Neither do I, I was simply comparing them from a Bayesian point of view. There is indeed no "smoking gun". What you say about the citation is possible but I estimate that it's more likely he had a physical copy (I would change my mind about that if we found out he had indeed contacted the authors for citation information).
Also, Sassaman has some important points in his favor that Peter Todd lacks:
1) he is dead. I find it unlikely that Satoshi is still alive and even more unlikely that he is still alive and very publicly involved in Bitcoin.
2) strong connection to one of the white paper's citations
3) cares a lot about privacy/anonymity, e.g. he tried to convince Bram Cohen to release BitTorrent anonymously
But he also has some points that work against him: not being known as a Windows C++ programmer, his wife not believing him to be Satoshi, etc.
Overall I feel Sassaman is more likely than Todd, but I am not convinced he is Satoshi.
> 1) he is dead. I find it unlikely that Satoshi is still alive and even more unlikely that he is still alive and very publicly involved in Bitcoin.
As morbid as it is we should all admit we want Sassaman to be Satoshi. It would be undeniably a better outcome for Bitcoin. I hope it can be proved personally.
What I don’t understand is why his wife wouldn’t help prove this. It would be in her interest in my opinion and likely the drives and systems he used can be tracked down and confirmed as either destroyed or still encrypted.
Satoshi’s coins are the elephant in the room. If the world is really headed towards a Bitcoin reserve world and value of a coin comtinuing to increase… then the Satoshi hoard can make him the first trillionare. The uncertainty around control of those coins is probably already a tail risk uncertainty that is holding back Bitcoin.
Back to Peter Todd it’s curious he was also actively working on distributed timestamping in 2007/8 apparently. Though I have yet to track down his code and only recently learned this.
If you didn’t watch the doc you probably should we have to acknowledge Todd’s and Back’s body language was definitely at a minimum curious.
My biggest concern is all 3 identified - Back, Maxwell, and Todd appear to be engaged in deflection and confusion tactics. They seem to promote this narrative that it’s best we don’t know who Satoshi was and so many people could be etc, I don’t buy that reasoning.
I hope Sassaman is Satoshi. Why not start having candidates show some alibis like Mike Kern has done for Finney … which curiously nullc has just questioned, though I’m glad he has, we should see the email headers the more we know to help track down Satoshi the better at this point imho. I’m aware many Bitcoiners seem to disagree with that opinion and it’s notable Back has not released his supposed correspondence with Satoshi at all.
Something like your proposal will have to be included in any future hard fork that takes Bitcoin dark by adding full privacy. It’s likely miners will one day embrace such a fork if governments become hostile to their business.
Neither do I, I was simply comparing them from a Bayesian point of view. There is indeed no "smoking gun". What you say about the citation is possible but I estimate that it's more likely he had a physical copy (I would change my mind about that if we found out he had indeed contacted the authors for citation information).
Also, Sassaman has some important points in his favor that Peter Todd lacks:
1) he is dead. I find it unlikely that Satoshi is still alive and even more unlikely that he is still alive and very publicly involved in Bitcoin.
2) strong connection to one of the white paper's citations
3) cares a lot about privacy/anonymity, e.g. he tried to convince Bram Cohen to release BitTorrent anonymously
But he also has some points that work against him: not being known as a Windows C++ programmer, his wife not believing him to be Satoshi, etc.
Overall I feel Sassaman is more likely than Todd, but I am not convinced he is Satoshi.