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vintermannyesterday at 5:32 AM5 repliesview on HN

You can't sell books or articles from saying something that's been said before, but Nick Szabo remains the best Satoshi candidate by a mile.

He had developed the system closest to Bitcoin, he was actively seeking collaborators to turn his system into a practical offering briefly before Bitcoin was released, and he was the only cipherpunk who conspicuously said very little when the system he'd been trying to realize for a decade suddenly appeared. Satoshi credited all his inspirations except for the most obvious one, Szabo's. No one in the cipherpunks mailing list thought any of this was odd, probably because it was obvious to them who Satoshi was.

In contrast to a certain convicted Australian fraudster who got caught trying to backdate his statements, Szabo got caught trying to front-date them. His politics are a match to Satoshi (tbf. true of all the cipherpunks), his coding style matches Satoshi, his writing style matches Satoshi if you disable the British English spellchecker. For good measure his initials match Satoshi.

I view articles like these as a good test of which investigative journalists are hacks indifferent to the truth - except for that Wired guy, who I think knows better but thinks it's righteous to lie a little to protect Satoshi's anonymity.


Replies

dansoyesterday at 7:01 PM

> No one in the cipherpunks mailing list thought any of this was odd, probably because it was obvious to them who Satoshi was.

If dozens of people affiliated on a mailing list knew that Sbazo was Satoshi is a decade ago, would’t his identity be treated as an open secret by now?

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reducesufferingyesterday at 6:25 PM

Exactly my thoughts down to the indictment of the thought process of a top investigative journalist. The amount of tunnel vision here, that dismisses Szabo based on a tweet of wanting to understand developments in core 10 years later? In all this writing, there's not a hint of investigation into every damning link to Szabo, including the IP leak which was simply dismissed as "dead end". Carreyrou is flying across the world to finally get a weak slip in speech he thinks finally implicates Back, meanwhile Szabo already slipped up in speech years ago for anyone to find.

Incredible gell-mann reminder for reporting...

chistevyesterday at 7:32 AM

> In contrast to a certain convicted Australian fraudster who got caught trying to backdate his statements,

Who?

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triage8004yesterday at 7:27 AM

Szabo is definitely top 3 candidates or on team

dist-epochyesterday at 11:48 AM

Nick Szabo doesn't know how to program enough to deliver the original bitcoin source code.

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