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by emgoldstein 3850 days ago
I think a very small amount of stylometric analysis would cast a lot of doubt on this theory.

Satoshi's grammar is always perfect. His sentences are tight. He's clear and to the point. Wright rambles; his grammar is terrible; he seems to have no idea what a comma is for. Scanning his blog for a minute, he comes across as the kind of slightly dotty kook who would try to convince people he's Satoshi with this kind of "leak."

I'll stick with the current mainstream theory, thanks...

5 comments

Satoshi is two people - Wright and Kleiman. Kleiman was responsible for the public Satoshi writing, and he doesn't have any of his own writing samples online that aren't co-authored to make a stylometric comparison against.
This seems extremely reasonable and possible.

Do we have any evidence of what kind of person Kleiman was?

Or Wright has Multiple Personality Disorder[1]. One is sloppy and the other is thorough.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10625626

I think there are a lot of engineers on here who only express a single language style.

In the business world I see writing style changing depending on who one is talking to - a trait I don't generally see in engineers. Who knows the mind of the originator of bitcoin.

Also, Wright can have a few drinks and click to send a sloppy message without much thought. However any time he purportedly posts as Satoshi he probably re-reads it 100 times with his heart pumping at 150bpm and takes as much care over his writing as the potentially fictional Satoshi. The author of bitcoin would surely be clever enough even if his natural language skills were poor.

I've definitely worked with people who are excellent writers and communicators, but send texts like "u busy?" and "when u comin by"
You'll need to get on archive.org then as he is currently going through and deleting all his blog posts.

Edit: well worth mentioning, on this note, that he asks for his associates to edit his public messages, seemingly aware of his terrible writing. Or a knowing attempt to obfuscate these matters. Or alternatively, yknow, not this guy.

Not only grammar, but Wright's writings are full of typos and spelling errors, which occur at a remarkable rate, to the extent that he can't spell Silicon Valley! (he spelled it as "silicone valley"). I never once saw Satoshi make a spelling error.

That said, the rest of the evidence is pretty compelling, isn't it?

Satoshi did once say he wasn't all that good with words, despite evidence to the contrary. Perhaps this mysterious collaboration with his dead friend involved the other guy writing the messages.

I think that's plausible particularly because he emailed someone asking them to leak his message about not being Dorian, and that person heavily edited / redacted it; it's quite possible that is a recurring theme.

Also in the Gawker article we are told Wright emailed Kleiman asking for "help editing a paper", "I need your help and I need a version of me to make this work that is better than me."

Notice that most of Wright's retroactive editing to make himself look like Satoshi took place in 2013-2014, shortly after Kleiman died.

Perhaps Kleiman was the one who really wanted to keep Satoshi's identity a secret, but Wright had different ambitions and now he doesn't have his friend to rein him in anymore.

Or Kleiman & Wright formed the Satoshi identity as a collaboration, and after Kleiman died, Wright decided to edit the historical record to take more of the credit for himself.
Well, according to one of the leaked e-mails, Wright originally wanted Kleiman's help in concealing his identity, but it's possible he could've changed his mind over time. http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Oqntva_c...
Possible. Kleiman seems to have stuck to not outing Satoshi at the expense of his own money problems.
I think this is the most likely case.
I'm glad you wrote because I was wondering about that. The stuff I've seen on Satoshi seemed to indicate a precise, engineer's mind. He should also have a certain programming and writing style with quirks that would be hard to entirely eliminate in revision. My method would be to compare the code/writing of the "maybe Satoshi" to Satoshi's.

Your comparison indicates they're highly unlikely to be the same person. Come to think of it, Wrights words are one of the only things we can attribute to him and evaluate in this. The rest can be made up crap and probably is.

Maybe he's talking about the area just east of Santa Monica and South of Hollywood: Silicone Valley.
the spelling of "silicone" looks intentional to me. the review is titled "Like the US is the only country to produce tech."

'Craig Wright of Australia wrote, a bit petulantly, “Always the assumption that [Satoshi Nakamoto] must be a bloody yank. The analysis of who Satoshi is is always so limited.”'

from this article: http://fusion.net/story/243056/alleged-bitcoin-creator-craig...

> So let’s recap: in September 2015, Wright was annoyed that people didn’t know who the real Nakamoto was.

Is Kashmir unable to read? Wright never said that. He was clearly angry about the national stereotyping and the 'assumption' and how thinking is 'limited'. This is exactly like those cases where women authors publish books under names like 'J.K. Rowling' and readers assume they are men; of course they are going to be upset.

> Satoshi's grammar is always perfect. His sentences are tight.

That makes me think it's more than one person, e.g. Wright, Kleiman, Szabo and possibly more. The more people that edit a work, the less errors there will be.

fewer errors ;-)

Proving your point!