Satoshi was hal finney.
Very unlikely IMO.
1) He would have break a basic OPSEC principle: compartimentalization.
Never mix your true identity with your anonymous identity. And Satoshi followed OPSEC very strictly.
2) It seems very unplausible that a focused person like Satoshi (the same argument is valid for Hal) would have spent so much time debating with himself, that would be borderline schizofrenic behaviour, and that doesn't fit neither Satoshi nor Hal.
In any case the crucial point is 1). Imagine you want to be anonymous to avoid the heat - being the recipient of the very first bitcoin transaction and one of the very first developers defeats that purpose. Imagine that shit hits the fan and the Gov goes hard against Bitcoin: Hal would be one of the first (if not the first) to receive a very uncomfortable visit, in a "
let's eliminate/interrogate all the possible targets" scenario he would be on the top of the list - and that's an epic OPSEC failure that would lead to almost assured failure.
On the contrary, Nick Szabo (
Nakamoto
Satoshi) fits incredibly well. It is painfully obvious that Nick is one of the main (if not THE main) inspirators of Satoshi's work. Again: Nick was the inventor of the "smart contracts" concept and he developed extensive work on blockchain-like decentralized ledgers; his bit-gold is simply "bitcoin beta",
but he is not even cited as a reference on the Bitcoin whitepaper - the only plausible reason for such ommission is again, OPSEC/compartimentalization. Similarly, Szabo almost never wrote about Bitcoin, despite it is clearly the system he has been writing about from 1996 to 2005. Every question to Szabo about BTC is duly ignored, he just wrote/commented about Bitcoin once after many questions, even if it clearly is the realization of years of his work. Additionally, the last paper on e-currency he wrote was published in 2005, and his very last comment on that matter (which was a central part of his work for at least 9 years) was published on his blog in 2008, shortly before the bitcoin paper was published.
Given the above and other many factors (similarity in writing style and political views, etc.) I give 75% chance that NS is SN. This obviously doesn't mean I want Nick to be "outed": privacy is a fundamental right that should never be taken away for anybody.
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