Possible disclosure of the personality of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin
Good afternoon, Habr! This article contains interesting materials for anyone interested in the origin of the decentralized Bitcoin currency, these are translations of two texts - yesterday's very hot interview at Techcrunch, where Sky Gray answers the questions of the magazine, a researcher who tried to find out who is hiding under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, and, actually, translation of his article about this study.
Something strange happened to the internet last week. When a researcher named Skye Gray, who was haunting a bitcoin bitcoin creator Satosi Nakamoto, published a detailed analysis of textual predispositions based on searching for key revolutions in Bitcoin technical documentation, and comparing them with the works of the researcher from George Washington University Nick Szabo, the interest in this story was of few words, although the research itself is rather optimistic. Did Gray get to the truth, refusing to go into personal details, or is this, as always, just a “finger to the sky” hypothesis?
')
No matter who Satosi is - a real person, a group of people, or a kind of government body - this is important information. It provides the necessary explanation for the origin of cryptocurrencies, and can confirm or refute a number of rumors and insinuations transmitted almost in a whisper in the back streets of the BTC exchanges. If the bitcoins are really a way of freeing us from under the overwhelming power of the government, why is Satoshi so hidden and veiled? And, despite the fact that the analysis carried out by Gray still requires confirmation or refutation, the process itself is extremely exciting, and considering that this analysis is at first glance solid and rather serious, I turned to the author for a short interview.
TC: Tell me about yourself. Why did you do this research?
Gray: Initially, I was driven by simple curiosity, which attracted my attention to this issue. I like secrets, and I wanted to solve this. And then I decided to publish what I found, and for two reasons:
First of all, I wanted other people to test my method and my conclusions for endurance, in order to finally confirm them or disprove them. I want certainty, and to keep secret what I was able to discover is not the best solution, since it will not lead me anywhere.
And secondly, I opened the results of the study in order to draw people's attention to the possibility that the creator of Bitcoin might be the “bad guy.” I am sure the answer to this question is what may harm the massive recognition of a currency in the near future.
TC: How confident are you that this is Nick Sabo?
Gray: I have no absolute certainty that this is really Nick Sabo, but I have quite a few independent clues pointing in his direction, each of which is interesting in itself:
I am currently in contact with two different researchers who will work on their own independent analysis of texts to verify my research.
TK: Is it really important to know the personality of Satoshi? What would this knowledge change, in your opinion?
Gray: I think it is necessary to identify Satoshi at this important moment in the history of Bitcoin. The “secret plans” hidden behind cryptocurrency, if they exist, can no longer remain in the shadows, since there is a big chance that Bitcoin will become the main alternative currency and challenge to the world of financial status quo. After all, there is an assumption that Bitcoin was created by any state agency with cryptographers and mathematicians as the main driving force, and this was done in order to simplify tracking financial transactions in order to get a more complete picture of the information and look for patterns of interest to the government, so we need to dispel all doubts, before we begin to seriously rely on bitcoin in our real life.
I think it will be great news for Bitcoin as a whole, if in reality Nick Sabo turns out to be the ideological inspirer of the whole movement. Nick seems to me amazing, brilliant and disinterested academic scholar. Who would you like to see at the origins of Bitcoin - a visionary professor and his associates, or obscure ghosts?
TC: How is your research in the bitcoin community perceived? So far it seems that this is a rather unpopular topic, let's say.
Gray: You are right, it was not accepted positively, and many people write to me now so that I “leave Satoshi alone.” But when someone acquires a huge influence on the world, he loses his right to anonymity. Satoshi currently has at his disposal about a million bitcoins, worth a billion dollars, which gives him the opportunity to completely bring down the BTC market. We need to know who those people are that have power over us, and should know their intentions, which is why we, for example, make a complete check of all our candidates for important positions before any elections. In the same way, we need to verify the entire virtual currency system before we send our real financial flow to it. And the next step will be the knowledge of what happened to the bitcoins of Satoshi himself that were deposited in the stash.
The anonymity of the figure of Satoshi probably played a role in the rapid initial acceptance of the entire Bitcoin system, because the veil of secrecy created a powerful wave that engulfed the early enthusiasts, each of whom, as it were, said to himself “we are all Satoshi”. Now, this anonymity has become an obstacle to the mass recognition of Bitcoin, because there is a reasonable interest in understanding the origins of the emergence and general goals of this decentralized currency.
