[kragen]

Pretty sure Len thought Bitcoin was a profound abortion of an idea:

https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/77358901774917632

> Right; why would they [mention Bitcoin in the cypherpunk panel on digital currencies], though? Bitcoin pretty much fails as a cypherpunk protocol.

https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/81121594373709825

> That only works if you want to leave the inflated value of Bitcoin on the table; otherwise you must cash out before the crash.

https://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/80748374386679808

> Oh, where's #infoanarchy when you need it? I mean, we could do a serious take and do BitCoin right, you know. (P.S.: CloudCoin™)

Also, Len was a Unix guy, and whoever wrote Bitcoin was a Windows programmer, though not an incompetent one.

(And, as pointed out in other comments below, Satoshi came out of his seclusion in 02014, three years after Len killed himself, writing only one short email, to rebut Newsweek's article claiming he was Dorian Nakamoto.)

[elliotec]

None of those tweets point to anything close to a "profound abortion of an idea" - in fact, I think these are almost supporting the claim. "we could do BitCoin right" and "it fails as a cypherpunk protocol" could be simple self-critiques or misdirections or even sly jokes. Saying bitcoin has an inflated value also doesn't mean this person didn't create it. Didn't Elon just recently say Tesla is way overvalued?

The Unix vs Windows argument is pretty silly. And as mentioned in other comments, the 2014 email is generally regarded as not legitimate.

[kragen]

I never heard Len say anything positive about Bitcoin. He devoted his life to guaranteeing people privacy; Bitcoin makes all transactions permanently public. If he'd managed to design a Bitcoin it would be something like Mimblewimble.

> The Unix vs Windows argument is pretty silly.

That doesn't amount to a counterargument. POSIX C++ and Win32 C++ have very distinctly different styles, and Satoshi's Bitcoin codebase is a lot more similar to the latter.

[nylonstrung]

I'd argue that none of these are mutually exclusive with Satoshi's own beliefs.

Satoshi seemed to think BTC was getting too much attention too fast. They were unhappy about WikiLeaks accepting it thinking it was far too premature for that.

They also were clear that it did NOT yet provide full anonymity. The whitepaper admits that and Satoshi advised precautions like using Tor and not reusing wallets until there was better privacy. They never claimed it was mature for privacy use cases.

[killerstorm]

> whoever wrote Bitcoin was a Windows programmer, though not an incompetent one.

It's worth pointing out that code of the first version was organized in a ridiculous way, even pro Windows programmers do not dump everything into one directory. So a widespread opinion is that it was written by an amateur without professional programming experience, albeit extremely bright, as organization aside, code worked very well.

[nikolay]

That's true about Windows. And that's why I believe Paul Le Roux is Satoshi.