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Comment by T-A | Hacker News Reader

Naive question from total outsider to both contexts, popped up while reading this: has there been any speculation that Aaron Swartz = Satoshi Nakamoto, or are there good reasons to exclude it?

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It's not a theory I have ever heard, and I think there's sufficient reason to rule it out. Swartz never really professed an interest in currency or monetary policy, etc. that I am aware of. He was an extremely prolific individual who worked on many very public projects. Transparency was clearly one of his core values, and never exhibited more than passing general nerd interest in cryptography, anonymity, or the technolibertarian ideal that seems to have been a driving force for Satoshi. Also, he was already pretty damned busy in 2008-2009. I doubt he would have had time to do the huge amount of design work that went into Bitcoin without somebody noticing what he was working on.

So, Aaron was a brilliant dude, who did a lot of cool stuff. I just don't think the personality matches up, at all, with whoever created Bitcoin. If Swartz created a cryptocurrency, which I don't think he would have, I doubt it would look like Bitcoin. (There's also several people much higher on the list of "might be Satoshi".)

Who are on your list?

Nick Szabo. Mike Hearn. Hal Finney. Wei Dai.

Nick Szabo and Wei Dai appear to be mythical creatures just as much as Satoshi Nakamoto and therefore saying that, say, Szabo is Nakamoto provides no information. The other two appear to be real people.

I believe these are both meatspace identities.

Nick Szabo is a "former law school professor at George Washington University" according to Wikipedia.

Wei Dai has attended SIAI/MIRI workshops in person:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ig9/outside_views_and_miris_fai_endg...

("Wei Dai" could be a pseudonym but if so I haven't seen him mention that on Less Wrong.)

Yes.

Vanishingly unlikely. Very different politics and economics. (Swartz: very Krugmanesque in views.) Even considering the referenced Swartz write-up after thinking about Bitcoin...

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko

...you can see his thoughts were more focused on censorship-resistance (a major interest of Swartz) than on stateless money.

(If it helps, I have some private information on this topic which ~100% rules out Swartz as Nakamoto, but I'm afraid I can't tell you it. If you don't trust me for other reasons, feel free to ignore my claim.)

Can you post a hash of the info for precommitment?

I timestamped a hash the other day at `18QX4nyBndkwmgisdeDi6Nhm69TaR7mDPi`. (But as I said, I can't guarantee I'll ever release this information.)

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