I remember having conversations with my brother about Hashcash at the time. There were plenty of nerds that followed that mailing list that had similar technical and political ideas, so I think you'd find a high number of coincidences within an audience that I'd guess was a small multiple of the number of people active on the cypherpunks list. There definitely were a lot of people at my brother's college discussing the same ideas.
FWIW my brother did his own bit of Satoshi hunting with coworkers at his hedge fund. They didn't come to a strong answer but my brother believed Nick Szabo was probably part of a group that helped edit the paper. He suspected Hal Finney was involved similarly at a minimum.
It's been extremely widely known that whoever created Bitcoin had a strong interest in Hashcash, and perhaps created that or worked on it, for years and years. If that's the only smoking gun, why didn't we identify Satoshi long ago?
You're right, "interested in Hashcash" describes dozens of people, and has been a known Satoshi filter for years.
The new claim is more specific: between 1997-1999, Back proposed combining Hashcash with b-money, adding inflation adjustment via increasing computational difficulty, and using hash trees for public timestamping.
That's most of Bitcoin's architecture in one package, a decade early.
The number of people who proposed that particular combination of ideas is much smaller than the number who were merely interested in Hashcash.
I agree with the parts worth engaging with. I hate when people weak-man arguments.
But interesting as this is, there are others who fit at least as well. That bit gold was the closest proposed scheme to Bitcoin is well known, and we know the proposer of bit gold (Szabo) was actively soliciting partners to help implement it as a real system right before Bitcoin appeared.
Also, people leave mailing lists and come back randomly months later all the time. Adam could have simply been unlucky, and busy with other projects at the time of the launch. Lots of people were, and kicked themselves for it (which honestly, it seems Adam did too!).
Adam Back is credited in the Bitcoin whitepaper as the inventor of Hashcash. W. Dai is credited as the inventor of b-money. But Nick Szabo is not credited as the inventor of bit gold, by far the most mature of these ideas floating around at the cipherpunks mailing list at the time. That's a conspicuous absence.
You need someone who read Back's obscure 1997-1999 cypherpunks posts about combining Hashcash and b-money, implemented exactly that system a decade later, independently came up with the same non-technical analogies and trivia, wrote with the same hyphenation errors, and then happened to be active during the exact window Back went silent. The more you flesh out the "someone who read Back" profile, the more it just sounds like Back.
Someone who has read his material would be likely to repeat the same analogies and trivia.
As for the hyphen errors, they are common for people for whom English is their second language. I commit hyphen errors similar to what is described all the time because English hyphenation makes absolutely no sense. In fact, reading the list of examples, the mistakes listed makes more sense to me than the correct way of writing those.
I also switch back and forth on a lot of the phrases the article mentions.
I also switch back and forth between US and UK spelling, because I learned UK spelling at school, but was far more exposed to US spelling in practice.
At some point "Satoshi was a devoted reader of obscure 1997 Adam Back mailing list posts who shares his hyphenation errors, his Napster vs Gnutella analogy, his celebrity email filtering idea, his FDR gold ban interest, his 'burning the money' metaphor, his 'Achilles heel' description of DigiCash, his 'better with code than words' self-assessment, his energy-vs-banking defense, his British spellings mixed with American ones, his double-spacing habit, his it's/its confusion, his sentence-final 'also' tic, his 'proof-of-work' hyphenation, his WebMoney references, and who went active the exact week Back went silent" is just a longer way of saying it's Adam Back.
I'm not sure I agree with that, but it's what I came up with after challenging myself to read the article in toto again and note 1 by 1.
It's clear it's beyond a couple tics everyone has, and when you combine that with the starting set being ~500 instead of "all 8 billion people on earth", well, it's worth mentioning.
Your entire first paragraph boils down to me as someone who admired Adam Back and who may or may not have English as a second language, coupled with the one additional coincidence of when he was around.
In terms of language, I don't agree it's beyond a couple of tics everyone has at all. I also don't agree with the assumption that the starting set is ~500.
It's of course possible that it is Adam Back, but I don't find the purported evidence remotely compelling as a way of showing that it is.
Yeah, I'm Norwegian, and maybe the Scandinavian languages makes us extra likely to make those mistakes, but overall English hyphen rules to a large extent boils down to feels. Words "graduate" to hyphens over time as and when they start to become seen as a unit, and then sometimes eventually fuse into words. E-mail to email is one of those. And that pipeline is also not uniform geographically so different English speakers will disagree about what should have hyphens where and when...
This article is a great example of "strong + weak = weak".
I only made it to the interesting stuff because of Carreyou's name, otherwise I would have stopped.
The email timing and lack of email metadata were also strong, in my opinion. But all of this nonsense like "Wow, these guys both talk about PGP??" distracts from it.
