Claiming other people are claiming you are Satoshi is a way that some fakers promote their fakery. But in this case, I weakly recognized the name and 10 seconds on the forum search confirm that people have indeed claimed as much, so I'm confident that the denial was not just a sideways way of claiming to be Satoshi.
It's really terrible to be falsely accused of being Satoshi when you're not (and when you're not planning on scamming anyone using it): Satoshi's identity is far far more interesting to mentally ill people than it is to ordinary people, as ordinary people usually only find it a mild curiosity at most-- after all Bitcoin was designed so that the identity of its creator wouldn't matter-- but there are more than a few mentally ill people who are utterly obsessed with it. Obsessed crazies have been known to murder famous people in order to make themselves memorable to history.
Satoshi's identity is also far more interesting to kidnappers and robbers, for obvious reasons: he's alleged to control a large amount of Bitcoin. You really don't want a bunch of crazy or criminal people making you a target of their adventures, esp because the cost of security against these sorts of threats is quite substantial, limiting your exposure in public stinks, etc.
Often celebrities have significant incomes that can pay for security costs as a cost of doing business-- that isn't the case for people falsely accused of being Satoshi.
Famous yet we never heard him before. Lol
One thing folks may be missing when they note that they haven't heard of him is that the view from the driver's seat of someone's life is very different from the sidelines. As someone who has probably received more than a typical amount of harassment and abuse, I've occasional commented to a friend about to hear back "oh, I've seen that but it wasn't really much was it?" only to have me bring them over to the computer and show them from my perspective -- "holy shit!".
Even if you were following a person, what percentage of the messages and mentions to and of them do you think you see? 1%? If you're not following them maybe a tiny tiny percentage 0.0001%? You can't even see meatspace or private interactions at all. So anything you see you could imagine that being multiplied by 100 or 1000 times. There seems to be a weird effect where nice comments tend to get made in public while nasty/stalky/invasive comments are made more often in private, further exacerbating the effect.
So to me it's quite credible that someone you've never heard of could still have received a troubling amount of unwelcome or concerning contact. (Doubly so in that the headline article here was published in 2013... plenty of time for people to forget about him
).
I still have David Kleiman as the #1 Satoshi candidate.
That just means you've fallen for Wright's story (abstraction v1). There is nothing to support Kleiman here, and Bitcoin is a mismatch of his skills: he was an IT admin guy, plugging PC parts and editing the windows registry. There is no evidence that kleiman had substantive programming expertise (the only 'programming' he has ever been shown to have done is a trivial Visual Basic windows registry checker), nor any particular expertise in cryptography. If Kleiman had any real experience programming it would have been brought out as evidence in the florida trial.
The only reason kleiman has ever been mentioned here is because Wright knew/feared that many would be able to tell that he obviously didn't create Bitcoin, but it would be fine for Wright's purposes (getting money predicated on access to Satoshi's coins) if people suspected that Wright was lying but still thought he had access to the coins.
Which would have been necessary to adopt elliptic curve signatures over other encryption standards which were later found to be compromised.
There weren't any viable options (e.g. available in openssl) which were later found to be compromised.
