No I don't think it's Szabo or anyone else whose name is known to me. I explained why I don't think it's Szabo to a reporter from London's Sunday Times who wrote about it in the March 2 issue. I'll try to find and quote the relevant section.

I had the article jailbroken recently, and the relevant parts (I hope I got it right, my version has scrambled-up text) are:

Nonetheless, the original bitcoin white paper is written in an academic style, with an index of sources at the end. I go to Wei Dai, an original cypherpunk, the proposer of a late-1990s e-currency called b-moneyand an early correspondent of Satoshi. When, in the first of several late-night chats, I ask him how many people would have the necessary competencies to create something like bitcoin, he tells me:

"Coming up with bitcoin required someone who, a) thought about money on a deep level, and b) learnt the tools of cryptography, c) had the idea that something like Bitcoin is possible, d) was motivated enough to develop the idea into something practical, e) was technically skilled enough to make it secure, f) had enough social skills to build and grow a community around it. The number of people who even had a), b) and c) was really small -- ie, just Nick Szabo and me -- so I'd say not many people could have done all these things."

A sudden frisson. Szabo, an American computer scientist who has also served as law professor at George Washington University, developed a system for "bit gold" between 1998 and 2005, which has been seen as a precursor to Bitcoin. Is he saying that Szabo is Satoshi? "No, I'm pretty sure it's not him." you, then? "No. When I said just Nick and me, I meant before Satoshi" So where could this person have come from? "Well, when I came up with b-money I was still in college, or just recently graduated, and Nick was at a similar age when he came up with bit gold, so I think Satoshi could be someone like that." "Someone young, with the energy for that kind of commitment?" "yeah, someone with energy and time, and that isn't obligated to publish papers under their real name."

...I go back to Szabo's pal, Wei Dai. "Wei," I say, "the other night you said you were sure Nick Szabo wasn't Satoshi. What made you sure?" "Two reasons," he replies. "One: in Satoshi's early emails to me he was apparently unaware of Nick Szabo's ideas and talks about how bitcoin 'expands on your ideas into a complete working system' and 'it achieves nearly all the goals you set out to solve in your b-money paper'. I can't see why, if Nick was Satoshi, he would say things like that to me in private. And, two: Nick isn't known for being a C++ programmer."

Perversely, a point in Szabo's favour. But Wei forwards me the relevant emails, and it's true: Satoshi had been ignorant of Szabo's bit-gold plan until Wei mentioned it. Furthermore, a trawl through Szabo's work finds him blogging and fielding questions about bit gold on his Unenumerated blog on December 27, 2008, while Satoshi was preparing bitcoin to meet the world a week later. Why? Because Szabo didn't know about bitcoin: almost no one outside the Cryptography Mailing List did, and I can find no evidence of him ever having been there. Indeed, by 2011, the bit-gold inventor is blogging in defence of bitcoin, pointing out several improvements on the system he devised.

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) or elaborate on Nick not knowing C++?

I've been trying to defend Szabo against the accusations of being Satoshi*, but to be honest, his general secrecy has made it very hard for me to rule him out or come up with a solid defense. If, however, he doesn't even know C or C++, then that massively damages the claims he's Satoshi. (Oh, one could work around it by saying he worked with someone else who did know C/C++, but that's pretty strained and not many people seriously think Satoshi was a group.)

* on Reddit, HN, and places like http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/03/11/nick-szabo-is-satoshi-nakamoto-the-inventor-of-bitcoin/ or https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-nick-szabo/ (my response) / http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/occams-razor-who-is-most-likely-to-be-satoshi-nakamoto/

Thank you so much Wei Dai.

My idea with second question was to understand if there is like an anarchist motivation around bitcoin that may have some risks in the future. I mean, if somehow when it reaches Wall Street the original developers can do anythink to affect credibility.

You say you don't think it was Szabo. Have you ever try to know who he was? Could you share who is your solid hunch and why?

Is relevant to know Satoshi?

If you know what you know today, would you have patented bmoney? Do you think bitcoin inventers would have done the same?

Kind regards Marta

What do you think are the most interesting philosophical problems within our grasp to be solved?

