where in the world is satoshi nakamoto

Linguistics Experts Think They’ve Found the Real Creator of Bitcoin

Photo: Dorottya Mathe / Shutterstock

Only a month after Newsweek proudly announced that it had sniffed out the creator of Bitcoin, a train-collecting engineer from California named Dorian Nakamoto, a new study by Aston University researchers has a candidate of its own: Nick Szabo, a cryptographer whose writings they say have “uncanny” similarities with the language in Bitcoin’s founding document — a 2008 white paper written by someone using the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto.”

A team of 40 (!) researchers studied many of Szabo’s works and those of ten other leading Nakamoto suspects, according to the Wall Street Journal, and found a “large number of distinctive linguistic traits appearing in both the Bitcoin paper and Szabo’s blogs and other writings,” leading them to conclude that Szabo is likely Satoshi Nakamoto. (Szabo has denied being Nakamoto.) The case for Szabo’s authorship isn’t airtight, though, so investigators will have to keep going in their efforts to figure out who invented Bitcoin. Soon, it might be easier to do this by process of elimination.

Another Bitcoin Founder Candidate