In 2008 an anonymous user with the alias Satoshi Nakamoto posted the original Bitcoin whitepaper to the Cryptography mailing list.
Satoshi mined a lot of the early Bitcoin blocks and the rewards that are held in bitcoin wallets associated are estimated to be around 1 million BTC or 10 Billion USD. If Bitcoin eventually reaches $120k, Satoshi will become the richest man in the world.
These wallet addresses and no addresses associated with Satoshi have ever been exchanged or used.
There’s been much speculation about who Satoshi could be but I thought I’d do my own “research” and build a tool to search for Satoshi by scraping the original Cryptography mailing list archives and doing some analysis.
Github source code: https://github.com/jamesbachini/satoshisearch
Fairly simple little scraper and analyser of the https://www.metzdowd.com cryptography mailing list archives where Satoshi first posted the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Methodology:
Scrape all the messages from Satoshi after November 2008.
Remove common words with an English word list and manually
Rescrape the archives prior to November 2008 to see who uses similar words and phrases.
Additional weight on very unique words that are uncommon and not likely to be widely used by a broad range of people.
Criticism:
This is a fairly low sample size analysis. More data could be pulled from the whitepaper and other known posts/emails. Perfectly plausible that Satoshi was a lurker and never posted before. More detailed analysis either with machine learning or sentence structure would be more conclusive.
Conclusion:
8 – Linda Casals
10 – Hal Finney
4 – Joshua Hill
4 – Jeff.Hodges at KingsMountain.com
7 – Leichter, Jerry
5 – Anne & Lynn Wheeler
6 – bear
4 – pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz
5 – Guus Sliepen
5 – alex at alten.org
4 – Daniel Carosone
4 – auto37159 at hushmail.com
6 – zooko
8 – Crawford Nathan-HMGT87
7 – R.A. Hettinga
5 – Ray Dillinger
8 – David Wagner
4 – Eric Young
Hal Finney is the closest match to Satoshi Nakamoto.
Hal’s use of words that Satoshi also uses like pseudonymous are quite unique. I ran the data for post-2008 which could well be corrupted by who’s talking about the same tech after the paper had been released and Hal got the second highest score on that behind Ray Dillinger. Ray Dillinger was also the bear profile above and he was involved in auditing the code. Makes sense that he would be using the same terminology after the release.
Hal has always been one of the most likely suspects with Dorian ‘Satoshi’ Nakomoto living a couple of blocks away and his account being the only one to write something positive about the original whitepaper post. He was also the first receiver of a bitcoin transaction etc.
Unfortunately Hal died in 2014 but his legacy remains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist)
Could Hal have been working with someone else like Ray or Nick Szabo? Quite possibly, there’s certainly a case for Satoshi being a British expat living in the States. Maybe someone could do some further research and find out.
