alt Hacker NewsAdam fits better as someone Satoshi respected, not who Satoshi was... Bitcoin explicitly cites hashcash. If Adam was so careful, why would he name himself in the paper; tongue-in-cheek? hide in plain sight? I don't buy it...
Hal Finney is the strongest alternative, but even there, I’m not fully convinced. Hal had the technical profile, mined early, and received the first transaction. But he also feels almost too obvious. I believe, just as Adam Back's hashcash, Hal's RPOW was a precursor.
I lean toward Len Sassaman, who was deeply embedded in the exact world Satoshi seemed to come from: remailers, anonymity systems, OpenPGP, and privacy-first engineering. Same things that got his conversations with Adam and Hal going... Adam here is probably just protecting his friend's legacy
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You could game theory this out forever. Maybe he put his name in there because people like you would only use first order logic and conclude that it wasn't him because it would be crazy to "hide in plain site".
I always had Adam Back as my main candidate because HashCash somehow had the same energy and thought to it. But I have no concrete reason to believe it was him.
I had always assumed that all of them shared the pseudonym of Satoshi, along with Nick Szabo.
Back wrote the white paper with input from Hal and Nick Szabo. Sassaman did the coding work on the client. Sassaman had the keys to the Satoshi wallet, hence it never moving since his passing.
Since Satoshi is a collective, it means that each of them individually can claim, without lying, that they're not Satoshi.
That's my uninformed guess.