Over the years, many ideas and proposals have been put forward trying to find out who Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, really is.
Among them, some thought of using stylometry to associate the texts produced by Satoshi with a real person’s name.
However, following this approach has already led to a conclusion: the most likely candidate would be Gavin Andresen, a developer currently working on the Bitcoin Cash project, who however denied being Satoshi.
The fact is that stylometry is not an exact science and more importantly it is not enough to identify a single name. Instead, it serves to compare the writing style of known people with that of Satoshi, giving results that are not accurate and not very specific at all. In fact, it is not impossible to imagine that there could also be several people with similar writing styles.
In this regard, however, the co-founder of Ethereum and founder of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson, suggests a variant that could give more precise results.
Instead of analyzing the writing style of the texts, he suggests analyzing the writing of the code.
As he stated in a recent interview, we know for sure that the code of the first Bitcoin client was written by Satoshi Nakamoto. Moreover, there are many projects online with open source code whose style can be compared with the one that surely belonged to Satoshi.
According to Hoskinson, there could be a high probability to find matches and then focus the investigation on some single names.
In addition, he adds that Bitcoin’s code was based on a very unusual programming language called Forth, used mainly in the field of computer education in England and the Eastern United States between the 1980s and early 1990s, and this could narrow down the search considerably.
It is not known if anyone has already attempted to do so, partly because the stylometric comparison on programming codes may not be so easy to perform, but it does seem a path that could be pursued to finally associate a name to the creator of Bitcoin.
Satoshi Nakamoto is not Scott Stornetta
Among other things, a new hypothesis has been proposed regarding Satoshi’s identity, according to which it would be the co-founder of Blockchain.com (formerly Blockchain.info), Scott Stornetta.
In fact, in an article dating back to 1991 Stornetta proposed, with his partner Stuart Harber, a decentralized process that would allow confirming the timestamp of when a file was created or modified.
Many of the ideas included in that article, and in some subsequent works by Stornetta, were then used by Satoshi to design and write the first Bitcoin code, and Stornetta himself proposed an explanation for the choice of the name Satoshi Nakamoto.
In reality, Stornetta may not be Satoshi at all, but his work was nevertheless fundamental to Bitcoin’s development.
Then again, it may be better for Bitcoin’s development that Satoshi’s true identity is never revealed.
