What struck me in particular was the fact the reporter noticed that Back had theorized how to evade stylometry. Obviously, if one of the people in question had specifically come up with ways to evade methods, you’d want to re-roll those methods to account for that.

That, alongside a number of other tidbits (Back’s activity and inactivity patterns lining up with Satoshi’s appearance and disappearance, his refusal to provide email metadata, his financial incentive to hide his identity as Satoshi under US securities law) makes the case a lot more meaningful than just “likely p-hacking.”

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Lerc 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>his financial incentive to hide his identity as Satoshi under US securities law

I don't think you can attribute this to financial incentive. The actual Satoshi could forfeit 90% of their BTC and still have more than they could know what to do with.

At those kinds of levels I can see personal security being a higher consideration.

Either way it would give no indication who might be Satoshi because all candidates would have a similar incentive if they were Satoshi, and you are measuring the absence of information.

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philistine 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

why does everybody assume that whoever is Satoshi still has access to their wallet? It's absolutely possible whoever is Satoshi has simply lost the key.

We're talking new technology where you're running fast and loose. It's absolutely possible, and I'd say a big reason why someone would not want to admit to being Satoshi.

I'm Satoshi, but I also lost billions because I messed up a Debian upgrade.

	▲	prawn an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Further, no one would believe them, and they'd still endlessly be a target for criminals. No benefit to revealing any information beyond mild dismissals, IMO.
	▲	3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
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	▲	CTDOCodebases 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Or what if Satoshi deliberately destroyed their key? The motivations behind Bitcoin were clear. All the wealthy people I know don’t really do it for the money. The money is the gauge or the metric they use to judge how well they are playing the game but what motivates them is the love of the game and their sense of purpose. If someone was to truly believe that Bitcoin was going to be a gold/USD/Eurodollar/swift etc. replacement then their metric of success isn’t money if they got in early.

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pdntspa 42 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

For that wealth to mean anything he has to withdraw from it, and wouldn't that produce a paper trail?

Apologies if its mentioned in TFA, I only got halfway through it... the author's self-indulgence was getting to be a bit much

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eddiewithzato an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also Back’s response on X was very telling

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yieldcrv 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> What struck me in particular was the fact the reporter noticed that Back had theorized how to evade stylometry.

there are automated tools for this now that students use routinely so that their papers don't get flagged as AI whether they wrote it or not

there would be lots of people that looked this up as it has been discussed a lot on those same mailing lists before being so commonplace