Satoshi Nakamoto is alive, and his real name is Nick Szabo
Satoshi Nakamoto - Nick Szabo S.N - N.S
Szabo is the only one among all candidates who, decades before Bitcoin, was actively researching and developing concepts around money.
Here is one of his texts where he writes about the history and the concept of money.
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/shelling-out/Before Bitcoin, he had a project very similar to Bitcoin called Bit Gold, but it failed The main reason Bit Gold failed was that there was no secure mechanism for digital scarcity there was no way to prevent double-spending and to ensure that each unit was unique and limited.It took Szabo 10 years for the problem to be solved and for Bitcoin to be created.
If you analyze Szabos texts and Satoshis writing on this forum, there are certain similarities in writing style, making it 99.9% likely that Szabo is Satoshi.
Have you ever heard of negativity bias in psychology? People tend to think that they always hit the stoplights when driving, but research shows it is a function of the focus on stoplights due to the frustration of having to stop, rather than actually hitting them more often than green lights. You do not think about the green light as you just pass through it. It causes no issue for you, it does not change the fluid situation of driving, and it does not add time to your route. The stop light, on the other hand, it stands out, and you remember it. Nick Szabo checks some of the boxes, he’s a satisfactory figure, and some things seem to line up, just like making the assumption that you keep hitting every stoplight, when in reality, you drove through plenty of green lights. We assume based on what we notice, and ignore what we glaze over, what doesn’t seem to fit for superficial reasons, rather than what actually matters.
Examples of inventions where another party worked on a previous iteration abound throughout history. The telephone, for example. Bell patented and commercialized a practical system where Antonio Meucci and Elisha Gray had worked on voice transmission prototypes. The Wright brothers airplane combined propulsion and 3-axis control to expand on the technology of gliders their predecessors had worked on. Humphrey Davy, Warren de la Rue, and Joseph Swan all build incandescent lamps prior to Edison’s invention of the light bulb. He solved the remaining issues of filament life and controlled power distribution. Automobiles were not popular until Ford made them affordable, but they had been around. Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine was not the first, but introduced a safer and more systematic method of production and distribution. Other examples include the printing press, computers, smartphones, photography etc. Often, early iterations are just missing one thing that makes the invention viable, useful enough, or of low enough cost to be adopted. More often than not, someone else comes along and sees what could fill the gap that their predecessors missed, and acts on it. The problem is often the viability of integration into daily life as a byproduct of the invention’s utility, or a missing piece of the puzzle to it’s functionality allowing viable use in general. Szabo having worked on Bit Gold does not inherently imply that he came back around to make Bitcoin. Why not just iterate on Bit Gold? His personality would suggest he would do it publicly, as well, just like Bit Gold. Others have taken cracks at the exact problem of digital money itself as well aside from Szabo. Chaum, Back, Wei Dai, even Finney’s digital trading cards all served as pieces to the puzzle, though none of them were Satoshi.
Regarding the stylometry, I would encourage you to further research the accuracy and reliability of the methods used. Work by Brannin, Afroz & Greenstadt, as well as others like Koppel have largely disproved the statistical reliability of such methods of pinning authors to multiple writings. There are multiple underlying assumptions that are required to be true in order for the reliability of it to have any bearing whatsoever. Once the possible authors is expanded past a small subset, the reliability tanks and false positives skyrocket. Discussion of Nick Szabo's use of the term "proof-of-work" as a sign of identity are less likely than Satoshi re-using the term, having come across it during his research phase. Analysis of similarities range from spot on to not at all alike, depending on the researcher and method. Inconclusive, at best.
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/12/16/no-nick-szabo-wasnt-satoshi-in-2014-either/Yes, Szabo wrote about money and it’s origins. Hundreds of thousands of papers have been written regarding the origins and history of money. Many Economics, Anthropology, History, Archaeology, Political Science, Sociology, Law, and Philosophy students have researched and written papers on the subject. There are “similarities” in almost everyone’s writing. Look for them, and you’ll find them. To say someone having written about the subject implies they are Satoshi is like saying someone drives a car so they must be the guy who robbed that bank, as the suspect drove a car.
Further, anyone trying to hide their identity can benefit from a good patsy. It is entirely plausible that IF there is any viability to the initials being the reverse of his, that it was intentional by a 3rd party. Aside, it’s not really a good sign of anything, rather a nice coincidence one may take to mean what it doesn’t while trying to make dots connect that don’t. The initials also probably happen to coincide with multiple people’s initials in a given social circle, without being very large. The birthday problem is a good example of how likely something is statistically, where intuitively it is not. Two people’s birthday’s in a given random subset match up far more often than one would assume.
At the end of the day, precursor work is very, very common in the world of innovation. It’s often a necessity, not a sign of origin. Stylometry here is a very weak methodology for establishing authorship, statistically flawed, and easily deliberately defeated by an intelligent author trying to hide their identity. The breakthrough that allowed Bitcoin to be, and the follow-through that made it happen were not Nick Szabo, although his early work on Bit Gold did contribute. To quote a random person on Reddit: “A common problem in those attempts to identify Satoshi is that they all start by assuming that he was, not only a cypherpunk, but a well-known cypherpunk.” Imagine the police trying to catch a murderer by comparing his fingerprints to those of Charles Manson, O. J. Simpson, Ted Kaczinsky, and Ted Bundy, and closing with the best match among those.”
Perhaps Satoshi was an outsider.
I understand the desire to put the Satoshi mystery to bed, and at this point, the identity is irrelevant to Bitcoin itself. However, it is bothersome how so many people jump onto the fantasy ending, despite the unlikely nature of it given the untouched coin, the cryptic last posts, and going silent. Continuing mining early on would damage the very thing that so much effort went into building if not to just get it to where others were keeping the network afloat. People seem to not consider that, you've got to leave the rest to others and not contribute to pushing the difficulty too high early on. It's an inhibitor to early adopters. Being greedy and continuing mining too much yourself could actually hurt the trajectory. Not to mention, once you've got ~5% of the supply, you'd probably feel like that should be plenty of a nest egg in the long-term if it takes off.
The "watching too many movies" thing is hilarious. Another common psychological fallacy. People always tend to think bizarre things or horrible things only happen in movies, it's a comfort thing. Many of the things that happen in movies happen all the time in real life. They just don't happen to you, so you feel like they don't happen at all, because you only see them in movies. The powers of certain government agencies post cold war and then again post 9/11 would make a lot of people very uncomfortable. Some of the things that happen behind the scenes that are kept from the public people would assume can't happen, can and do happen, especially if someone is tricked into signing something.
