Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Bitcoin Creator ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ Unmasked–Again?

From WSJ:
A U.K. university has released a new study claiming a linguistics analysis of the people most often assumed to be Satoshi Nakamoto leads them to believe that Nick Szabo is the mysterious father of the digital currency.

A month after a firestorm erupted over Newsweek’s claim that it “unmasked” the creator of bitcoin, a U.K. university has released a new study that points to a different candidate.

The study by students and researchers at Aston University in Birmingham claims a linguistics analysis of the writings by people most often listed as bitcoin’s potential creator leads them to believe that Nick Szabo, a former George Washington University law professor, is the mysterious father of the digital currency.

In a press release, the school writes:
Szabo is by far the closest match, with a large number of distinctive linguistic traits appearing in both the Bitcoin paper and Szabo’s blogs and other writings. This includes the use of: the phrases “chain of…”, “trusted third parties”, “for our purposes”, “need for…”, “still”, “of course”, “as long as”, “such as” and “only” numerous times, contractions, commas before ‘and’ and ‘but’, hyphenation, ‘-ly’ adverbs, the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’ in papers by a single author; fragmented sentences following colons and reflexive (-self) pronouns. In total hundreds of documents written by the eleven possible authors were considered, including over 40 academic papers written by Szabo which are available on his personal website.

If Szabo is Nakamota that would make things real interesting. GWU is a spook factory. The CIA regularly uses GWU professors as bird dogs to scout for potential recruits for the company.

5 comments:

  1. One wonders why Kokesh goes to GWU.

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    1. So he can mislead the anarcho-capitalist crowd on Reddit (though that's not hard to do).

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  2. If Szabo is Nakamota that would make things real interesting. GWU is a spook factory.

    You have not done any additional work to understand Bitcoin it seems. Even if Bitcoin were written by the NSA, it would not matter; the source code for Bitcoin is open for inspection. What you are claiming is that since the NSA uses arithmetic, arithmetic is suspect. Clearly this is false, and the logic extends to any piece of software whose source is open.

    It doesn't matter who wrote Bitcoin. Only hysterical journalists and people who do not understand computers and software think that who wrote the software has any bearing on how it works. It doesn't.

    You need to do more work on the fundamentals of Bitcoin and software to write better posts about it. Your tone has changed markedly over the last few months, from being entirely dismissive, to using fallacious arguments to grudging acceptance.

    Progress!

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    1. Hi anon-o-mouse. I've spent most of my life working on computer and networking systems, and I've written a fair bit of code. I still think the only people who are acting hysterically are the rabid enthusiasts. From what I can tell, this is a fatal flaw in the thinking of [particularly young] libertarians/anarcho-capitalists. They're simply too quick to embrace and laud any new technology as an amazing thing, without thinking about the ramifications of said technology. These are the same people who would line up to accept the mark of the beast if it offers convenience while calling it "progress."

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    2. "It doesn't matter who wrote Bitcoin." Although I am in general a Bitcoin enthusiast, if the NSA did write Bitcoin, then it would be possible for them to have inserted a subtle flaw in the protocol that is very difficult for developers to detect. They have demonstrated that they are ready, willing, and able to deceive the cryptography community and there is no way to mathematically prove that there are no backdoors. However, I personally would regard NSA involvement as a "buy" signal, as the NSA/CIA has the means to ensure that Bitcoin succeeds. Given the level of control they apparently have over our "leaders," would you bet against them?

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