gwern comments on AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Will_Newsome 12 January 2014 02:18AM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 17 March 2014 12:02:40AM *  3 points [-]

I actually meant to email you about this earlier, but is there any chance you could post those emails (you've made them half-public as it is, and Dustin Trammell posted his a while back)

Sure, I have no objection to making them public myself, and I don't see anything in them that Satoshi might want to keep private, so I'll forward them to you to post on your website. (I'm too lazy to convert the emails into HTML myself.)

elaborate on Nick not knowing C++?

Sorry, you misunderstood when I said "Nick isn't known for being a C++ programmer". I didn't mean that he doesn't know C++. Given that he was a computer science major, he almost certainly does know C++ or can easily learn it. What I meant is that he is not known to have programmed much in C or C++, or known to have done any kind of programming that might have kept one's programming skills sharp enough to have implemented Bitcoin (and to do it securely to boot). If he was Satoshi I would have expected to see some evidence of his past programming efforts.

But the more important reason for me thinking Nick isn't Satoshi is the parts of Satoshi's emails to me that are quoted in the Sunday Times. Nick considers his ideas to be at least an independent invention from b-money so why would Satoshi say "expands on your ideas into a complete working system" to me, and cite b-money but not Bit Gold in his paper, if Satoshi was Nick? An additional reason that I haven't mentioned previously is that Satoshi's writings just don't read like Nick's to me.

Comment author: gwern 01 April 2014 01:26:30AM 2 points [-]

so I'll forward them to you to post on your website.

Done: http://www.gwern.net/docs/2008-nakamoto

(Sorry for the delay, but a black-market was trying to blackmail me and I didn't want my writeup to go live so I was delaying everything.)