TC: How easy is it to identify a person through written “habits”?
Gray: It's pretty easy. We all use our own language, different from others, in a very definite way: I’m talking about the probability distribution of rare expressions, the structure of the sentence and the stop words in our letter, which leave a certain signature behind them. This, of course, is not so unambiguously determining factor as fingerprints or DNA, but it allows one to isolate one person accurately from several hundreds or even thousands. For some people, such as writers or scholars, for example, who have more than certain, specific “habits” in writing, all this is a fairly reliable identification process.
In the case of Satoshi, I identified a number of unusual content-neutral expressions that are found both in the technical documentation of Satoshi Nakamoto and in the works of Nick Sabo. For four of these expressions, I was able to estimate (with the help of Google Scholar) the proportion of researchers in the entire cryptographic community who can use these expressions in their articles. These proportions, respectively - 15%, 10%, 15% and 50%. Assuming that the use of each of the expressions does not depend on the use of the others, the overall probability of finding such a researcher who uses each of the key expressions in writing is of the order of 0.1%. So this particular combination of written “habits” can define one cryptographer out of a thousand, and even if each of the approximations is mistaken several times, then the joint probability remains very small.
TC: Who else besides Nick Sabo can be called a likely candidate for the role of Satoshi?
Gray: Today, Nick Sabo is the only candidate. I did not find any significant factors pointing to other possible candidates that would be worthy of even mention.
TC: How many bitcoins do you own?
Gray: Let's just say I have from 1 to 10 BTC. I have not invested heavily in bitcoins, but I am definitely optimistic about the prospects for its massive adoption.
***
The end of the interview, then - the article by Sky Gray on the analysis of textual patterns, published on December 1, 2013.
Recently, I became interested in identifying the identity of the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. Using Bitcoin's technical description published at the end of 2008, I began to reverse-analyze the text - in fact, an Internet search for extremely unusual revolutions and vocabulary models, and even more precisely - text sections where a cryptographic researcher's contribution was expected, and then assessed the match of each found match. by comparing textual similarity metrics.
This process eventually led me directly to several articles from Nick Sabo’s blog, where his coded references to bitcoin were documented: anticipating the emergence of bitcoin, Nick has been developing a mechanism for several years since 1998, which allows to decentralize digital currency, which eventually turns into a system, named " Bit Gold ", and it is a direct predecessor of the Bitcoin architecture.
According to what seems to be a widely accepted history of the origin of the Bitcoin system, Satoshi Nakamoto was a highly qualified scientist (or group of scientists) who found Nick's development concerning Bit Gold and, having invented an idea for its improvement, published a technical description of Bitcoin, deciding to turn it into reality by development of the original Bitcoin client. Nick also denied the connection between himself and Satoshi, and expressed an official opinion on Satoshi and Bitcoin in a May 2011 article.
I’m willing to argue with that and say that Satoshi is actually Nick Sabo, probably with one or more technical staff.
What originally led me to this hypothesis, as I mentioned above, was the reverse analysis of content similar to that contained in the Bitcoin technical specification, and this analysis led me to Nick’s blog completely independently of any prior knowledge of the official version of the currency's origin. I have to emphasize this - an open, impartial search all over the Internet for textual analogies in writing contained in the technical description of Bitcoin as the best candidates reveals Nick Sabo's articles about Bit Gold. This, of course, can be a coincidence, although very unlikely - as of 2008 and earlier, the topic of cryptocurrency was frankly a niche, limited to almost 3-4 scientists, and each specialist in this field constantly used the same general expressions and shared a similar vocabulary. Satoshi would certainly be Nick's blog reader, so we could expect him to describe the same concepts in a similar way. But besides this, there is something else.
