Satoshi Nakamoto wrote code that was not usual. He had many quirks. We can find him by comparing his code with others, but no one did that yet.

When I first saw their code, I thought "Satoshi is not a programmer" because of how weird it was. He didn't follow normal code practices that were modern at that time.

He made big use of locks when it was out of fashion. He used Hungarian notation which was no longer used. He made spaghetti function recursion and never used objects to encapsulate processes. He also targeted Windows.

All of this indicate an older person, possibly not a software dev but from a close domain like engineering or physics. His whitepaper hinted at a background with a practical focus but not a mathematician.

The code was highly idiosyncratic and personal including the style itself. Analysis of the code will tell us everything.

You can even compare the code from 2008 with the code in 2010, and the way Satoshi writes code doesn't change. You can actually see the change from proof of concept to hacked up Satoshi node.

Whenever anyone says X is Satoshi, my first response is always "show me the code". This should be our default position.

But no Bitcoin coder (including myself) cares enough to do this. We're all so busy with real work. And I guess we also respect Satoshi-kun's wishes. Even writing this post showing how we can find him feels almost like a betrayal.

To be fair to Peter Todd, he handled it well and didn't try to claim undue credit.

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