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.

Where does your 500 come from? Why can't Satoshi be someone who simply had no deanonymized online presence?