The analysis of textual similarities between the technical description of Bitcoin and Nick's articles on Bit Gold, as well as his article “ Formalization and Protection of Communications in Public Networks ” indicates a perfect match of content-neutral expressions, therefore this means that Nick is the author of the technical description, or it was written by someone imitating Nick's writing style in detail. Below is a brief overview of some of the most important common indicators, where for each expression, cryptographic documents containing this expression (using Google Scholar) to measure how often it is used among researchers, and later give an approximate value for the probability of the null hypothesis. Of course, we will do this only for content-neutral expressions:
Content-specific expressions that have suitable synonyms in the field of cryptography and could effortlessly be expressed in another way:
Take this example: assuming that the content-neutral expression is part of the researcher's vocabulary, and the author uses it, at least in one-tenth of his works, (as, for example, the expression “for our purposes” appears in 1.5% of articles, therefore, we assume that 15% of researchers will use it in their works), therefore, the probability of finding all the expressions from the list “it should be noted”, “for our purposes”, “can be characterized” and “preclude” within the framework of the lexical set the specific author has an upper limit of only 0.08%. This is the desired p-value, and such a specific combination of content-neutral expressions can reveal one researcher out of a thousand.
Of course, the hypothesis of “one-tenth of articles” is purely arbitrary, so judge for yourself how much it is acceptable. To me, this ratio seems fairly fair, and even generous, because most researchers, as a rule, tend to use the same expressions all the time.
In short: most of the unusual formulations found in Bitcoin's technical specification are regularly found in Nick's articles. However, not everything, for example, “favour” Anglicism used by Satosi is not used by Nick, who writes “favor” in the American manner. Of course, documents relating to Bitcoin may have several authors, moreover, Nick Sabo was hardly the only one, and based on the fact that all documents on Bitcoin are written in the American version of the English language, except for one word “favour”, it is really great the likelihood that either there are several authors of the documents, or this word is used for a deliberate attempt to mislead us regarding the origin of the document.
In addition, there is minor evidence. Obviously, Satoshi did extensive research on preliminary references to concepts like Bitcoin, as any real scientist would write an article. This is evidenced by referring Satosi to b-money Wei Dai, as well as to Hashcash Adam Beck, while they do not even seem to be a direct source of inspiration for Bitcoin. At the same time, Satoshi nowhere makes any mention of Nick Sabo's Bit Gold, while Bitcoin is quite clearly built directly on these very ideas. If Satoshi developed Bitcoin regardless of Nick's research, why didn't he align his work with proper scientific etiquette?
There is also a surprising lack of public reaction to Bitcoin's takeoff from Nika at the very beginning of the era of decentralized currencies, while for such a scientist deeply involved in such concepts, this is quite unexpected, and it is surprising that Nick took many months just to mention Bitcoin while his ideas came to life and were embodied in such an inspiring way.
Another interesting fact, significant or not, is that the main mentions of Bit Gold on Nick’s blog were subsequently backdated to be slightly behind the time when official Bitcoin documentation was published, and this happened immediately after this publication. Nick’s blog has two main articles on Bit Gold, one originally published in December 2005, and then the publication date was retroactively postponed to December 2008, and the second article published in April 2008 was also shifted to December 2008. The fact is that in Blogger, you can edit the posting date manually, but the original date will be visible in the uneditable URL.
It is not clear why such a substitution of dates actually happened, but it cannot really be an attempt to confuse the dates of publication of articles about the Bit Gold system, because this information was widely documented and published even before 2008, and Nick once said that He began working on this idea back in 1998. I think that, shortly after the publication of the Bitcoin technical description, Nick found something to edit in both Bit Gold articles.
Finally, the last thing to consider is that the profiles of Nick and Satoshi perfectly match each other. It is very likely that Satoshi has an academic education, as evidenced by his perfect knowledge of scientific writing: writing documentation on the relevant scientific concept is a very difficult task if you have not done this several times, and Nick is a professor with a significant publication history. In fact, the whole idea of ​​creating a concept, by writing a scientific work, is a very academic approach. Plus, the fact that the very idea of ​​a decentralized digital currency, the main thing in Nick's work, could be of interest to only a very limited number of scientists at that time. Who was on the list of scientists passionately passionate about cryptocurrency in 2008 and who could write an article just as Nick Sabo would write it? Nick Sabo.
