Nick Szabo[0] is the more likely candidate in my opinion, but I doubt that it's either of them. Adam Back was quite late to the game and initially dismissed Bitcoin.
Every time people mention Szabo, and every time someone needs to debunk this rumour. I'm on the phone, so it won't be me this time.
One of the many argument against this theory is that Szabo is not much of a computer programmer, and Satoshi was very fluent with C++ among other skills.
There's Hal Finney, the creator of PGP, which was a good programmer, a cypherpunk, and died a few years ago. The fact that Satoshi has shown inhuman restraint in showing up or saying a single world since 201x would be neatly explained if they were dead.
I already talked at length about this, but no human would be able to keep their mouth shut and assets frozen if they were alive today and held a few billion dollars and spiritual reigns of the most controversial economic invention of the century. Not a single one.
Let alone with the best opsec ever seen not to be nabbed, identified or killed by any of the major intelligence agencies in the world.
I think it is very unlikely to be Hal Finney either. Andy Greenberg's interview with Finney a few months prior to his death, with Finney's wife and son also being present convinced me of that at least. https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/03/25/satosh...
I specifically said I didn't think it was Szabo... I agree that Satoshi is probably dead, but I don't think it's Hal Finney either. It's most probably someone who isn't on anyone's radar.
No, not Adam. I remember reading Adam's Hashcash paper back in 2003 or so, excited for how it might lead to cryptocurrency, but he was completely uninterested in the topic. Apparently Satoshi tried to get him involved early on, and Adam ignored him. My understanding is that he was pretty rude to anyone who tried talking to him about Bitcoin.
It wasn't until Bitcoin went over 1000 dollars that Adam finally realized he could cash in on the reference to his paper. That was when he finally got involved, founding Blockstream, hinting towards people that he was more involved with the early project. He hired up a bunch of Bitcoin devs, and basically ruined the network for everyone, trying to pivot everyone heavily towards Lightning so they could extract fees to pay back investors.
Kleiman seems like an obvious top contender in my opinion.
Maybe I am reaching here, but by “ruining the network” I assume you mean that you are blaming him Adam for the small blockers winning, in which case the network is better off for it.
I'd not heard that theory, but I remember when Dan Kaminsky put the BitLen tribute into the blockchain, and it was definitely more about Dan screwing with weird tech, and realizing that anything he put there would be there forever right around the time that a good friend of his passed away. Dan was super skeptical about cryptocurrencies, and most of what he did around the space was finding weird ways to fuck with it.
despite he's mentioned in this article he is barely mentioned - paul le roux. he had skills, money and the timing of his capture and satoshi's disappearance are right.
The NSA has a poor track record with cryptography, often being audacious enough to believe that their backdoors in common encryption standards wouldn't be found by anyone. So much so that the idea of them being behind Bitcoin at the same time that they were gutting modern encryption is... Well, laughable, really.
