Who DeathAndTaxes is?

[Severian]

In a hundred years in a hundred parallel worlds I wouldn't have come up with the concept of Bitcoin...

But if someone asks you how your day was, you're one of the few people on the planet that can say, "I was mistaken for Satoshi Nakamoto today. And you?"

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[RoadToHell]

In a hundred years in a hundred parallel worlds I wouldn't have come up with the concept of Bitcoin...

I don't always invent a cryptocurrency.  But when I do, it's bitcoin.  - DeathAndTaxes

[Elwar]

I have considered writing a program to be able to track who is who on the Internet based upon their writing style (note, I have come close to working on a government project where I could have done just that...your identity is not safe on the Internet).

Most people have a very limited vocabulary depending upon intelligence. I believe the number I saw was around 150,000 words on average. Not everyone will use the same 150,000 words so if two people do a lot of writing on the Internet, they will likely write a good chunk of their own word base or a main subset. If two different people's word set do not correlate, then they are likely different. But, if you have one person's total writing and then you compare it against the words of many people you can get a percentage of word usage.

More importantly, most people will have similar sentence structure or use combinations of words in a more telling way than their bucket of words. So I would have taken combinations of words added together and given them more credit toward the possibility that two people are the same.

There was a study done taking a similar approach to news articles and comparing those articles to wording used by congressmen to show which congressmen were using the language of which news articles. They then gave a percentage to the various news agencies of whether they leaned more democrat or republican. Most sites correlated just about how you would think, CNN, MSNBC, etc favoring democrats while FoxNews favored republicans. Surprisingly Drudge Report came out as the most balanced but that is just because they link to several different sources of news.

Personally, I actually change my writing style on the Internet for this very reason.

[bg002h]

Personally, I actually change my writing style on the Internet for this very reason.

Me good idea think have you. I style change now too also. Be hidden so bots not find on me.

Actually, my approach is to just be real...and since it's hard to be actually become and remain rich anyway...don't try too hard to be rich. Life is short, enjoy it

[QuestionAuthority]

It's not DnT. Theymos and Sirus are Satoshi.

[solex]

I love the OP's implying that whatever web scraper he wrote is some kind of amazing quantum AI that is so CPU-heavy he had to turn off all his mining programs while it rans for weeks doing the kinds of pattern recognition you usually see on TV shows like 24 or Person of Interest. I picture it like this:

-OP types "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?" into his hackstation, which appears on 9 screens at once.
-Green letter scroll across black screens for hours, surveillance photos of asian men flash across the screen.
-Computer speaks in half robotic/half human voice "There are a number of possibilities, Michael"
-OP says "Narrow the search. Enhance the variables."
-Montage of OP pacing around his dark apartment while the computer runs.
-Computer speaks "You're not going to like this Michael".
-OP speaks: "Just give me the results, S.A.T.O. !"
-S.A.T.O. : "I've narrowed it down to a list of suspects. Number one is the forum poster DeathandTaxes"
-OP : "Okay, now we're getting somewhere. S.A.T.O., give me the case on DeathandTaxes"
-S.A.T.O.: "He gets quoted all the time on bitcointalk."
-OP: "BINGO. Thanks buddy. And now the game begins".

The superhackcomputer powers down as OP opens a forum window and types "WHO DEATHANDTAXES IS?".

Fade to black.

The AI should be making some snarky comments as well. For instance, OP should ask, "Are you certain?" and the computer should reply, "It's the only thing in life that is certain."

Excellent. But I've got a much better idea for S.A.T.O.

Attach it to a bot and turn it loose on Mt Gox so it can make BTCBTCBTCBTCBTCBTCBTCBTCBTC 

[mc_lovin]

Definitely adding this to my thread

http://www.bitcointrading.com/forum/talk-bitcoin/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto-thread-of-theories!/

[HeroC]

I love the OP's implying that whatever web scraper he wrote is some kind of amazing quantum AI that is so CPU-heavy he had to turn off all his mining programs while it rans for weeks doing the kinds of pattern recognition you usually see on TV shows like 24 or Person of Interest.

Hehe, not really. I stopped mining coz of The End Is Near. The bot is just a java application. It works on GPUs via http://www.jcuda.org/, it's not rocket science. I hope u satisfied.

Wait.. You actually made a bit? I thought it just  meant you and your sites users did some deep digging. Nice job! 

[Phinnaeus Gage]

No. D&T is smart, but he's not THAT smart.

Satoshi wasn't genius. He compiled together ideas of other guys.

FUCK ME! Are you saying that Ed Trice is Satoshi Nakamoto?

Two spaces after a period was an excellent find. I always thought it was fishy how D&T let me pass him in posts count. Probably did such to take away any suspicions on himself.

Now the bad news: If D&T is truly SN, and since he answered with a NO, that would make SN a liar, bursting my belief system all to hell.

Today is now the saddest day of my life.   Say it ain't so, Nakamoto!

[myrkul]

Say it ain't so, Nakamoto!

No.

[organofcorti]

I only ever use one space between sentences. Satoshi Nakamoto would be smart enough to throw people off the trail by changing his typewriting to one space between sentences. I am, however, not Satoshi Nakamoto.