Thus, it seems to me very likely that Nick is Satoshi, perhaps with colleagues. At least, there is convincing evidence of textual analysis that it was Nick who wrote a significant part of the official Bitcoin documentation. I would suggest that Nick, wanting to further develop his long-time dream of decentralized currency, contacted one or more technical staff who helped him eliminate the shortcomings of his Bit Gold system and created the first member of the network under the collective name Satoshi Nakamoto, or an unknown brilliant engineer groped better implementation for Bit Gold, contacted Nick, and they decided to work on the system together. I would also note that it seems to me much more likely that Satoshi is a similar character who lit up with the idea of ​​developing a cryptocurrency system would first contact the original author of the project, instead of blindly devoting all his resources to the realization of someone else's favorite idea.
The scenario in which Nick Sabo himself is looking for a scientist and developer to turn Bit Gold into reality is strongly supported by the fact that in April 2008, just a few months before the announcement of the implementation of Bitcoin, Nick was actively looking for employees for his project. He writes in his blog:
So, after 10 years of thinking about Bit Gold, Nick becomes interested in developing a concrete realization of his dream - a decentralized currency. What happens right after that? Bitcoin technical description and software to work with it appear in the network.
Let me remind you, do not forget that these two scenarios - pure speculation on my part - are the only sufficiently serious proofs that I have - only the probable authorship of the technical documentation of the Bitcoin system.
***
End of both translations. I would very much like to hear in the comments what you think about this, and thank you for your attention to this very long article. To correct the actual, or any other translation errors, write to private messages.
Who is the real Satoshi Nakamoto? One researcher may have found the answer.
Something strange happened to the internet last week. When a researcher named Skye Gray, who was haunting a bitcoin bitcoin creator Satosi Nakamoto, published a detailed analysis of textual predispositions based on searching for key revolutions in Bitcoin technical documentation, and comparing them with the works of the researcher from George Washington University Nick Szabo, the interest in this story was of few words, although the research itself is rather optimistic. Did Gray get to the truth, refusing to go into personal details, or is this, as always, just a “finger to the sky” hypothesis?
')
No matter who Satosi is - a real person, a group of people, or a kind of government body - this is important information. It provides the necessary explanation for the origin of cryptocurrencies, and can confirm or refute a number of rumors and insinuations transmitted almost in a whisper in the back streets of the BTC exchanges. If the bitcoins are really a way of freeing us from under the overwhelming power of the government, why is Satoshi so hidden and veiled? And, despite the fact that the analysis carried out by Gray still requires confirmation or refutation, the process itself is extremely exciting, and considering that this analysis is at first glance solid and rather serious, I turned to the author for a short interview.
TC: Tell me about yourself. Why did you do this research?
Gray: Initially, I was driven by simple curiosity, which attracted my attention to this issue. I like secrets, and I wanted to solve this. And then I decided to publish what I found, and for two reasons:
First of all, I wanted other people to test my method and my conclusions for endurance, in order to finally confirm them or disprove them. I want certainty, and to keep secret what I was able to discover is not the best solution, since it will not lead me anywhere.
And secondly, I opened the results of the study in order to draw people's attention to the possibility that the creator of Bitcoin might be the “bad guy.” I am sure the answer to this question is what may harm the massive recognition of a currency in the near future.
TC: How confident are you that this is Nick Sabo?
Gray: I have no absolute certainty that this is really Nick Sabo, but I have quite a few independent clues pointing in his direction, each of which is interesting in itself:
- Analysis of the text, in which it turned out that only 0.1% of all researchers of cryptography could reproduce this style of writing (again, please, attack my method in this question);
- The fact that Nick was looking for technical staff for the Bit Gold project, very similar to Bitcoin cryptocurrency, and it happened just a few months before the announcement of Bitcoin, but immediately after that the project died out;
- The lack of citation of Nick Sabo's work by Satoshi himself, while he quoted other cryptocurrency projects that are less related to Bitcoin;
- The lack of response from Nika about Bitcoin, while the topic of decentralized currencies as a whole has been his main research in the last ten years;
- The fact that Nick deliberately began backdating his Bit Gold articles in order to look lagging behind, and this began immediately after the announcement of the creation of Bitcoins.
I am currently in contact with two different researchers who will work on their own independent analysis of texts to verify my research.
TK: Is it really important to know the personality of Satoshi? What would this knowledge change, in your opinion?
