- Charles Hoskinson, the inventor of Cardano, believes that the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto can be revealed through the use of stylometry on the Bitcoin code and all other open source projects.
- According to him, Nakamoto is probably an academic who was educated in England or the eastern United States and is now between 40 and 50 years old.
The Cardano inventor and IOHK CEO, Charles Hoskinson, recently expressed his thoughts on the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto in an interview. Hoskinson told U.Today that although he does not know who the inventor of Bitcoin is, it is possible to evaluate it by stylometry. Instead of analyzing old forum posts by Satoshi, however, Hoskinson suggests that the Bitcoin code could be compared with other open source projects.
What you can do is you can apply stylometric techniques to that code and apply it to all the open-source projects that have ever been written and there’s a very high probability you’re going to find a match between that code and other code and then transitively you can follow it. You probably can get a really good idea of who that person could be.
Hoskinson’s assumptions about the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto
According to Hoskinson, it is likely that Nakamoto was educated either in the UK or the US and is an academic between 40 and 50 years of age. The IOHK CEO bases this assumption on the fact that the Bitcoin script is based on a language called Forth, which is very unusual and was mainly used in computer science education in England and the eastern United States.
It is also likely that Nakamoto was more of an academic than a professional developer, as the code was “overly academic”. A professional would have done a cleaner job, as Hoskinson noted:
So, that’s somebody who probably has an academic background. Somebody who has a lot of knowledge of cryptography, especially because of the choice of the elliptic curve and the fact that he was able to create things like Base 58 and things like that. It’s clearly a person who had computer science training.
The overly academic C++ code was a good indication of somebody trained to know how to code but not be a professional engineer. Cause there was a lot of cleaning and optimization and technical debt reduction that would have happened.
Hoskinson also claims that he knows people who have done the analysis and therefore may know who Satoshi Nakamoto is.
I’ve never done that exercise but I know people who have and they have a pretty good idea of who Satoshi is, given facts and circumstances.
However, as Hoskinson also stated, he is not interested in knowing who Satoshi is because Bitcoin has been working perfectly since 2012. Hoskinson also told U.Today that many people claim to be Satoshi because it gives them special prestige. However, this is not necessarily beneficial for the future of Bitcoin:
I think the power here is that certain people want to say they’re Satoshi or say they know Satoshi because it gives them a special prestige. It’s almost like you’re the Pope and you speak for God, right? You can then use that pulpit to influence people to use your product, like Bitcoin SV for example, or, at the very least, make yourself seem cooler or more interesting.
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