At the least, a writing style analysis is stronger evidence than the last pile of shaky not-even-coincidences used to point the finger at someone.
I'm far more likely to believe Satoshi is Szabo--or a collaborative group that includes Szabo--than someone who is not actually a recognized expert in cryptography.
"A group of 40 students and researchers at the university studied the writing of 11 candidates...It’s important to stress that the team isn’t saying its study points conclusively to Mr. Szabo, only that of the people it studied, he appears – on the basis of his writing – to be the most likely candidate."
In that case that would mean that Nick is single point of failure which does not help much. It's single proxy. Although we do not know whether transparent or not.
I think the headline should probably be changed. This isn't really an unmasking, and the original article uses a question mark, which makes its headline sound less definitive than this. As mentioned by others, Nick Szabo as Satoshi is an old theory. While this adds to the case, without conclusive evidence, it's not a big story.
it is only more thorough than prior efforts because they list the names of the other people they applied the same textual analysis to. HOWEVER, this type of analysis is too subjective. It may help when you definitively know the suspect is one of 12 or 20 but it is useless when it could be literally anyone. You might as well water board random people on the street demanding they tell you who Satoshi is.
Szabo is definitely a candidate but the onion of who Satoshi is requires you look at much more information. Such as what the target was doing 2 years before the publication (this is the known timeframe of when he started working on bitcoin), the style of coding, the times of coding which indicate sleep patterns and what happened the end of last year to Satoshi (nov 2013) which lead him to diverge control of all final assets (known from whois records for bitcoin.net and bitcoins.org, confirmed by theymos). If you cant complete that, don't bother writing an article on who Satoshi is and don't bother telling a journalists about your textual pseudo-suspicions.
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I'm far more likely to believe Satoshi is Szabo--or a collaborative group that includes Szabo--than someone who is not actually a recognized expert in cryptography.
- Satoshi should've already known about linguistic analysis.
- It's likely Satoshi had someone read and rewrite his works to avoid linguistic analysis. Nick Szabo would've been a logical choice for this.
The title on this post is outright false. The HN guidelines call for making titles less misleading, not more.
Szabo is definitely a candidate but the onion of who Satoshi is requires you look at much more information. Such as what the target was doing 2 years before the publication (this is the known timeframe of when he started working on bitcoin), the style of coding, the times of coding which indicate sleep patterns and what happened the end of last year to Satoshi (nov 2013) which lead him to diverge control of all final assets (known from whois records for bitcoin.net and bitcoins.org, confirmed by theymos). If you cant complete that, don't bother writing an article on who Satoshi is and don't bother telling a journalists about your textual pseudo-suspicions.
2) Nick already denied being satoshi years ago
3) Really old news
4) Failure to use google isn't journalism