Gray: I think it is necessary to identify Satoshi at this important moment in the history of Bitcoin. The “secret plans” hidden behind cryptocurrency, if they exist, can no longer remain in the shadows, since there is a big chance that Bitcoin will become the main alternative currency and challenge to the world of financial status quo. After all, there is an assumption that Bitcoin was created by any state agency with cryptographers and mathematicians as the main driving force, and this was done in order to simplify tracking financial transactions in order to get a more complete picture of the information and look for patterns of interest to the government, so we need to dispel all doubts, before we begin to seriously rely on bitcoin in our real life.
I think it will be great news for Bitcoin as a whole, if in reality Nick Sabo turns out to be the ideological inspirer of the whole movement. Nick seems to me amazing, brilliant and disinterested academic scholar. Who would you like to see at the origins of Bitcoin - a visionary professor and his associates, or obscure ghosts?
TC: How is your research in the bitcoin community perceived? So far it seems that this is a rather unpopular topic, let's say.
Gray: You are right, it was not accepted positively, and many people write to me now so that I “leave Satoshi alone.” But when someone acquires a huge influence on the world, he loses his right to anonymity. Satoshi currently has at his disposal about a million bitcoins, worth a billion dollars, which gives him the opportunity to completely bring down the BTC market. We need to know who those people are that have power over us, and should know their intentions, which is why we, for example, make a complete check of all our candidates for important positions before any elections. In the same way, we need to verify the entire virtual currency system before we send our real financial flow to it. And the next step will be the knowledge of what happened to the bitcoins of Satoshi himself that were deposited in the stash.
The anonymity of the figure of Satoshi probably played a role in the rapid initial acceptance of the entire Bitcoin system, because the veil of secrecy created a powerful wave that engulfed the early enthusiasts, each of whom, as it were, said to himself “we are all Satoshi”. Now, this anonymity has become an obstacle to the mass recognition of Bitcoin, because there is a reasonable interest in understanding the origins of the emergence and general goals of this decentralized currency.
TC: How easy is it to identify a person through written “habits”?
Gray: It's pretty easy. We all use our own language, different from others, in a very definite way: I’m talking about the probability distribution of rare expressions, the structure of the sentence and the stop words in our letter, which leave a certain signature behind them. This, of course, is not so unambiguously determining factor as fingerprints or DNA, but it allows one to isolate one person accurately from several hundreds or even thousands. For some people, such as writers or scholars, for example, who have more than certain, specific “habits” in writing, all this is a fairly reliable identification process.
In the case of Satoshi, I identified a number of unusual content-neutral expressions that are found both in the technical documentation of Satoshi Nakamoto and in the works of Nick Sabo. For four of these expressions, I was able to estimate (with the help of Google Scholar) the proportion of researchers in the entire cryptographic community who can use these expressions in their articles. These proportions, respectively - 15%, 10%, 15% and 50%. Assuming that the use of each of the expressions does not depend on the use of the others, the overall probability of finding such a researcher who uses each of the key expressions in writing is of the order of 0.1%. So this particular combination of written “habits” can define one cryptographer out of a thousand, and even if each of the approximations is mistaken several times, then the joint probability remains very small.
TC: Who else besides Nick Sabo can be called a likely candidate for the role of Satoshi?
Gray: Today, Nick Sabo is the only candidate. I did not find any significant factors pointing to other possible candidates that would be worthy of even mention.
TC: How many bitcoins do you own?
Gray: Let's just say I have from 1 to 10 BTC. I have not invested heavily in bitcoins, but I am definitely optimistic about the prospects for its massive adoption.
***
The end of the interview, then - the article by Sky Gray on the analysis of textual patterns, published on December 1, 2013.
Under the pseudonym Satosi Nakamoto, perhaps Nick Sabo is hiding
Recently, I became interested in identifying the identity of the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. Using Bitcoin's technical description published at the end of 2008, I began to reverse-analyze the text - in fact, an Internet search for extremely unusual revolutions and vocabulary models, and even more precisely - text sections where a cryptographic researcher's contribution was expected, and then assessed the match of each found match. by comparing textual similarity metrics.
