Bad science, -- article contains a litany of points that are true for many other people (myself)-- and a number of the bits of I have personal experience with are just flatly untrue or misleading, e.g. citing Back's name at the top of a paper I coauthored as evidence of his importance to it, -- the names were alphabetic. Not that it was an important point, but I think failing to notice the names being alphabetic and including it speaks to the bar being held to the other 'evidence' there.

That said-- I guess credit goes for naming someone who is essentially credible in the sense that they had the relevant interests and aptitudes, a lot of the journalists writing on this stuff have picked ludicrous names out of a hat. But so did a lot of other people. And unfortunately, the real person was clearly trying to obscure their identity and so they easily could have been adding chaff similarity to other people. (which may explain why there are good matches with multiple of the highest visibility ecash authors). For the few journalists that don't finger absolutely absurd people they keep going over and over again to some of the most visible people from the cypherpunks community, but in reality it may well have been a lurker that never posted or only posted pseudonymously.

Probably the research on this stuff tends to not be very good because people who would do good work realize that it's a pointless effort and care that incorrectly implicating them causes harm by putting their safety at risk... and so they don't publish.

In any case I would be extremely surprised if it were so-- I've known Adam for a long time, and he's been consistently straightforward and guileless. When he came into Bitcoin he had a number of significant misunderstandings that Satoshi couldn't have had, (unless Bitcoin was developed multiple people, of course). To have consistently played dumb like that would be entirely inconsistent with the person I know, and perhaps outside of his capability.

Fundamentally the article ignores the base rate and the correlations... as in yes this or that thing is true about adam and satoshi, but it's also true of a large number of odd people who have the other prerequisites. Normal people don't talk about pre-images but cryptographers do. When you use correlated characteristics you overweight the underlying common factor. You also basically hand Satoshi a win on hiding if he was in fact copying visible characteristics from other people.

In any case, at least I haven't yet heard rumors that this was a paid piece by someone with an agenda ... sad that I can't say that about all NYT writing.

Aside, the comments about Adam's body language and emphatic denial: I can tell you what that is straight up: He's afraid of being harmed because of these accusations and he's afraid of being criticized for not denying it if he doesn't do so directly and clearly enough doubly so because some actual Satoshi fakers have accused him of being one himself, and tried to dismiss the respect Adam has earned as an unearned product of being suspected of being Satoshi. This is absolutely a witch-test where you're dammed one way or the other: In the HBO documentary, Peter Todd gave a cutesy demurring response which was the polar opposite of Adam's and in that case the program used that as evidence of the same. That kind of subjective judgement is just a coat-rack to hang your preconceived notions on.