Search for the creator of Bitcoin

    The founding document with the principles of the peer-to-peer cryptosystem Bitcoin was published by a certain Satoshi Nakamoto. It is still not known who is hiding behind a pseudonym, one or more people.

    The Japanese name Satoshi means "clearly thinking, quick-witted, wise." The word naka is translated as “inside”, and moto is “beginning, foundation, basis, organization”. That is, Satoshi Nakamoto can be translated as "a clearly thinking person within a fundamental organization." An interesting coincidence, given the revolutionary nature of the Bitcoin payment system, which threatens to overturn the global financial system.

    In recent days, American journalists published two investigations at once ( 1, 2 ) by putting forward different versions about the identity of the creator of Bitcoin. One of these versions (with a Russian trace) looks very believable. However, first things first.

    Security experts who unsuccessfully examined the source code of Bitcoin for vulnerabilities concluded that the program developer is "a world-class programmer with a deep knowledge of C ++ and an extensive background in the field of cryptography, economics, and P2P systems."

    Linguistic analysis of all online messages on behalf of Satoshi Nakamoto (≈80 thousand words in forums and in mailing letters) showedthat this person is fluent in English, writes in a bright and clear style and allows very few typos. In the very first message, he used American English, but after that he completely switched to classical spelling using words such as color instead of color , gray instead of gray and so on, decorating texts with exquisite phrases like bloody hard .

    The author of the first study decided that the author of the work is truly British. In search of the truth, he went to the Crypto 2011 cryptographic conference in Santa Barbara, where he found a suitable candidate - 23-year-old Irish cryptologist Michael Clear. He uses the same English grammar and is a co-author of scientific work on P2P systems. However, the Irishman categorically refutes his involvement in the creation of Bitcoin, and other parts of the puzzle do not add up. This version really looks rather weak.

    Adam Penenberg, a professor of journalism and professional linguist from New York University, conducted another investigation and achieved better results. According to him, the Bitcoin developer intentionally uses British disguise to complicate the linguistic analysis of his texts, that is, he has extraordinary intelligence and knows how to cover his tracks.

    The journalist tried to isolate specific phrases and google them. People tend to repeat themselves and even the most intelligent person can sometimes use the same phrase twice, and once under his real name. This is especially true of technical terms and formulations, where the stereotyped statements are especially high.

    For several months, Adam Penenberg studied the texts of Satoshi Nakamoto and checked his specific phrases. In the end, the journalist was lucky - he found that a specific combination of words [computationally impractical to reverse] was found on the Internet only 26 times, mostly copies from the same document. But there is another document with the same combination of words. This is US Patent Application No. 20100042841 Updating And Distributing Encryption Keys , published publicly on February 18, 2010. This application describes a cryptographic system, largely based on the same principles as Bitcoin technology. Researcher's attention was drawn to one fact. The patent application was filed on August 15, 2008, and the bitcoin.org domain was registered on August 18, 2008 - another coincidence.

    The authors of the patent application indicate three people - Neil King (Neal King), Charles Bry (Charles Bry) and Vladimir Oksman (Vladimir Oksman). Further investigation has allegedly identified the identities of these people. All of them are the authors of several more patents close to Bitcoin technology.

    Neil King and Charles Bry are residents of Munich (Germany), and Vladimir Oksman is probably a Russian-born programmer Vladimir [Vova] Oksman who lives in New Jersey and works for Samsung ( LinkedIn profiles , MyKrug ).

    Two months before the launch of Bitcoin.org, these three filed another patent application, which also speaks for itself: Key Management For Communication Networks .

    Best of all, Neil King is suitable for the linguistic and psychological portrait of Satoshi Nakamoto. Judging by his profile on Facebook , he is a very educated and fantastically well-read person, he left reviews for 46 books on Amazon, including astronomy, biology, cryptography, linguistics, literature, mathematics, philosophy and physics. Moreover, these reviews are written in excellent literary style, very clean, without a single extra word and typos, just like Satoshi Nakamoto. Its wall on the social network is filled with reports of protests against Wall Street, criticism of the banking system and the Patriotic Act (a law passed in the USA in October 2001, which gives the government and the police wide powers to supervise citizens).

    However, all three refute their involvement in the creation of Bitcoin, in response to a corresponding request, they gave different comments. Vladimir Oksman limited himself to one phrase “Wrong person”, and Neil King in his lengthy letter said that he had never heard of Bitcoin at all and he had to study the Wikipedia article.

    A cryptologist who has not heard of Bitcoin is about the same as a journalist who does not know about twitter, Adam Penenberg believes, and recalls several examples of how many famous writers and inventors published their works anonymously and initially denied authorship.

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