[sireat]

Why do you say obviously?

I am really curious why Le Roux has been ruled out even by the author of the book about him "The Mastermind" by Evan Ratliff - quite a good read.

Le Roux seemed like a good candidate to be Satoshi - a Windows C++ programmer with serious crypto knowledge(most other crypto oldschoolers were on Linux/BSD), as the book states he liked adopt other persona on forums, he obviously had a strong anti-government bent,

so far that is not much but more importantly he was dealing with his real life crime empire and had baskets of money laying around the house.

it is hard to imagine Satoshi not spending some money once BTC got over $1 - unless he was really really not worried about money. Of course he could have just lost the keys...

There has to be some crucial detail which book does not mention why Le Roux is ruled out so conclusively.

I'd be curious if any code similarity analysis has been done on old LeRoux codebases and original Bitcoin code.

[pen2l]

Satoshi and Le Roux both coded C++ but the code they wrote is very different, stylistically and otherwise (tabs vs. spaces, commenting style, approach to things like RNG). Linguistics tics are different in writings. Satoshi has an academic streak to him, he's probably some unknown dude in Germany. La Roux sometimes made grammar/spelling mistakes, Satoshi was pretty much always perfect. It's also strange that Le Roux, being a criminal kingpin with lots of operations, never implemented BTC use in any of his enterprises... why did he choose not to?

When the Dorian saga happened, Satoshi posted on p2pfoundation to clear up that Dorian wasn't him with his original account, I think Le Roux was in prison at that time. He's still in prison, he's been cooperating with the US government. US is definitely not letting him go anywhere for the shit he's done, everything from drug cartel work, helping Iranian and North Korean governments acquire weapons, etc.

One more delicious detail: Le Roux in a letter to SDNY judge wrote that he wants to invent ways to mine BTC efficiently. Really it comes down to the fact that Le Roux was involved with a whole bunch of stuff, and when you have this much surface area to scan you'd think you could come upon with just one strong piece of evidence... but there is nil, he's just another criminal warlord, luckily now in the custody of the US government: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ca2-20-03410/pd...