Was Bitcoin Created by This International Drug Dealer? | Hacker News Reader

Was Bitcoin Created by This International Drug Dealer?

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32 pointsesalazar11 comments

Even though there's no good answers here, I still enjoyed reading this. It's as much about the process and the hype as it is about trying to answer yes/no. In the end he decides it's a maybe, and that's probably good enough for now. It's a fun little piece.

No, it's not Paul, but wouldn't it be ironic if it turned out that the designer and architect of the original Bitcoin protocol was (partially) responsible for putting him behind bars?

My favorite part of this is that there's a clear reason for the Satoshi coins to have never been spent. Like the article says, the only other theories that allow for that are Satoshi being something like a nation-state.

The speculation that Paul Le Roux (the developer of TrueCrypt's precursor E4M, and the suspected coauthor of TrueCrypt) is Satoshi Nakamoto has a long history, but ultimately many found that it was still unpersuasive.

Has anyone analyzed the coding style of E4M and compared it to the original Bitcoin release?

Coding style may not be as unique to an individual as prose, but it would be an interesting smoke test.

They mention it in the article and couldn't come to any conclusions.

  I don't see anything that stands out as saying these couldn’t have been written by the same person (especially separated by a decade),” he wrote. “Nor do I see any similarity that wouldn’t also be true for many other authors and codebases. At a minimum, however, if they were written by the same person that person’s styles changed a lot (either due to time or intentionally hiding them).

Thanks. I hadn't gotten that far in the article yet. :)

I have. I compared contemporary Truecrypt and Bitcoin sources. They don't show any obvious sign of being written by the same person. If anything I'd say Paul Le Roux is a better programmer than Satoshi.

Couldn't time account for that? Like my code looks nothing like it did years ago.

Well TC is much older than Bitcoin, so you'd think newer stuff by the same author would be better. But it's hard to say anything for certain. The projects are so different in form and function. TC targets Windows, Bitcoin targets Linux. (Yeah, they're cross platform, but if you look at them you'll see what I mean) The cryptography code included in both is public domain/third party so that doesn't help. Bitcoin has networking, TC doesn't. TC is a driver primarily, while Bitcoin is not. They don't use the same GUI toolkit. So a lot of it is really hard to compare because the style of the code is following the common idioms for the framework being targeted. Where the author is more free of convention, they don't feel similar to me.

I should write up a detailed post about this topic.

Another interesting article on this topic .... http://cryp7o.me/pujs9

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