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Comment by Confusion | Hacker News Reader

A smart man, especially someone that understands security, would foresee the argument from silence. If anything, I think it is a deliberate red herring to make suspicion fall on Szabo.

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Ah, you remind me the "battle of wits" scene from Princess Bride [0]. If he is that smart, he could have predicted people would reason as you did, in which case being silent about bit gold was the right thing to do... and so on ad infinitum :)

[0] http://www.gametheory.net/popular/reviews/PrincessBride.html

it worked pretty well. one way to think about it: did Nakamoto want to be known? then reason from there. then consider the negation. the deeper point in all of this: why do we trust people in the first place?

i think nakamoto/szabo is ambivalent on this point. i think he cared enough to cover his tracks enough so that no conclusive evidence of his identity can be found. but he did not care enough to clear certain circumstantial evidence from the picture, such as aspects of his writing style, and the times of day he posted which link him to szabo and the aforementioned forward-dating of posts.

i think some part of nakamoto wishes to have credit for BitCoin, or at least not permit someone else to take credit - which is part of why he came out of hiding to redirect people away from dorian nakamoto. to protect him, but also to ensure that credit was not conclusively misattributed.

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