This process eventually led me directly to several articles from Nick Sabo’s blog, where his coded references to bitcoin were documented: anticipating the emergence of bitcoin, Nick has been developing a mechanism for several years since 1998, which allows to decentralize digital currency, which eventually turns into a system, named " Bit Gold ", and it is a direct predecessor of the Bitcoin architecture.
According to what seems to be a widely accepted history of the origin of the Bitcoin system, Satoshi Nakamoto was a highly qualified scientist (or group of scientists) who found Nick's development concerning Bit Gold and, having invented an idea for its improvement, published a technical description of Bitcoin, deciding to turn it into reality by development of the original Bitcoin client. Nick also denied the connection between himself and Satoshi, and expressed an official opinion on Satoshi and Bitcoin in a May 2011 article.
I’m willing to argue with that and say that Satoshi is actually Nick Sabo, probably with one or more technical staff.
What originally led me to this hypothesis, as I mentioned above, was the reverse analysis of content similar to that contained in the Bitcoin technical specification, and this analysis led me to Nick’s blog completely independently of any prior knowledge of the official version of the currency's origin. I have to emphasize this - an open, impartial search all over the Internet for textual analogies in writing contained in the technical description of Bitcoin as the best candidates reveals Nick Sabo's articles about Bit Gold. This, of course, can be a coincidence, although very unlikely - as of 2008 and earlier, the topic of cryptocurrency was frankly a niche, limited to almost 3-4 scientists, and each specialist in this field constantly used the same general expressions and shared a similar vocabulary. Satoshi would certainly be Nick's blog reader, so we could expect him to describe the same concepts in a similar way. But besides this, there is something else.
The analysis of textual similarities between the technical description of Bitcoin and Nick's articles on Bit Gold, as well as his article “ Formalization and Protection of Communications in Public Networks ” indicates a perfect match of content-neutral expressions, therefore this means that Nick is the author of the technical description, or it was written by someone imitating Nick's writing style in detail. Below is a brief overview of some of the most important common indicators, where for each expression, cryptographic documents containing this expression (using Google Scholar) to measure how often it is used among researchers, and later give an approximate value for the probability of the null hypothesis. Of course, we will do this only for content-neutral expressions:
- Re-use of “of course” without commas, contrary to common agreement, for example “the problem of course is”;
- The expression “can be characterized”, often found on Nick's blog, and found only in 1% of cryptographic works;
- Using "for our purposes" when describing a hypothesis, this expression is found only in 1.5% of cryptographic articles;
- The beginning of the sentence with the words “It should be noted”, such use is found in 5.25% of cryptographic documents;
- The use of the term "preclude", which happens only in 1.5% of cryptographic work;
- The expression “a level of” + any noun, for example “achieves a level of privacy by ...” as a separate classifier.
Content-specific expressions that have suitable synonyms in the field of cryptography and could effortlessly be expressed in another way:
- The expression “timestamp server”, which occupies a central place in the technical description of Bitcoin, is used in Nick’s blog back in January 2006;
- The constant use of the expression "trusted third party";
- The expressions "cryptographic proof" and "digital signatures";
- Repeated use of "timestamp" as a verb.
Take this example: assuming that the content-neutral expression is part of the researcher's vocabulary, and the author uses it, at least in one-tenth of his works, (as, for example, the expression “for our purposes” appears in 1.5% of articles, therefore, we assume that 15% of researchers will use it in their works), therefore, the probability of finding all the expressions from the list “it should be noted”, “for our purposes”, “can be characterized” and “preclude” within the framework of the lexical set the specific author has an upper limit of only 0.08%. This is the desired p-value, and such a specific combination of content-neutral expressions can reveal one researcher out of a thousand.
Of course, the hypothesis of “one-tenth of articles” is purely arbitrary, so judge for yourself how much it is acceptable. To me, this ratio seems fairly fair, and even generous, because most researchers, as a rule, tend to use the same expressions all the time.
In short: most of the unusual formulations found in Bitcoin's technical specification are regularly found in Nick's articles. However, not everything, for example, “favour” Anglicism used by Satosi is not used by Nick, who writes “favor” in the American manner. Of course, documents relating to Bitcoin may have several authors, moreover, Nick Sabo was hardly the only one, and based on the fact that all documents on Bitcoin are written in the American version of the English language, except for one word “favour”, it is really great the likelihood that either there are several authors of the documents, or this word is used for a deliberate attempt to mislead us regarding the origin of the document.
