[Orig to FB]
Imma up this from my comment because it’s pretty esoteric knowledge:
I was on cypherpunks from ~1993 when it had a ~250 people and joined the spinoff cryptography mailing list early on, maybe in 2002 — very soon after 9/11, I think, because Perry Metzger worked on Wall St. So by the time Satoshi published his paper in 2008, I was thoroughly steeped in all that — enough to (I’m still pissed) decide not to install BTC because it ran on java, which I’d grown to hate (ironically, in large part because it had been so deeply hated by the CP milieu for so long). So, yes, I watched all those ideas unfold over many years, to the point where the surprise of BTC was only that someone had integrated so many of those ideas into a single project.
As for a single person, well, BitTorrent was just one initially (Bram Cohen) and Wikileaks was basically one — Assange, although the domain was originally registered by John Young, who parted ways with JA early on because JA was a psycho PITA. John, who ran Cryptome until he died last year, was an ’68er architect of all things who lived on NYC’s Upper West Side, and we were friends.
I can say with some certainty that the stylometry arguments are all bullshit — it was reflexively understood in that milieu that peculiarities could give the game away. The overlapping interests args are a slightly higher grade of BS, but they’d need to operate on the level of oral/intellectual history to tease out significant differences that could ID someone. The strongest args are the long-term traffic analysis, when Satoshi comes and others come and go. That’s the kind of thing it’s much, much harder for an individual to systematically manipulate or fake. On that basis, and only on that basis, would I accept the claim that Adam Back was Satoshi.
So, all of that said, do state actors know who he is? Interesting question! Short answer: I think the answer has morphed from probably not to probably. Basically, ML and AI trained on all the relevant corpuses (mailing list archives, conf proceedings, journalistic refs, books, corporate papers, patents, repositories, etc) will make it harder and harder for Satoshi to hide (unless he’s dead). In that respect, this NYT article might be a sort of a tipping point.