I'm not sure there is any. A big part of it is that metaphilosophy is essentially a complete blank, so we have no way of saying what counts as a correct solution to a philosophical problem, and hence no way of achieving high confidence that any particular philosophical problem has been solved, except maybe simple (and hence not very interesting) problems, where the solution is just intuitively obvious to everyone or nearly everyone. It's also been my experience that any time we seem to make real progress on some interesting philosophical problem, additional complications are revealed that we didn't foresee, which makes the problem seem even harder to solve than before the progress was made. I think we have to expect this trend to continue for a while yet.

If you instead ask what are some interesting philosophical problems that we can expect visible progress on in the near future, I'd cite decision theory and logical uncertainty, just based on how much new effort people are putting into them, and results from the recent past.

Do you think that solving normative ethics won't happen until a FAI? If so, why?

No I don't think that's necessarily true. It's possible that normative ethics, metaethics, and metaphilosophy are all solved before someone builds an FAI, especially if we can get significant intelligence enhancement to happen first. (Again, I think we need to solve metaethics and metaphilosophy first, otherwise how do we know that any proposed solution to normative ethics is actually correct?)

You argued previously that metaphilosophy and singularity strategies are fields with low hanging fruit. Do you have any examples of progress in metaphilosophy?

Unfortunately, not yet. BTW I'm not saying these are fields that definitely have low hanging fruit. I'm saying these are fields that could have low hanging fruit, based on how few people have worked in them.

Do you have any role models?

I do have some early role models. I recall wanting to be a real-life version of the fictional "Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo" (from Vernor Vinge's novel A Fire Upon the Deep) who in the story is known for consistently writing the clearest and most insightful posts on the Net. And then there was Hal Finney who probably came closest to an actual real-life version of Sandor at the Zoo, and Tim May who besides inspiring me with his vision of cryptoanarchy was also a role model for doing early retirement from the tech industry and working on his own interests/causes.

Since the birth and early growth of Bitcoin, how has your view on the prospects for crypto-anarchy changed (if at all)? Why?

My views haven't changed very much, since the main surprise of Bitcoin to me is that people find such a system useful for reasons other than crypto-anarchy. Crypto-anarchy still depends on the economics of online security favoring the defense over the offense, but as I mentioned in Work on Security Instead of Friendliness? that still seems to be true only in limited domains and false overall.

1 - I didn't take any steps to code up b-money. Part of it was because b-money wasn't a complete practical design yet, but I didn't continue to work on the design because I had actually grown somewhat disillusioned with cryptoanarchy by the time I finished writing up b-money, and I didn't foresee that a system like it, once implemented, could attract so much attention and use beyond a small group of hardcore cypherpunks.

2 - It's hard for me to tell, but I'd guess that it was probably a mixture of technical challenge and wanting to change the world.

3 and 4 - Don't have much to say on these. Others have probably thought much more about these questions over the past months and years and are more qualified than I am to answer.

5 - I haven't seen any indication of this. What makes you suspect it?

I sometimes wonder if Bitcoin was invented not so much to become the global reserve digital cash currency, but to prove to others that the technology can work. It was more gateway rather than final destination

Have you read Satoshi's original emails?

I received another question from this same interlocutor:

Also, I understand you haven't read the original bitcoind code but do you have any guess for why the author chose to lift your SHA256 implementation from Crypto++ when the project already required openssl-0.9.8h? Is there anything odd about the OpenSSL implementation that wouldn't be immediately obvious to someone who isn't a crypto expert?

Hmm, I’m not sure. I thought it might have been the optimizations I put into my SHA256 implementation in March 2009 (due to discussions on the NIST mailing list for standardizing SHA-3, about how fast SHA-2 really is), which made it the fastest available at the time, but it looks like Bitcoin 0.1 was already released prior to that (in Jan 2009) and therefore had my old code. Maybe someone could test if the old code was still faster than OpenSSL?

What do you make of the decision to use C++?

It seems like a pretty standard choice for anyone wanting to build such a piece of software...

Do you have any opinions of the original coding beyond the 'inelegant but amazingly resilient' meme? Was there anything that stood out about it?

No I haven't read any of it.

It's Chinese Pinyin romanization, so pronounced "way dye".

ETA: Since Pinyin is a many to one mapping, and as a result most Chinese articles about Bitcoin put the wrong name down for me, I'll take this opportunity to mention that my name is written logographically as 戴维.

I don't follow Bitcoin development very closely, basically just reading about it if a story shows up on New York Times or Wired. If you're curious as to why, see this post and this thread.