In addition, there is minor evidence. Obviously, Satoshi did extensive research on preliminary references to concepts like Bitcoin, as any real scientist would write an article. This is evidenced by referring Satosi to b-money Wei Dai, as well as to Hashcash Adam Beck, while they do not even seem to be a direct source of inspiration for Bitcoin. At the same time, Satoshi nowhere makes any mention of Nick Sabo's Bit Gold, while Bitcoin is quite clearly built directly on these very ideas. If Satoshi developed Bitcoin regardless of Nick's research, why didn't he align his work with proper scientific etiquette?
There is also a surprising lack of public reaction to Bitcoin's takeoff from Nika at the very beginning of the era of decentralized currencies, while for such a scientist deeply involved in such concepts, this is quite unexpected, and it is surprising that Nick took many months just to mention Bitcoin while his ideas came to life and were embodied in such an inspiring way.
Another interesting fact, significant or not, is that the main mentions of Bit Gold on Nick’s blog were subsequently backdated to be slightly behind the time when official Bitcoin documentation was published, and this happened immediately after this publication. Nick’s blog has two main articles on Bit Gold, one originally published in December 2005, and then the publication date was retroactively postponed to December 2008, and the second article published in April 2008 was also shifted to December 2008. The fact is that in Blogger, you can edit the posting date manually, but the original date will be visible in the uneditable URL.
It is not clear why such a substitution of dates actually happened, but it cannot really be an attempt to confuse the dates of publication of articles about the Bit Gold system, because this information was widely documented and published even before 2008, and Nick once said that He began working on this idea back in 1998. I think that, shortly after the publication of the Bitcoin technical description, Nick found something to edit in both Bit Gold articles.
Finally, the last thing to consider is that the profiles of Nick and Satoshi perfectly match each other. It is very likely that Satoshi has an academic education, as evidenced by his perfect knowledge of scientific writing: writing documentation on the relevant scientific concept is a very difficult task if you have not done this several times, and Nick is a professor with a significant publication history. In fact, the whole idea of ​​creating a concept, by writing a scientific work, is a very academic approach. Plus, the fact that the very idea of ​​a decentralized digital currency, the main thing in Nick's work, could be of interest to only a very limited number of scientists at that time. Who was on the list of scientists passionately passionate about cryptocurrency in 2008 and who could write an article just as Nick Sabo would write it? Nick Sabo.
Thus, it seems to me very likely that Nick is Satoshi, perhaps with colleagues. At least, there is convincing evidence of textual analysis that it was Nick who wrote a significant part of the official Bitcoin documentation. I would suggest that Nick, wanting to further develop his long-time dream of decentralized currency, contacted one or more technical staff who helped him eliminate the shortcomings of his Bit Gold system and created the first member of the network under the collective name Satoshi Nakamoto, or an unknown brilliant engineer groped better implementation for Bit Gold, contacted Nick, and they decided to work on the system together. I would also note that it seems to me much more likely that Satoshi is a similar character who lit up with the idea of ​​developing a cryptocurrency system would first contact the original author of the project, instead of blindly devoting all his resources to the realization of someone else's favorite idea.
The scenario in which Nick Sabo himself is looking for a scientist and developer to turn Bit Gold into reality is strongly supported by the fact that in April 2008, just a few months before the announcement of the implementation of Bitcoin, Nick was actively looking for employees for his project. He writes in his blog:
[Bit Gold] would greatly benefit from a demonstration, for example, an experimental market (with a trusted third party replaced with a sophisticated security system that would be necessary for real work). Anyone want to help me in its development?
So, after 10 years of thinking about Bit Gold, Nick becomes interested in developing a concrete realization of his dream - a decentralized currency. What happens right after that? Bitcoin technical description and software to work with it appear in the network.
Let me remind you, do not forget that these two scenarios - pure speculation on my part - are the only sufficiently serious proofs that I have - only the probable authorship of the technical documentation of the Bitcoin system.
***
End of both translations. I would very much like to hear in the comments what you think about this, and thank you for your attention to this very long article. To correct the actual, or any other translation errors, write to private messages.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/205052/
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