According to a team of forensic linguists from Aston University in Birmingham, UK, a mysterious creator of the digital currency Bitcoin is most likely Nick Szabo, a blogger known for his research in digital currency.
Bitcoin-based coin. Image credit: CASASCIUS / CC BY 3.0.
Bitcoin is an internet-based currency which allows users to buy goods and services online. The payment system is supposedly easier and safer than sending money via more traditional means. Using Bitcoin to pay for items also means avoiding credit card, foreign exchange or cash handling fees.
Bitcoin was first mentioned in a 2008 paper published under the nickname Satoshi Nakamoto.
In March 2014, Newsweek magazine claimed that 64-year-old engineer Dorian S. Nakamoto is the main author of the paper.
The new linguistic study, dubbed Project Bitcoin, challenges this claim. It looked at linguistic similarities between the Bitcoin paper and the writing of 11 individuals that are regularly referred to as possible authors: Dorian S. Nakamoto, Vili Lehdonvirta, Michael Clear, Shinichi Mochizuki, Gavin Andresen, Nick Szabo, Jed McCaleb, Dustin D. Trammel, Hal Finney, Wei Dai, and Neal King, Vladimir Oksman & Charles Bry.
The results showed that of the eleven Nick Szabo is by far the closest match, with a large number of distinctive linguistic traits appearing in both the Bitcoin paper and Nick Szabo’s blogs and other writings.
This includes the use of: the phrases “chain of…”, “trusted third parties”, “for our purposes”, “need for…”, “still”, “of course”, “as long as”, “such as” and “only” numerous times, contractions, commas before ‘and’ and ‘but’, hyphenation, ‘-ly’ adverbs, the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’ in papers by a single author; fragmented sentences following colons and reflexive (-self) pronouns.
“Our study adds to the weight of evidence pointing towards Nick Szabo. The case looks pretty clear-cut. Nick Szabo is an expert in law, finance, cryptography and computer science. He created ‘bit gold’, a precursor to Bitcoin, and was looking for collaborators in 2008,” said Dr Jack Grieve of Aston University, who led the study.
“The number of linguistic similarities between Nick Szabo’s writing and the Bitcoin paper is uncanny, none of the other possible authors were anywhere near as good of a match.”
“We are pretty confident that out of the list of people regularly referred to as possibilities, Nick Szabo is the main author of the paper, though we can’t rule out the possibility that others contributed.”
In total hundreds of documents written by the 11 possible authors were considered, including over 40 academic papers written by Nick Szabo which are available on his personal website.
The study also questioned why the most-cited textual feature of the Bitcoin paper is the fact that it contains double spaces after full stops.
The Bitcoin paper was drafted using Latex, an open source document preparation system. Without the base .tex for the Bitcoin paper, which is not available, researchers are unable to tell if the author double spaces between sentences. However, the study noted that Nick Szabo uses Latex for all his publications.
