10 pointsby glenstein8 hours ago1 comment
  • Markoff6 hours ago
    No paywall link: https://archive.ph/EqJJZ

    "Mr. Back and Satoshi shared many of the same writing tics. We collected the archives of three internet mailing lists where Cypherpunks congregated in the 1990s and 2000s. We merged them into one big database and compared them to Satoshi’s body of writings. We performed three different writing analyses. All three pointed to Mr. Back as the closest match for Satoshi.

    One of the analyses focused on tics I had noticed in Satoshi’s writing:

    Satoshi put two spaces between sentences and used British spellings.

    He sometimes confused “it’s” and “its” and ended some sentences with “also.”

    He spelled “bugfix” as one word instead of two and “half way” and “down side” as two words instead of one.

    He wrote the compound noun “double-spending” with a hyphen even though it didn’t require one and the compound adjectives “file sharing” and “noun based” without hyphens when they should have been hyphenated.

    And he alternated between “e-mail” and “email,” “e-cash” and “electronic cash,” “cheque” and “check” and the British and American forms of the word “optimize.”

    Only one among hundreds of subscribers to those three mailing lists matched all those writing quirks, according to our analysis: Mr. Back."

    sounds like pretty solid proof