And I say this with no opinion about who he is.
Edit: I also don't understand the speculation at this point. Bitcoin is out there, has been for a while, and it's not going away. I'd wager the original coins will never be touched. Figuring out who it is won't really change anything at this point, and it's clear that whoever it is doesn't want people to know (assuming they're alive) - why can't "we" generally respect that?
It's hard to take analysis seriously when it gets this wrong. Occam doesn't say what's likely, he says it's preferable to prefer simpler answers until more complex ones are required.
It's also just... not any simpler to say "he picked a pseudonym that used his initials, reversed" than "he picked a pseudonym at random"
If you toiled relentlessly to hid your identity and have done an extremely good job of it, why would you throw all of it away and say "okay, you got me"
so you can watch yourself and your family be relentlessly attacked for the rest of your life? so you can have your life threatened on a regular basis? so you can watch your greatest creation, something that was meant to be decentralized, come back to being something centralized under you?
the only people that would think this is a good idea are people who are short-sighted or narcissists.
Here we are talking about billions of dollars. To be worth billions and not use a penny of it to make your life better, on the basis of protecting privacy, that’s a supreme exertion of willpower on a daily basis, and we’re talking over years. Bears repeating that it’s years since a transaction was made against those wallets. One has to be a saint to not succumb once over the years, and while certainly possible, it’s the least likely outcome. Rather the lack of movement suggests that either Nakamoto is dead or Nakamoto is an org, presumably an org that doesn’t care about billions (I won’t name names but there are only a handful of orgs that possess crypto expertise and would not care about billions).
So who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
..there’s enough evidence to make a strong guess about who the white paper’s author really is. The signs point to an American polymath named Nick Szabo.
Szabo is a lawyer and sophisticated coder with deep ties to an online community, known as cypherpunks, that spent years experimenting with digital money. This community shares a love of cryptography and a deep distrust of government, which is reflected in Szabo’s Twitter feed and rare public appearances. While there are other cypherpunks closely associated with the first days of bitcoin—notably, the late programmer Hal Finney—some big clues point to Szabo as the paper’s author.
These include anecdotes, set out by New York Times reporter and Digital Gold author Nathaniel Popper, that put Szabo at the center of early development of bitcoin. Additionally, linguists have compared the white paper and Satoshi’s emails with writing samples from Szabo, Finney, and other possible candidates.
Szabo is far and away the closest match. Satoshi Nakamoto’s initials are also the inverse of Nick Szabo’s. It could be a coincidence. All of it could be a coincidence. But if you subscribe to the philosophical principle known as Occam’s Razor, which holds that simpler solutions are more likely to be correct than complex ones, it makes far more sense to accept that Szabo is the author than to insist it’s either someone else or a mystery incapable of being unraveled.
In fact, most longtime bitcoin owners will concede quietly in a one-on-one conversation that they, too, accept Szabo as Satoshi. Just don’t ask them to do it publicly.