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<body><div style="font-family: sans-serif;"><div class="plaintext" style="white-space: normal;"><p dir="auto">Almost all of the technical evidence is of that nature, though like many people I was especially amused that the journalist regarded it as significant that both Satoshi and Adam used C++ and public key cryptography. The only part that sounded vaguely convincing to me was the in-person confrontation at the end.</p>
<p dir="auto">On 14 Apr 2026, at 0:16, Peter Gutmann via cryptography wrote:</p>
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<div style="display:none !important;display:none;visibility:hidden;mso-hide:all;font-size:1px;color:#ffffff;line-height:1px;max-height:0px;opacity:0;overflow:hidden;">John Levine <johnl@ iecc. com> writes: >A long piece in the New York Times claims to have figured out that Satoshi is >really Adam Back. Some of the clues seem plausible, like linguistic quirks and >relations to hashcash, some less</div>
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<pre style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 100%; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word">John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> writes:
>A long piece in the New York Times claims to have figured out that Satoshi is
>really Adam Back. Some of the clues seem plausible, like linguistic quirks and
>relations to hashcash, some less so like the code being written in C++.
It's all confirmation-biased examination of cloud pictures. I've been
identified as Satoshi a couple of times based on grapholo... sorry, linguistic
analysis when I'm definitely not. For example something that someone pointed
out was that I double-space at the end of sentences and (apparently) Satoshi
did too. This isn't some personal quirk that identifies me as Satoshi but
something that anyone who learned to touch-type before maybe the mid-90s does
because that's how it was taught, and most people posting to cypherpunks in
2008 would be from that era. So it's not "double-space = Satoshi quirk", it's
"double-space = learned to touch-type".
If you stare at the clouds long enough you're bound to see Satoshis somewhere.
Peter.
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<br><p dir="auto"> --Steve Bellovin, <a href="https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb" style="color: #3983C4;">https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb</a></p>
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