Additionally, Szabo was an employee of Agoric Systems, publisher of the Agoric Papers [1], a treatise on market based systems. He was also an employee of Digicash [2], a failed electronic money startup created by David Chaum.

However, Szabo has released a bit of code [3], which is very different than code I would expect Satoshi Nakamoto to have written.

That said, for someone who was a professor at GWU law school, there is a remarkably small amount of public information about Nick Szabo.

[0] - http://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/Folklore/Humor/squish.hoax

[1] - http://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.html

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash

[3] - https://github.com/nicksz/jTime

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.privacy.anon-ser...

My clues:

a) He lives in London. Satoshi's mining has been timezoned to indicate that he probably lived in the UK. The genesis block had a quote from The Times ("chancellor on brink of second bailout").

b) Wei is an expert C++ programmer, and the bitcoin client was written in C++

c) Wei created cryptopp, a C++ cryptographic library, so he definitely knew how to implement cryptographic features in C++. The bitcoin client heavily used the cryptopp library. The code seems similar too.

d) Wei Dai published 'b-money' system in 1998

e) 'British formatting in his written work implies Nakamoto is of British origin. However, he also sometimes used American spelling, which may indicate that he was intentionally trying (but failed) to mask his writing style, or that he is more than one person. ' - Bitcoin wiki

Doesn't Dai live in Washington...?

> d) Wei Dai published 'b-money' system in 1998

And Szabo says he first wrote about Bitgold around then too, so? Lots of people have written about digital currency over the years.

>Doesn't Dai live in Washington...?

I don't know. His website says that he's a lecturer at 'Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus'. His current location is irrelevant though, it's only relevant where Wei lived around 2007-2010. Do you have information on that?

>And Szabo says he first wrote about Bitgold around then too, so?

b-money is quite similar to bitcoin. Satoshi would be familiar with electronic money schemes, maybe even a public author.

>Lots of people have written about digital currency over the years.

Yes, and? I'm not saying that being an author of a digital currency means the he or she is Satoshi. I'm saying that it's evidence that he or she may be Satoshi, because authors of digital currencies probably want to have said currencies implemented.

Well, if I were Satoshi, wouldn't I be encouraging you to fixate on Wei Dai...?

> I don't know. His website says that he's a lecturer at 'Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus'.

It does? Are you sure you are looking at the right Wei Dai, the Wei Dai of http://www.weidai.com/ ? It's not a unique name. There's more than one of them.

Note, non-exhaustive hypotheses. I've lived in England my whole life, but I've done a lot of talking to Americans online. I don't think I'm consistent with my locale, because I don't care enough to pay attention. (Also I don't even remember which of -ise and -ize is which, despite occasionally looking it up.)

Much like DPR and silkroad.

https://web.archive.org/web/20061202010422/http://www.weidai...

It's possible that 'Satoshi' deliberately scheduled things to give the appearance of living somewhere else.

For example, Bitcoin didn't even run on Linux at first -- it was developed by Satoshi on Windows and had a lot of Windows-specific code despite the use of wxwidgets for UI.