Here's my Satoshi conspiracy theory. I don't have any particular evidence to support this, but it's a clever story that gives me great personal pleasure to think about, and no one else has posed it. Of course, Satoshi's identity is totally irrelevant at this point, so I really don't care what the true answer is. I'll be a little disappointed if someone proves this idea *isn't* the case, but, oh well, go ahead. I'll happily collect all the points if this ends up being correct!
1. Wei Dai invented it. B-Money is by far the closest related conceptual work. It has most of the critical parts, such as broadcasting digitally-signed transactions to everyone on the network, who collectively maintain a ledger and transaction history.
http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txthttp://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1998/12/msg00194.htmlNone of Wei Dai's posts ever mentioned the use of proof-of-work puzzles to resolve conflicts and coordinate global consistency. But these techniques were well-known at the time (e.g., Hashcash), just not for this application. Once that missing piece was put in its place, he also came up with the plan to develop and launch it (rather than just write more about it on the mailing list).
2. Ben Laurie wrote the code, but hates the idea. Laurie is a prominent crypto engineer and coder, having written code for OpenSSL and an ecash library called Lucre. He thinks proof-of-work is nonsense though, and would prefer a digital currency system based on a quorum of semi-trusted designated servers.
http://www.links.org/files/decentralised-currencies.pdf3. Nick Szabo wrote the whitepaper, but this was his only involvement. Szabo has written tons of great essays on this history of currency technology
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ and frequented the cyperpunks mailing list. This explains the text-analysis trail.
