That's mostly evidence for my theory: he's an egomaniac trying to sell a story. Almost all of this goes back to him or the leaker as a matter of faith. It all appears way after Bitcoin appears. Everything about how he presents himself comes off as playing to a mystique to draw people in.

I'd buy the leaks if the hacker posted a message as Satoshi using stolen credential and linked to this article. Meanwhile, the "hacker" is probably Wright with nothing to do with Satoshi other than make money on his name.

> he's an egomaniac trying to sell a story

Awesome guerrilla marketing.

Journalists want the scoop of the century - outing the real Satoshi. By back filling history, they gave exactly what they wanted, and they took it hook, line and sinker.

Except is that really the scoop of the century? Do people really care that much? If the media would just leave the real guy alone we could have the added benefit of preventing false self-marketing too. How about we just ignore all these "the real satoshi!" articles?

It's already in Wired, has 212 points on Hacker News, and who knows what value to people assessing him in academia or business sectors. Altogether, enough people care for it to matter to a tech egomaniac. Not "scoop of the century" or anything, though.

Sorry, when I said journalists, I meant tech journalists.

All good. I agreed with rest of it.

Yeah, it would be the scoop of the century to Bitcoin fans but few other people. That said, as someone who isn't involved at all, I love a good detective story. I'll read this.

> By back filling history...

Yep. That seems plausible. Given means, motive, and opportunity (including a few months of time), could some of the folks here on HN have backfilled history this way? Register an email address one character off of Satoshi's? Edit some old blog posts to insert Bitcoin references? Generate backdated GPG keys? Perhaps enough to satisfy not-very-technical journalists who won't think to compare coding styles and are too worried about losing a scoop to ask folks for second and third opinions?

I'd expect the real Satoshi to have more of a math background, not "ecommerce law" and "digital forensics." I'd also expect him to be more similar in writing style and be more ideologically in sync with Bitcoin in his public actions. Plus I'm not a C# coder but this looks pretty basic: https://digital-forensics.sans.org/blog/2009/04/24/code-skil...

The evidence the journalists published is more convincing if you want it to be convincing. My guess is that they did.

I think Gizmodo's is a much less rigorous article than the Wired one. It mostly consists of accusations and circumstantial evidence. Every early player in Bitcoin development has these in spades. In a world where Craig Steven Wright is not Satoshi, we'd see the exact same tenuous evidence.

In contrast, the Wired article stays close to the facts (GPG keys, email addresses, IPs, etc) and hedges its bets. Wright might be Satoshi. He might be a hoaxer. We don't know. It's not as satisfying to read as the Gizmodo pablum, but it's much more accurate.

I have looked at the GPG keys, and based on the hash algorithm preference order, I believe they were created after [edit: July 2009], by a gnupg version following this[1] commit, on a computer with its clock set to 2008.

1. http://git.gnupg.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=gnupg.git;a=commit... [edited]

If this is true, then it's pretty substantial evidence that this guy is a hoaxer.

But can you really tell when a key-pair was generated? This would make for a fascinating write-up if you could please spend the time to explain.

Which hash did he use?

The change you link to has the same SHA-256 as the first option both before and after the change.

Did he use something else?

I'm curious to know your thoughts on the scenario whereby another hash would be chosen for him by the software, and whether or not he may have chosen a specific hash?

This is potentially a good line of enquiry with more info