There's evidence of deliberate deception, alongside a suspicious lack of evidence about what transpired out of view of the public. So there are grounds to believe this guy is full of shit.
I don't know, Nic doesn't know despite many words to convince you otherwise, you don't know, we all don't know. I choose the fun explanations and wait to see if I'm right, with the completely reasonable position that I, nor anybody else, cannot possibly know if the theory is correct with the data available.
The alternative is getting upset about it and smashing keyboards, which most folks seem to be doing. Who cares? Seriously, why does it matter? He is or he isn't. Wait and see.
To me, Gavin Andresen's position on this is the fly in the grand conspiracy ointment, and it's funny how all of the theories involve Andresen being incompetent or compromised to work around that problem. I saw people start referring to the possibility that one of the highest folks in Bitcoin is autistic and easily fooled by a con man, and I was just laying in bed last night reading it and shaking my head. This thread is doing it, too, discussing a person they've never met and how he's lost his senses or accepted payment to lie.
Giant mess. John upthread is right.
Nic doesn't know despite many words to convince you otherwise
While you claim that you have no stake or position in this, your other post borders on the bizarre, with you seemingly completely misunderstanding the arguments made and then, having carefully constructed an absurd strawman, you confidently knock it down.
Anyone can be tricked by a con man with no shame. This includes very smart people. Anyone who controls the hardware and the network can render virtually any proof useless without moving outside of their control (which is extremely easy to do), and it can be a fun parlour trick. In this case we have someone with a long history of casual trickery (if not fraud) who, while under an impending cloud of peril, and with months to contrive a magic trick, convinced a single person.