| ▲ | kgeist 20 hours ago |
| >I read up to here, but I wasn't convinced that this is the revelation that the author claims The rest of the arguments is as weak: 1) both released open-source software 2) both don't like spam 3) both like using pseudonyms online 4) both love freedom 5) both are anti-copyright etc. Basically, the author found that Adam Back used the same words on X as Satoshi did in some emails (including such rare words as "dang," "backup," and "abandonware") and then decided to find every possible "link" they could to build the case, even if most of the links are along the lines of "Both are humans! Coincidence? I think not." |
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| ▲ | DeliciousSeaCow 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| It's weird they spent so much time on the written word similarities, when the biggest reveal here is that Back disappears off the email lists (on a topic he is VERY interested in and has historically corresponded on) when Nakamoto appears, and then comes back when Nakamoto disappears. |
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| ▲ | WalterBright 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I use "dang" as a nod to Gary Larson. |
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| ▲ | tovej 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think this misses the point. The point is that interests and writing style matches, which means there's a higher chance they are the same person. The more similarities you find, the closer the match. It's in no way proof, of course. But it does provide good reason to look closer |
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| ▲ | rcxdude 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Only if those similarities are indicating more than 'generic internet hacker' for both of them. You only need 23 bits to identify a person but those are 23 uncorrelated bits, and all the 'similarities' presented here are extremely strongly correlated with themselves. | | | |
| ▲ | alwa 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The interests and writing style differentiate Mr. (Dr.?) Back from the general public, sure. But from what I’m reading, they don’t do a great job of distinguishing between 90s hackers. “Get this, his PhD thesis dealt with a computer language called C++, just like Bitcoin papers used” seems both confused and impossibly lazy to me. > “Scrap patents and copyright,” Mr. Back wrote in September 1997. > Satoshi did a similar thing. He released the Bitcoin software under M.I.T.’s open-source license Really? Like saying “get this, his college-aged musical interests included the Urban American musical style known as ‘Hip Hop’; therefore Tupac didn’t really die and this is him.” Heavy on insinuation, light on seriousness. Strong “…you’re not from around here, are you?” vibes. What does this kind of journalism hope to accomplish, anyway? Beyond bothering middle-aged nerds for gossip? And providing a frame for the author’s cute little sleuth jape? “Good reason to look closer” assumes there’s good reason to pick through ancient rubble in the first place. | | | |
| ▲ | defrost 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Similarities in style and word were common enough in small circles such as the cyphyrpunks that spawned those discussions. Then there's not altogether unlikely chance that Satoshi is a nodding homage to Nicolas Bourbaki, each contributor holding part of a multiparty voting key. |
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| ▲ | refulgentis 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| That's the weak evidence. Nobody cares that they both like open source and freedom, half the cypherpunks list fits that. The parts worth engaging with: Back described a system combining Hashcash and b-money with inflation adjustment and public timestamping on the cypherpunks list between 1997-1999. That's basically Bitcoin's architecture, a decade early. He was one of the most prolific digital cash posters for years, went silent when Satoshi appeared, came back when Satoshi left. And this person who independently arrived at the same technical design also independently landed on the same Napster vs Gnutella analogy, the same celebrity email filtering idea, and the same FDR gold ban trivia. Any one of these is a coincidence. At some point you have to ask how many you need before the simpler explanation wins. |
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| ▲ | bobbiechen 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This article is a great example of "strong + weak = weak". I only made it to the interesting stuff because of Carreyou's name, otherwise I would have stopped. The email timing and lack of email metadata were also strong, in my opinion. But all of this nonsense like "Wow, these guys both talk about PGP??" distracts from it. | |
| ▲ | vidarh 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | All of those similarities can be explained by Satoshi having read what Back wrote. | | |
| ▲ | refulgentis 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You need someone who read Back's obscure 1997-1999 cypherpunks posts about combining Hashcash and b-money, implemented exactly that system a decade later, independently came up with the same non-technical analogies and trivia, wrote with the same hyphenation errors, and then happened to be active during the exact window Back went silent. The more you flesh out the "someone who read Back" profile, the more it just sounds like Back. | | |
| ▲ | vidarh 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Someone who has read his material would be likely to repeat the same analogies and trivia. As for the hyphen errors, they are common for people for whom English is their second language. I commit hyphen errors similar to what is described all the time because English hyphenation makes absolutely no sense. In fact, reading the list of examples, the mistakes listed makes more sense to me than the correct way of writing those. I also switch back and forth on a lot of the phrases the article mentions. I also switch back and forth between US and UK spelling, because I learned UK spelling at school, but was far more exposed to US spelling in practice. This seems to me to be exceedingly weak. | | |
| ▲ | refulgentis an hour ago | parent [-] | | At some point "Satoshi was a devoted reader of obscure 1997 Adam Back mailing list posts who shares his hyphenation errors, his Napster vs Gnutella analogy, his celebrity email filtering idea, his FDR gold ban interest, his 'burning the money' metaphor, his 'Achilles heel' description of DigiCash, his 'better with code than words' self-assessment, his energy-vs-banking defense, his British spellings mixed with American ones, his double-spacing habit, his it's/its confusion, his sentence-final 'also' tic, his 'proof-of-work' hyphenation, his WebMoney references, and who went active the exact week Back went silent" is just a longer way of saying it's Adam Back. I'm not sure I agree with that, but it's what I came up with after challenging myself to read the article in toto again and note 1 by 1. It's clear it's beyond a couple tics everyone has, and when you combine that with the starting set being ~500 instead of "all 8 billion people on earth", well, it's worth mentioning. |
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| ▲ | dboreham 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's been extremely widely known that whoever created Bitcoin had a strong interest in Hashcash, and perhaps created that or worked on it, for years and years. If that's the only smoking gun, why didn't we identify Satoshi long ago? | | |
| ▲ | refulgentis 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You're right, "interested in Hashcash" describes dozens of people, and has been a known Satoshi filter for years. The new claim is more specific: between 1997-1999, Back proposed combining Hashcash with b-money, adding inflation adjustment via increasing computational difficulty, and using hash trees for public timestamping. That's most of Bitcoin's architecture in one package, a decade early. The number of people who proposed that particular combination of ideas is much smaller than the number who were merely interested in Hashcash. |
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