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Do we have enough writing from Satoshi to try to correlate language/linguistic patterns against known actors in the field of cryptography?


Yes; we have a number of emails from the p2presearch ML, the cryptography ML, the Bitcoin ML, his Bitcoin forum posts, his whitepaper, and source code revisions & comments. This amounts to easily 80k of text, which should be more than enough to run stylometric techniques on him.

The real trouble would actually be getting enough text from all the 'known actors' you might want to compare him against (for example, one Redditor thinks Satoshi is Mike Reiter, but almost all of Reiter's papers are co-authored and he doesn't seem to have any other online presence, so what would you use as your Reiter corpus?).


Regardless of the comparison with other actors, is it possible to run an analysis over Satoshi's corpus to determine if its internally consistent or likely written by multiple individuals?


I haven't actually seen any mentions of stylometric techniques or analyses which look into that question, although I'm sure it's been done. (The only example I can think of, the Federalist papers, was known to have been done by two people with large pre-existing corpuses to go on, and so the question was simply assigning responsibility.)


I actually have read a paper once on stylometric authorship attribution, part of which was oriented at detecting whether it was a single or multiple authors. I think "authorship attribution" were keywords in the title, but that's all I remember. So I don't have anything more to go on :)


I'm not sure if a professional forensic study has been done but check out the bitcoin wiki page linked in my post. It contains links to his crypto mailing List posts and a couple of journalists who have tried tracking him down.

The original bitcoin pdf suggests a British education but some of his other writing uses American spelling. And he probably isn't Japanese. The plot thickens.




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