart contracts.
D) While Nick was at Vaurum, the array of arcane skills and knowledge at his command led several colleagues to conclude that Mr. Szabo was most likely involved in the creation of Bitcoin.
E) Nick mentioned bit gold, saying it harnessed many of the same obscure concepts, like secure property titles and digital time stamps, that made Bitcoin possible. He also said "....you can go through secure property titles and bit gold — there are so many parallels between that and Bitcoin that you can’t find anywhere else.”
F) Many concepts central to Bitcoin were developed in an online community known as the Cypherpunks, a loosely organized group of digital privacy activists. As part of their mission, they set out to create digital money that would be as anonymous as physical cash. Mr. Szabo was a member.
G) He worked for six months as a consultant for a company called DigiCash.
H) In 1998, he sent the outline for his own version of digital money, which he called bit gold, to a small group that was still pursuing the project, including Mr. Dai and Hal Finney, a programmer based in Santa Barbara, Calif., who tried to create a working version of bit gold.
I) When Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper describing Bitcoin appeared in the fall of 2008, it cited Mr. Back’s hashcash. The first people Satoshi emailed privately were Mr. Back and Mr. Dai, both men have said. And Mr. Finney, who recently died, helped Satoshi improve the Bitcoin software. All these people were members of Cypherpunk community.
J) In spring 2008, before anyone had ever heard of Satoshi Nakamoto or Bitcoin, Mr. Szabo revived his bit gold idea on his personal blog, and in an online conversation about creating a live version of the virtual currency, he asked his readers: “Anybody want to help me code one up?” After Bitcoin appeared, Mr. Szabo changed the date on that blog post. It then looked as though it was written after Bitcoin’s release, rather than before, archived versions of the website show.
K) In 2014, researchers at Aston University, in England, compared the writing of several people who have been suspected to be Satoshi and found that none matched up nearly as well as Mr. Szabo’s.
L) Unlike Mr. Dai, Mr. Finney and Mr. Back, Mr. Szabo has not released any correspondence from Satoshi from this period or acknowledged communicating with him.
M) He wrote about it again at greater length, noting the similarity between bit gold and Bitcoin. He acknowledged that few people would have had the expertise and the instinct to create either of them.
N) May 2011 was when Mr. Szabo went on a lengthy hiatus to work, on a new concept he called temporal programming. May 2011 was also the last time Satoshi communicated privately with other Bitcoin contributors. In an email that month to Martti Malmi, one of the earliest participants, Satoshi wrote, “I’ve moved on to other things and probably won’t be around in the future.”
Last but not least:
