alt Hacker NewsThis dude can seem to tell the difference between Newsgroups and Mailing Lists. Also described Newsgroups as being displayed in a particular font. What a weird mistake. It's almost like he doesn't care about the details.
The article claims Adam Back "disappeared" on the cryptography mailing lists exactly when Satoshi Nakamoto became active (late 2008) and only "reappeared" around the time Satoshi stopped posting in 2011.
Back's rebuttal: He was highly active, "a lot of yakking" on the relevant lists and forums during Bitcoin's early years. He points out that his high volume of posts on electronic cash and cryptography topics naturally makes him visible in searches, creating confirmation bias when filtering for "Satoshi-like" activity.
The NYT analysis apparently missed or underweighted his continued contributions in developer chats, Bitcoin-related discussions, and other lists/forums.
The stylistic argument is weak. In 1990s technical mailing lists and Usenet, Many cypherpunks showed similar inconsistencies. The article treats these as highly distinctive "fingerprints" rather than common artifacts of the era's informal technical writing.
>This dude can seem to tell the difference between Newsgroups and Mailing Lists. Also described Newsgroups as being displayed in a particular font. What a weird mistake. It's almost like he doesn't care about the details.
It's full of clangers like that, showing that the author is woefully unversed in the subculture he's writing about. Hence why the main focus is on the personality of Satoshi and Back, trying to psychologise them into being the same person, instead of doing a technical analysis.