10 years ago a paper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Cash System appeared on the internet, describing the digital currency now worth over $100 billion.

The author of the paper used the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, a shadowy being who has remained a mystery – until now.

Investigative journalist John Roberts thinks that he has uncovered the real person behind the pseudonym. He claims that the “evidence is overwhelming about who wrote the paper” and shared his insights in an article on Fortune.

According to Roberts, if you subscribe to the idea of Occam’s Razor then the simplest solution is probably the right one.

By that logic, the answer is clear: the man behind Bitcoin is a 50-something American named Nick Szabo (below).

I first heard of Szabo six years ago covering Bitcoin conferences for the tech site Gigaom. Then, as now, crypto insiders are reluctant to publicly state that Szabo is Satoshi but, in private conversations, several confided to me they think Szabo created Bitcoin.

There’s also plenty of external evidence to support this. Nathaniel Popper, whose book Digital Gold provides the canonical account of Bitcoin’s beginnings, has described how Szabo’s earlier writing described the architecture of Bitcoin, and how he asked others to help him “code one up” shortly before the Nakamoto white paper appeared.

Szabo’s biography also seems to fit. He’s a computer genius and an accomplished cryptographer. He’s also well-versed in law and holds a libertarian outlook on the world synonymous with the Bitcoin ethos.

When I saw Szabo appear at a financial conference in New York this year, he spoke primarily of privacy and the need for a financial system that didn’t require trusting a third party—central precepts of the Satoshi white paper.

What really drives Roberts’ theory home is a 2014 linguistic analysis performed by the Aston University Centre for Forensic Linguistics in the UK, compared the writing style in the Satoshi paper to 12 people identified as possible creators of Bitcoin.

The conclusion? “The number of linguistic similarities between Szabo’s writing and the Bitcoin whitepaper is uncanny, none of the other possible authors were anywhere near as good of a match.”

When Szabo was approached for comment he had the following to say:

“All this speculation is flattering, but wrong—I am not Satoshi,” Szabo wrote to Popper in 2015.

What to make of the denial? Two points. First, “Satoshi” has very good reasons not to identify himself. Namely, wallets on the blockchain tied to Satoshi contain more than 1 million Bitcoins, which is a fortune worth billions of dollars. Revealing himself as Satoshi would instantly invite the scrutiny of governments, tax agents and a hoard of criminals—maintaining a mask of anonymity is the much safer bet.

Likewise, for a person like Szabo who values privacy (several accounts describe him as a recluse), claiming the mantle of Satoshi would transform him into a celebrity besieged by media and fanboys.

Those fanboys can be quite intense – I would probably want to stay anonymous, too.

A heads up – you’re probably not going to rub shoulders with Satoshi / Szabo, but if you’re interested in blockchain technology, you should know that the world’s leading blockchain experts are coming to South Africa.

The Blockchain Africa Conferences provide a platform for attendees to network with like-minded individuals, and learn about some of the most interesting blockchain use cases from a range of innovative companies and start-ups.

[source:fortune]