I am "Satoshi Nakamoto"!
No, I am "Satoshi Nakamoto".
(continues for some time)
The California man who says he was mistakenly identified as the inventor of Bitcoin is accepting a $23,000 gift from backers of the cryptocurrency. Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto said that he will be joining the ranks of Bitcoin users after receiving a wallet of 47.925 bitcoins (valued at roughly $23,300) from members of the …
I am Satoshi Nakamoto, and so is my wife.
Or, if you prefer:
Sirs: Many of my friends are Satoshi Nakamoto, and only a few of them are the inventors of Bitcoin.
Yours faithfully, Brigadier Sir Charles Arthur Strong (Mrs.)
P.S. I have never kissed the editor of the Register.
The problem is that he might well actually be the person.
Here's a rough way to work this out. Firstly, let's assume that his name is actually Satoshi Nakamoto. (Of course this might be false...)
There are roughly 100m Japanese people in the world, about 50m of which are male. (This is order of magnitude calculations, so 150m or whatever doesn't matter.)
According to
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2009/10/11/to-be-sorted/japans-top-100-most-common-family-names/#.U1eiOxDLKk0
Nakamoto is not one of the 100 most popular surnames for Japanese people, so there are certainly less than a million people with that name in the world, let's say 100,000, so the number of male Nakamotos are about 50k.
A list of popular forenames is given here:
http://japanese.about.com/library/weekly/aa050601a.htm
I know that choices of names vary with time (see the fall of the name Adolf post-1945) but this website says that Satoshi has *never* been a popular name. It's a good guesstimate that 1% is a decent upper bound. That yields roughly 500 Satoshi Nakamotos in the world.
Finally, they have to have the requisite knowledge of mathematics and computer science: education is better in Japan than the UK, but high-level mathematics needed for one-way cryptosystems is still not universally taught, meaning 0.1% is a reasonable percentage. That leads there to be roughly 0.5 Satoshi Nakamotos with knowledge of cryptosystems in the world.
From this first approximation, I think it's entirely plausible that he is *the* Satoshi Nakamoto, and suing them might not be the best course of action.
"You know, there's this thing called the Internet, where it's common for people to use names that aren't really their own.
If Bitcoin's creator had used the name "Barack Obama" would you have made the same assumptions?"
Listen Caffeine, if that is your real name: I started it with
"Firstly, let's assume that his name is actually Satoshi Nakamoto. (Of course this might be false...)"
so I stated my assumption clearly. What you are really saying is "you assume something that you clearly stated at the start, but I'm going to be sarcastic anyway".
But my analysis proves that there aren't many Satoshi Nakamotos around, and if you chose a suitably rare name -- like Barack Obama for example -- then there likely isn't *anyone* with the requisite skills to make Bitcoin. If the Bitcoin creator made up a rare name and there just happens to be a mathematician/computer scientist called that rare name, then that's a pretty big coincidence.
"Firstly, let's assume that his name is actually Satoshi Nakamoto."
The problem with this (aside from the awkward and completely unnecessary -ly suffix; "first" can be an adverb) is the antecedent for "his" is entirely unclear in your original post. When I read it, I thought you meant "let's assume that Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto's name is actually Satoshi Nakamoto", which seemed like a rather odd postulate.
I'd say Caffeine's interpretation is perfectly reasonable. If you want to throw pronouns around willy-nilly, you really have no one to blame but yourself.
El Reg's commentators have spoken: Doing actual research, presenting an analysis of how likely it is that this person is the inventor of Bitcoin is not all that good, but making sarcastic comments and dragging people up on minor grammatical points that are entirely clear from context is good.
"I'd say Caffeine's interpretation is perfectly reasonable. If you want to throw pronouns around willy-nilly, you really have no one to blame but yourself."
Right-o, I'll just poke grammatical holes in other people's comments in future, rather than doing anything of any practical use. I am an academic, so I guess I'm used to doing that.
Edit: As for mocking firstly, see
http://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/886/when-enumerating-motivations-is-it-correct-to-write-firstly-secondly-or
Basic common sense clearly eludes these donors. There's only two possible situations. He either really is or really isn't THE Satoshi.
If he is, then he already is one of the richest people on the planet so this money will make less than no difference to him. If he really isn't, then this donation is even more obviously misplaced.
Hey I'm not Satoshi Nakamoto either! Please send bitcoins to me too!.