Comment by acjohnson55
7 days ago
I think there's a pretty good chance Adam Back is Satoshi, but I don't think this is a great article. Perhaps he's rendering a careful scientific process in a way that makes for a readable narrative, but as written, it sounds like a lot of gut feel and confirmation bias.
The biggest new contribution to the Satoshi question seems to be ad hoc stylometry. To have faith in his methodology, he should be testing it on identitying other people. If he were to show me that a repeatable methodology that doesn't require hand tuning can identify other people with low error rate, and it said Back=Satoshi, that would be much more convincing.
Like so much tech writing done by non engineers, there are many places where mundane things are made to sound remarkable (e.g. Black's thesis used C++, the "heated debate").
It seems very unlikely to me. I've had personal correspondence with Satoshi, and met Adam Back in person, and I can't see it.
Actually I don't see how anyone involved with Blockstream could be identified as Satoshi. They never believed in what Satoshi was doing and built their whole company around the claim that Satoshi had screwed up the core of the system's design, despite that nothing about the design or its assumptions had changed. They spent years raising investor capital (why would you do that if you were rich?) specifically to build a system designed to replace Bitcoin for end users.
The last time I met Adam he was trying to convince me to not continue working on Satoshi's original design, and none of his arguments were technical. Satoshi had a totally different approach.
>why would you do that if you were rich?
Satoshi can't spend any of his bitcoins without tanking bitcoin's price. So Satoshi needs to find some other way to support himself. Creating bitcoin related companies is one way.
Nobody knows which coins Satoshi owns, it's just a guess for the very early coins and that guess gets progressively less accurate as time goes by. And this was a long time ago. There was no particular reason to think back then that Satoshi spending his coins would tank the price. Everyone back then was spending Bitcoins because that was the only way to build the economy. The idea that if his coins move everyone would panic is a post-2015 idea when Blockstream killed Bitcoin as a genuine means of exchange and it became all about sitting on them as a speculative "investment".
But if he did want to spend he could just start from his last coins backwards.
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He could tank the price to $1000 and still be a billionaire. There's a much more plausible reason for why Satoshi's coins haven't moved.
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I have no idea about any of this stuff - but if I were trying to hide my identity I would go out of my way to misalign my real self with my hidden identity.
e.g. Pick a name that puts people on a false trail.
What are your thoughts about Satoshi's last message offering support for Blockstream?
Edit: I see you addressed this elsewhere. Thanks for contributing!