The guesswork around Satoshi Nakamoto goes into the next round in 2021. An analysis of the writing habits of the Bitcoin inventor provides new impetus.
More than 12 years after the Bitcoin whitepaper was published, the identity of its author remains a mystery
Now the Ungeared.com team also got involved in the speculations surrounding Satoshi Nakamoto. Because on December 31, a statistical study appeared there, which is related to Satoshi’s spelling.
The article responds to a line of reasoning that claims that Great Britain is the home of the BitQT inventor. Since some of the arguments put forward for this were based on Satoshi’s spelling, the authors decided to subject them to statistical examination. They made use of the fact that a number of words in American English are spelled differently than in British. In addition to the Bitcoin whitepaper, Satoshi’s well-known emails and blog posts were also the subject of the analysis.
The authors of the study were able to identify a total of 108 cases that are relevant to their concerns. With regard to the spelling, the following breakdown results: „American – 52, British – 35 and misspelled – 21.“ Satoshi thus uses both the American and the British spelling.
Moreover, there is no recognizable pattern according to which Satoshi switches between the two writing styles. The same word is sometimes found in British and then again in American spelling. Even within the same email, the Bitcoin inventor varies his spelling habit. Only when it comes to coding does he remain largely faithful to the American.
Where did the Bitcoin inventor come from?
The just mentioned inconsistencies seem to require explanation. For example, as one hypothesis, the authors suggest that the Bitcoin inventor is Canadian. Because the Canadian English mixes the spelling of the British and the American on some points. Since Satoshi mainly uses American coding for coding, it is also conceivable that he is actually British, but programmed in American English.
However, that doesn’t explain Satoshi’s misspelling either. It would be conceivable here that English is simply not the mother tongue of the Bitcoin inventor. (The authors do not consider this possibility.) The seemingly arbitrary switch between different spelling styles could also be explained in this way.
In the end, the results of the study leave more questions unanswered than answered. Could Satoshi Nakomoto be more of a collective than a loner, as is often assumed? It is also possible that the inconsistent spelling was a deliberately chosen strategy by the Bitcoin inventor to make the traces unrecognizable as much as possible. If so, even years after the white paper was published, Nakamoto is cheating on all Bitcoin archaeologists.