Students and researchers from Ashton University in Birmingham recently conducted a linguistics analyst on the Bitcoin white paper published in 2008. The analysis suggests Nick Szabo, not Dorian S. Nakamoto, penned the document.
A team of 40 final-year students and researchers compared the white paper with writings from 11 potential candidates: Dorian S Nakamoto; Vili Lehdonvirta; Michael Clea; Shinichi Mochizuki; Gavin Andresen; Nick Szabo; Jed McCaleb; Dustin D Trammel; Hal Finney; Wei Dai; Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry.
Of those 11 people, Szabo’s writings were found to have uncanny similarities to language used in the white paper. They found a number of distinct linguistic traits appearing in both the white paper and his blogs. For example, phrases like “trusted third parties” and “for our purposes” showed up repeatedly, as did the use of commas before “and” and “but” and the use of adverbs and pronouns.
The team said none of the other possible authors were anywhere near as good of a match.
This isn’t the first time that Szabo has been pegged as the author of the white paper. Last year, researcher Skye Grey came to the same conclusion but even still, it’s far from a smoking gun.
Szabo is a well known name in the cryptography community and is an expert in law, finance, cryptography and computer science. The researchers said they aren’t sure if he created Bitcoin but they think he probably wrote the paper so it’s certainly worth a closer look.
