Stylometry, time zones, candidates

Lacking an identity, researchers dissected the writings. The Satoshi corpus (whitepaper, emails, about 540 forum posts) reveals impeccable English with British markers: "favour," "colour," "grey," the expression "bloody hard." The genesis block cites a London newspaper, The Times, rather than an American title. Another tic noted: the double space after the period, a habit typical of people trained on the typewriter or on the Anglo-Saxon typographic conventions of the 70s-80s, which suggests an author born no later than the 60s-70s.

The analysis of the timestamps of his posts and commits shows a near-absence of activity between 7 AM and 1 PM GMT, compatible with the sleep of a person living on the East or West Coast of the United States, or of a European on very shifted hours. The technical profile, for its part, is strange: cryptography and economics of a very high level, but C++ code judged competent without being that of a modern professional developer, without tests, monolithic, "old school."

The serious candidates can be counted on one hand. Nick Szabo: the stylometric studies (including one by a team at Aston University in 2014) designate him as the most probable author of the whitepaper, and bit gold is the closest precursor, precisely uncited. He has always denied it. Hal Finney: the first recipient of a transaction, the first contributor, and by an extraordinary coincidence, he lived in Temple City in California, a few streets from a certain Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, the engineer Newsweek wrongly accused in 2014. Finney, suffering from ALS, died in 2014 denying being Satoshi. Adam Back and Wei Dai, Satoshi's first contacts, denied it as well.

A simple test cross-checks these leads: spelling. Satoshi writes British ("favour," "colour," "grey"). Now, comparing his corpus with Szabo's blog (more than 80,000 words), the latter writes resolutely American: "favor," "behavior," "defense," "organization," without a single British form. Same thing for Adam Back ("favor" in Hashcash). None of the leading favorites therefore matches Satoshi's spelling, which leaves two readings: either the author is a Briton or a resident of the Commonwealth absent from the usual lists, or, more likely according to the stylometricians, an American like Szabo who deliberately disguised his spelling as British to muddy the trail. Deep stylometry (function words, syntax), much harder to fake, continues, for its part, to designate Szabo: it is on this, and not on surface spelling, that his first place rests.

There remain the impostures. Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist, has claimed the identity of Satoshi since 2016 without ever producing the only proof that counts, a signature with the keys of the early blocks. In March 2024, the High Court of London (case COPA v Wright) ruled definitively that he is not Satoshi Nakamoto and that his evidence was forged.

One name comes up periodically, carried less by cryptography than by the novelistic: Elon Musk. The scenario is tempting. In 2008, the man who founded X.com, which became PayPal, precisely the trusted third party Bitcoin wants to abolish, goes through the darkest year of his life. Having become CEO of Tesla in October, he sees his two companies on the brink of the abyss and no one wants to lend him money anymore. The funding round that saves Tesla closes on December 24, 2008 at 6 PM, "the last hour of the last possible day," three days from bankruptcy; Musk puts into it everything he owns, does not even own a house and must borrow from friends to pay his rent. It is exactly the window in which Bitcoin is born: bitcoin.org is registered in August, the whitepaper appears on October 31, the genesis block is mined on January 3, 2009. A currency born against the banks, at the precise moment when the banks abandon one of the most ambitious entrepreneurs in the world.

Amateurs add a delicious detail, echoing the analysis of the whitepaper: Musk's most famous quote, "When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour," uses the British spelling "favour," exactly like Satoshi, and unlike the American "favor" of Adam Back. Musk, born in South Africa, naturally writes in Commonwealth English.

One must, however, cool the enthusiasm. This "favour" is shared by hundreds of millions of speakers (British, South Africans, Canadians, Australians): it is a clue of a linguistic zone, not a signature. Musk has no cryptographer's past, in 2008 he was absorbed full-time in the survival of Tesla and SpaceX, and he denied it unambiguously in 2017: "Not true. A friend sent me part of a BTC a few years ago, but I don't know where it is." The Musk trail is a superb narrative coincidence, not a proof, exactly like the others.

The most solid verdict therefore remains negative: above all we know who Satoshi is not. The author or authors of Bitcoin achieved something rarer than the invention itself: to disappear in the age of total traceability, leaving a million bitcoins intact as proof that anonymity was not a posture, but the heart of the project. See the candidate ranking.