According to ZyCrypto, Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto was finally identified as Gavin Andresen by using Eder’s bootstrapped stylometry method. Previously, Andresen announced during an interview that Satoshi Nakamoto is probably Dr. Craig Wright, an Australian scientist, and businessman.
Wright also claimed that the mysterious creator is he. However, this was proven wrong when comparing Laszlo Hanyecz’ description of Satoshi Nakamoto. Hanyecz is a full-time developer, he was the first to use Bitcoin in a commercial transaction, and only he knew who the mysterious creator was. While helping Satoshi in the development process, he discovered that Satoshi is an eccentric, odd and paranoid person. According to Toshitimes, Hanyecz supported his point of view, saying:
“He’d say, ‘Hey, the west side’s down,’ or ‘we have these bugs – we need to fix this.’ I’d be like, we? We’re not a team. I thought that it was approval from him, that maybe he accepted me as a member. But I didn’t want the responsibility. I didn’t really understand all of the forces that were going on at the time.”
Craig Wright failed to prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto since he did not offer any conclusive or concrete evidence. He did take wise steps to prove his identity but was not smart enough to hide his self-published verification script from the simplest technical examination. He also failed to prove that he owns one of the Satoshi Nakamoto keys and avoids and refuses to sign any new messages.
What Is the Stylometry Method?
By statistically deciphering the style, stylometry method, composed of a number of methods, aims to identify an unknown author. Associate professor and literary scholar Maciej Eder is the creator of the bootstrapping method, which aims to overcome the problem of incomplete evidence or cherry picking.
In order to spot the difference between two texts, this method uses Burrow’s delta. This is explained as a Manhattan distance of z-scores derived from a number of words used in the entire works or texts of a specific author. It also follows random graphics of most frequent words to get even stronger results.
What Were the Steps Followed to Uncover Satoshi Nakamoto’s Identity?
ZyCrypto followed two steps using Eder’s bootstrapped stylometry to see if it will succeed in uncovering the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. They first produced the z-score table by using standard deviations derived from 20,000 English texts from Gutenburg dataset. They then calculated the Manhattan distance formula for most frequent words by comparing a list of authors related to bitcoin with its actual whitepaper.
Finally, they followed the k-nearest neighbors algorithm to sort in order the mean distances to discover what style is the most similar to Satoshi’s.
Is There Enough Evidence to Prove That Gavin Andresen Is the Real Satoshi Nakamoto?
According to the details listed on ZyCrypto, the methods mentioned above showed that Satoshi’s email texts were the nearest neighbors, followed by 3 GitHub documents owned by Andresen and Satoshi’s forum texts.
According to Zycrypto:
“these findings are quite reasonable because not only do they validate the links between the Satoshi whitepaper-emails-forums but they also cluster Gavin as the likely author.”
It is important to mention that not only was Andresen’s style similar to Satoshi’s whitepaper, but he also matched Satoshi Nakamoto himself with the forum texts.
However, there may be limitations to this study due to the fact that the style of genre is measured rather than the style of authorship. Some methods can be used later on to avoid this issue.
It was also proved by ZyCrypto that “Gavin’s GitHub blogs have similar low distances to the whitepaper as does Satoshi’s emails/forums” when comparing some of the texts.
One cannot ignore that Eder’s bootstrapped delta showed really important results. However, is that enough to make everyone believe that Gavin Andresen is the real Bitcoin creator?
