On the second point, no. I think we have a preponderance of evidence for Len Sassaman. He also explains why those bitcoin haven't moved, as well as many other peculiar things. This appears to be the most authoritative research that lays everything out: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.10257v14.pdf
If anyone actually reads that and comes to a different conclusion, I'd love to hear it and why.
The fact it was a whitepaper highly suggests a lifelong academic who has spent their careers publishing papers like these men, not a PHD student.
Also, some of the word choices in the whitepaper and the initial reference to London banks being bailed out again suggest Satoshi is not a native American english speaker.
I like the idea of Paul Le Roux, specifically because his name was redacted in the court docket but the government did the redacting in the PDF wrong
But I don’t find this thread to be very thin. Satoshi being a common name is going to always be an issue, but there are not that many cryptographers in the world.
Hal Finney left his family broke in his wake, after spending the entirety of his bitcoin wealth on treatment and cryopreservation.
I really don't believe Finney would have had access to what would have been tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of bitcoin at the time and left his family in that position.
This is blatantly false (Hal Finney felt confident in that his family would be OK and they were technological savvy enough to work out access to their inheritance), but also, they became a target so I believe that their privacy should be respected.
There are literally billions in those wallets. Unless "Satoshi" is independently wealthy, a nation state, or dead, you would expect that they would have at least taken out some money. I can't imagine that "Satoshi" would have lost all the keys to all of those wallets.
There are many, many ways to lose a cryptographic key. There are none to restore one.
There's also the idea that Satoshi thought he was doing something altruistic and purposely destroyed the keys so he wouldn't be tempted later on... which, if true, he might be regretting now.
It's entirely feasible that the modern Nicolas Bourbaki that was Satoshi have lost a member, or can no longer reach a pooled key quorum.
The argument can be made that not releasing early blocks contributed greatly to the perception that lifted bitcoin and there was never the intent to release them, to which sufficient early members still hold fast.
honestly, i thought we settled on Adam Back as Satoshi:
- adam was extremely active during the early cypherpunk days, when
- he invented Hashcash, which bitcoin cites in its whitepaper and used as its PoW
- he was the first to take Wei Dai's b-money proposal seriously and discusses combining it with hashcash (the 2 core elements of bitcoin)
- he disappeared and reappeared professionally during the exact timeframe of bitcoin development
- his writing closely matches satoshi's (british english + style/punctuation)
- he had no public involvement with bitcoin until he joined Bitcointalk forums in 2013 and suddenly had intimate details of unknown bugs in bitcoin saying "I thought I'd fixed them".
- he started Blockstream with the mission to ensure the survival of bitcoin (funded lighting, paid core devs, etc)
- he recently helped nail the coffin on Craig Wright's case in court proving he was not satoshi, during which
- he revealed the earliest known email correspondence with satoshi
watch the interview were he uncomfortably describes himself
I still like Hal Finney as Nakamoto, just because those bitcoin have never moved, and his being dead is the best explanation for that.