During a recent interview, Charles Hoskinson, one of the co-founders of Ethereum, suggested that those trying to find out the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto should use stylometry. According to him, Nakamoto is either an American or British-educated and is an academic that is in his later forties or early fifties.
According to Hoskinson, Stylometry is used to discover the identity of an author, based on how a book is written. In his opinion, a similar method could be used to discover the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto by analyzing the Bitcoin code. For this to work, the code needs to have been written by Nakamoto alone. He believes that by applying stylometry to the BTC code and all other open-source projects, there is a good chance that the code could be matched to other code that exists in the world.
The Likely Identity of Nakamoto
According to Hoskinson, Nakamoto is likely in his forties or fifties and even possibly his sixties based on the skills needed to write the Bitcoin code. He added that Nakamoto likely went to school in the eighties or the early nineties. According to him, Nakamoto is most likely an academic instead of a professional engineer. The reason for his conclusion is that the BTC code is highly academic. If he was a professional, the BTC code would be a lot cleaner.
Besides that, he notes that BTC was written in an uncommon programming language which was mainly used by computer science pedagogy in the Eastern United States and England at the time. Hoskinson believes that should give you a clue of where Nakamoto was trained.
Ethereum Co-Founder Doesn’t See The Value
However, Hoskinson does not think it is important to find the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. According to him, the Bitcoin code has been running fine for the past 12 years, which means the input of the code’s creator is not needed.
He noted that while being Satoshi Nakamoto would come with special privileges, it is not beneficial to the future of the blockchain and the crypto industry. He believes that if his identity was discovered, it would make him cooler but it would not add any real value. He compared him to the Pope who speaks for God and can use his pulpit to influence others. Hoskinson thus believes that Satoshi Nakamoto was discovered, he could use his stardom to promote the blockchain and crypto.
Thus far, it does not appear that Hoskinson believes Craig Wright is the creator of Bitcoin. However, Wright has continued to insist he is Nakamoto. His claims recently landed him in legal trouble. He is currently embroiled in a legal tussle where he is being sued for billions of dollars. If he is not the creator of BTC, it could prove to be one of the most expensive hoaxes in history. Whether he wins the lawsuit or not, it has already cost him a lot of money in attorney fees.
Why It Would Help Bitcoin Adoption
Despite Hoskinson not seeing any value in finding Satoshi, some people would disagree with him. Many individuals in the Bitcoin space envision a world where Bitcoin is offered in ETFs and other traditional finance products. This would accelerate the global acceptance, similar to when the 1st Gold ETF came into circulation. Every financial product is highly regulated which creates all sorts of issues for Bitcoin. With Wall Street operating within a “fiduciary model,” there’s little chance Bitcoin will ever surface if the regulators have no idea how it was created. Bitcoin would continue to hang around in a peer-to-peer fashion, but the real goal to exponential growth would be Bitcoin diversified in retail accounts across the globe. If people continue to market Bitcoins value around an anonymous creator, it will continue to scare away the big money from a regulatory standpoint.
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