Meet Satoshi. From the UK?

Meet Satoshi. From the UK?

Bitcoin was a 5pm to 3am job?

One of my favourite lectures of the year, is where I outline how blockchains are created and in the application of cryptocurrencies. For me, it is just a way of showing a future which is based on trusted tokens, and where public-key encryption is used to make everything trustworthy. And, of course, I start the lecture with the story of Satoshi Nakamoto and the mystery of who they actually were. And it’s a story too about Hal Finney.

And so recently new work shed more light on Satoshi with an analysis around the Wayback Machine on Bitcointalk posts, emails, code commits, and related data [here]:

This included 742 posts over 206 days, and which ended on 13 Dec 2010:

By analysing the times of the activity we can see that Satoshi may have been sleeping from 4am to 2pm (UK time). If we take 4pm UK time as the time he may have started his work (approx 9am), there may be a seven-hour difference, and which would place him around US Pacific (PST).

But, if we think that he had a day job, and did the work in the evenings, we end up with a different analysis, and where he finished work around 5pm, and then started on Bitcoin development. This would possibly place him in the UK. A further analysis saw that Satoshi made 169 code commits around the same time period. Each of these time commits with defined with UTC. A recent study in 2018 found that Satoshi’s commits were often related to “British Summer Time” timestamps. So here is a possible scarious, where Satoshi awoke around 7am and went to work in the UK, and then left work around 4pm, and set off home. Once there he focused on creating Bitcoin 1.0, until around 12pm, when he sometimes worked late, but would also get some sleep:

A very British person?

So, the UK is a strong possibility, and this is strengthed by the data in the genesis block’s on 3 January 2009, and which outlined a news item from The Times:

In 2009 the on-line version of the paper carried a different version of the article, so Satoshi may have actually bought the paper, and where it is unlikely that he would have been able to source this in the US.

There has been much debate to about his spelling of works that favoured the British stype, such as using with -ise instead of -ize, such as with analyse and organise, and by adding an ‘o’ to neighbour and colour. But his usage of the word ‘bloddy’ definitely points of someone in the UK, as there are few places in the world which use the word [here]:

And also have a look at this:

What do you see? Well, it has a British spelling of “honour” and uses double space breaks. It seems that Satoshi might not be from the US, and that the usage of British spelling and double spaces could point to one person: Adam Back — the current CEO of Blockstream. Adam has a long track record of innovation in cryptography and cryptocurrency, including creating Hashcash in 1997, and which was finally written-up in 2002 [here]:

He is also a well-known as a cypher punk and even produced the following T-shirt as a protest against export restrictions related to the RSA method:

In fact, Satoshi even mentions Adam in an email from 2008, and one way of reading this is that Adam knew about the similarities, and was hiding behind the Satoshi pseudonym:

And he was referred to in the Bitcoin paper:

Conclusions

And, so, if Satoshi created Bitcoin as a day job, he can be placed in the US. If not, he left work, and continued his work, and which places his in the UK. For me, there’s mounting evidence that we worked from 5pm to around 3am in the morning, and that he was British.

So, it all hinges on whether Satoshi did Bitcoin as a day job or it was a hobby project. For me, I think it is the latter. So is it Adam Back?