He IS a hacker from the 90s. It’s an assumed name. Plenty of hackers from the 90s have pseudonyms.
> so-called creator of some encryption protocol
All evidence points to him being one of the protocol’s designers, along with Trevor Perrin.
I’ve met both of them. The first time I met Moxie and talked about axolotl (as it was called back then) was in 2014. Moxie and Trevor strike me as having more integrity and conviction than most. There is no doubt in my mind that they are real and genuine.
Interestingly enough, some of the work Trevor did related to Signal’s cryptography was later used by Jason Donenfeld in the design of WireGuard.
> It screams honeypot like nothing else.
As you can see there is plenty of evidence suggesting otherwise.