[Cryptography] The Strange Story of Satoshi Nakamoto's Spelling Choices: Part 1.

[bit]

We've published a small study of Satoshi Nakamoto's writing style
<https://ungeared.com/the-strange-story-of-satoshi-nakamotos-spelling-choice
s-part-1/>  - the first part was focused on his spelling choices. We went
through every word written by Satoshi and picked out words that are spelled
differently in American & British English and also all of his misspellings
(contrary to popular belief, his spelling wasn't always perfect). We
identified 108 such instances (likely we missed some, it was a manual
process): American - 52, British - 35 and Misspelled - 21. We can't post
picture here, there're a lot of charts/graphs on our site, they help a
lot-:)

 

Satoshi Was Consistently Inconsistent

Perhaps, the biggest takeaway from our research is that Satoshi was highly
inconsistent in his use of American and British spelling and he was
inconsistent from the very beginning. Many have noticed that in the Bitcoin
whitepaper the British spelling of "favour", however, seemingly no one had
spotted that in the same paper, he used American spelling for
"characterized" (British: "characterised"). Interestingly, this irregularity
would have been consistent with the rules of Canadian English.

 

Satoshi's Coding Suggests He Was American

Another interesting observation we made is that - predominantly Satoshi was
using American English when discussing code. This is also consistent with
his coding - we haven't identified any usage of British English there
(though this may require additional research).

 

Satoshi's usage of American English Spelling NOT directly related to coding

>From this we came up with two alternative hypotheses:

1.	Satoshi's native tongue was American English (think Hal Finney or
Nick Szabo) and British spelling was part of his operational security.
However, being a human, he was not always consistent.
2.	Satoshi was multicultural. For instance, he could have been born in
the UK and then worked for a US-centric company (think Adam Back).

More Inconsistencies

Did we mention Satoshi's spelling was inconsistent? - Sometimes, he would
use American and British spelling on the same day and even within the same
post.

 

Satoshi's Spelling Idiosyncrasies (Words Grouped by Stem)

There is also some variance by the day of the week:

*	American: Mondays, Wednesdays, Saturdays
*	British: Thursdays
*	Even: Tuesdays, Fridays, Sundays

 

Part 2

In the second part of our study, we will apply the "Information
categorization approach to literary authorship disputes
<http://reylab.bidmc.harvard.edu/pubs/2003/physica-a-2003-329-473.pdf> "
developed by Dr. Albert Yang et al to the texts of popular Satoshi
candidates to see if it can help identify the man or men who created
Bitcoin. Dr. Yang managed to apply it successfully to such distinct cases as
the attribution of Chinese 18th-century novel, Shakespearean plays, and the
Federalist Papers. If you would like for us to look at particular persons,
please let us know along with appropriate texts authored by them.

 

We look forward to your feedback

 

Bit

bit at ungeared.com <mailto:bit at ungeared.com> 

 

Whose texts should we compare to Satoshi's?

 

 

 

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