I want to start off by saying that if I knew who satoshi was, I would never reveal his identity out of respect for what he gave us. It is his choice to remain anonymous and possibly choosing to continue his work from the shadows. It still remains a mystery who the man was, but looking at publicly available data won’t interfere with his privacy.
After reading
The Chain Bulletin report where a conclusion was made that satoshi lived in the UK while working on Bitcoin and is possibly British, I started my own research. I slowly went through all 27 pages of satoshi's post history.
My goal was to check his spelling and find sentences and phrases to determine if those were written by a British person. Whether he lived in London or somewhere else, can't be defined from his posts.
If there were records of him speaking live, it would make this task much more manageable. Since I am not aware of any, I had to focus on some of the differences in the spelling between US and British English.
Let me show you what I mean.
1. In US English, you can notice that the letter ‘z’ is often used instead of the letter ‘s’ in words such as
modernized, formalized, optimization. The British forms would be
modernised, formalised, optimisation.
Here are a few examples from satoshi’s posts, so you can check for yourself whether he used British or US spelling.
A)
We could potentially schedule a far in future block when Bitcoin would upgrade to a modernised arrangement with the Merkle Tree on top, if we care enough about saving a few bytes.
-US English spelling is modernized. Modernised is the British variant.
B)
Priority is a more formalised version of the concept you're describing.
-Same as the above example. In US English, you would spell this word formalized, but satoshi spelt it formalised.
C)
The key was Gavin's idea for prioritising transactions based on the age of their dependencies.
-Another example of satoshi using the British spelling form in words like prioritising, instead of prioritizing, which would be used by an American.
D)
There's something with MinGW's optimisation, I'm not sure but maybe a problem with 16-byte alignment on the stack...
- Another example where satoshi spells the word with an ‘s’, instead of the American way with a ‘z’.
2.In the UK, words like
colour or
honour are spelt with ‘ou’. US Americans tend to drop the ‘u’. They will spell these two words as
color or
honor. When it comes to satoshi, I was able to find both forms in his posts. Unfortunately, I don’t have many examples to show.
A)
The foreground is now exactly the same colour as the BC in the old one.
- In this example, he uses the British variant.
But Satoshi also used the US form. He simply didn't pay that much attention to it all the time, or he could have also been familiar with the American way of spelling, so he adopted both forms.
Here is an example:
B)
I have to guess it has something to do with your display color depth selection.
- As we can see in the above example, satoshi used the US form.
3.-There is a difference between how the word ‘
dependent/dependant’ is spelt in American English and British English. Americans would spell the word with an ‘e’, but we can see that satoshi used the British style and spelt it with an ‘a’.
Merriam-Webster's dictionary explains the difference perfectly:
What to Know
The difference between dependent and dependant is merely a matter of preferred spelling. "Dependent" is the dominant form in American English for both the noun and adjective, while in British English, "dependant" is more common for the noun. "Dependent" is still used to indicate the adjective form in British English but its use in this form is uncommon.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/spelling-variants-dependent-vs-dependantHere is how satoshi spelt the word in one of his posts:
A)
The OP_BLOCKNUMBER transaction and all its dependants would become invalid.
Some interesting things I discovered while going through satoshi’s posts: - He often referred to the blockchain as ‘
block chain’. There are many examples of that, here are just two:
A)
You do need to have downloaded the complete block chain (currently 71040 blocks) before you'll see any confirms.
B)
0.3.2 has some security safeguards to lock in the block chain up to this point and limit the damage a little if someone gets 50%.
- He referred to
inputs and
outputs as
inpoints and
outpoints. Does anyone know when and why these terms were changed to inputs and outputs?
A)
The network would track a bunch of independent outpoints. It doesn't know what transactions or amounts they belong to. A client can find out if an outpoint has been spent, and it can submit a satisfying inpoint to mark it spent. The network keeps the outpoint and the first valid inpoint that proves it spent. The inpoint signs a hash of its associated next outpoint and a salt, so it can privately be shown that the signature signs a particular next outpoint if you know the salt, but publicly the network doesn't know what the next outpoint is.
Another example:
B)
The challenge is, how do you prove that no other spends exist? It seems a node must know about all transactions to be able to verify that. If it only knows the hash of the in/outpoints, it can't check the signatures to see if an outpoint has been spent before.
- Although this can’t be used as concrete evidence that satoshi is from the UK, this very much sounds like something a Brit would say, not an American.
A)
Sorry to be a wet blanket. Writing a description for this thing for general audiences is bloody hard.
‘Bloody’ is an intensifier that is not that common in America. You will rarely hear an American saying: “That is bloody difficult to do”.
Here is what the BBC says about it:
Bloody is an all-purpose intensifier that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, once qualified as the strongest expletive available in just about every English-speaking nation except the United States.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20151109-english-speakers-or-not-brits-and-americans-swear-in-different-languages
That’s it. I wish I could have found more examples. If we had for, example,
soccer/football, sidewalk/pavement, fries/chips, pants/trousers... we would have more proof. But I still feel like all this is leaning towards satoshi being British.
What do you think?