If you're looking for someone with a name that's an anagram of Satoshi Nakamoto, I'd start with looking for someone named "Oh I took Satan's Ma!".

[Phinnaeus Gage]

The OP is very similar to something I once proposed:

If the real Satoshi has published a lot of text under his real name, it should be possible to figure out who he's most likely to be using statistical analysis.

I'm surprised nobody has attempted this, a general solution to this problem would have some pretty cool uses in computer forensics.

I first suggested this be done several months ago, and twice more after that. It has proven successful to link a old paper to William Shakespeare once.

~Bruno~

Won't work if "Satoshi Nakamoto" is another Nicolas Bourbaki  - if your training texts are written by many people, then they won't be much use if your algorithm is assuming it is one person.

There's an article that stated after gleaning all that Satoshi wrote, they were surprised to find so few grammatical errors. Two people with the same writing style and avoiding errors--maybe. Three or more--I lean toward no.

The following is what I was eluding to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_question#Evidence_for_Shakespeare.27s_authorship_from_his_works

Beginning in 1987, Ward Elliott, who was sympathetic to the Oxfordian theory, and Robert J. Valenza supervised a continuing stylometric study that used computer programs to compare Shakespeare's stylistic habits to the works of 37 authors who had been proposed as the true author. The study, known as the Claremont Shakespeare Clinic, was last held in the spring of 2010. The tests determined that Shakespeare's work shows consistent, countable, profile-fitting patterns, suggesting that he was a single individual, not a committee, and that he used fewer relative clauses and more hyphens, feminine endings, and run-on lines than most of the writers with whom he was compared. The result determined that none of the other tested claimants' work could have been written by Shakespeare, nor could Shakespeare have been written by them, eliminating all of the claimants whose known works have survived—including Oxford, Bacon, and Marlowe—as the true authors of the Shakespeare canon.

I believe the following is what I had in mind (or something similar): http://www.philocomp.net/humanities/signature

Welcome to the home page of Signature, a program designed to facilitate "stylometric" analysis and comparison of texts, with a particular emphasis on author identification.

Signature used to investigate claims that Obama's book was written by an ex-terrorist.

Signature used to support Coleridge's authorship of an anonymous 1821 translation of Goethe's Faustus.

Signature used to test authorship of famous cyphers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry

Stylometry is the application of the study of linguistic style, usually to written language, but it has successfully been applied to music and to fine-art paintings as well.
Stylometry is often used to attribute authorship to anonymous or disputed documents. It has legal as well as academic and literary applications, ranging from the question of the authorship of Shakespeare's works to forensic linguistics.

...

Modern stylometry draws heavily on the aid of computers for statistical analysis, artificial intelligence and access to the growing corpus of texts available via the Internet. Software systems such as Signature (freeware produced by Dr Peter Millican of Oxford University) and JGAAP (the Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program—freeware produced by Dr Patrick Juola of Duquesne University) make its use increasingly practicable, even for the non-expert.

Do you believe Singature or JGAAP can find Satoshi Nakamoto?

[Paul Troon]

U have placed two spaces between sentences! Just like Satoshi!  

EDIT: The text I made bold was a hint! U r very smart, I suspect u just make appearance that u r not so smart...

Maybe D&T is just part of the older generation. The 2 space after sentences was something they did in the early days of typing, I think. I had a teacher in middle school who told us to do that in reports.

I think you are right.  It's a legacy of learning to type at a certain time and place.  I distinctly remember my typing teacher (teaching us to use an IBM Selectric typewriter) telling us to put two spaces between sentences.  This probably dates Satoshi (and the rest of us) as having learned to type with an older typewriter standard, OR from someone who taught an older typewriter standard.   More conclusively though it places Satoshi as having learned in an English speaking country.  Apparently no non-English speaking countries do this double space thing, according to: http://www.ditchwalk.com/2011/01/19/two-spaces-after-a-period/ .  But no one suspected Satoshi as actually being Japanese anyway.

[Phinnaeus Gage]

U have placed two spaces between sentences! Just like Satoshi!  

EDIT: The text I made bold was a hint! U r very smart, I suspect u just make appearance that u r not so smart...

Maybe D&T is just part of the older generation. The 2 space after sentences was something they did in the early days of typing, I think. I had a teacher in middle school who told us to do that in reports.

I think you are right.  It's a legacy of learning to type at a certain time and place.  I distinctly remember my typing teacher (teaching us to use an IBM Selectric typewriter) telling us to put two spaces between sentences.  This probably dates Satoshi (and the rest of us) as having learned to type with an older typewriter standard, OR from someone who taught an older typewriter standard.   More conclusively though it places Satoshi as having learned in an English speaking country.  Apparently no non-English speaking countries do this double space thing, according to: http://www.ditchwalk.com/2011/01/19/two-spaces-after-a-period/ .  But no one suspected Satoshi as actually being Japanese anyway.

Hence Ashish Gulhati being my SN of choice. Is D&T n Oz?

[Viceroy]

+1 for  Ashish Gulhati

If it's not Ashish it's Vladamir.