Cryptocurrency expert and guy who continually denies he’s Satoshi Nakamoto, Nick Szabo, is probably Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto, according to the New York Times. “I’m not Satoshi,” Szabo told reporter Nathaniel Popper. He probably is, though.
Popper outlines the evidence for the “Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto” consensus that’s currently brewing: Szabo created a Bitcoin predecessor called “bit gold” and he was in contact about that project with the same people who Satoshi first contacted about Bitcoin. He back-dated a blog post asking for help turning bit gold into reality to make it appear like he wrote it after Satoshi’s paper on Bitcoin was released in 2008. And he just sounded a hell of a lot like Satoshi:
Mr. Szabo’s writing about bit gold from that time contains many striking parallels with Satoshi’s description of Bitcoin, including similar phrasings and even common writing mannerisms. In 2014, researchers at Aston University, in England, compared the writing of several people who have been suspected to be Satoshi and found that none matched up nearly as well as Mr. Szabo’s. The similarity was “uncanny”, said Jack Grieve, the lecturer who led the effort.
Popper isn’t the first to put forth the “N.S. = S.N.” hypothesis, and despite denials, even Nick Szabo thinks that Nick Szabo is probably Satoshi Nakamoto. “All I’m saying is, there are all these parallels and it looks funny to me and looks funny to a lot of other people,” he said.
Very funny indeed.
