Satoshi, The Great and Powerful Part 1
Daily Active Usage. Bitcoin. Satoshi. Stylometry. Finney. Szabo. Usual Suspects. Linux. Redbooks. Scrooged. Heavens to Betsy.
Happy Holidays! I wrote a long one, which didn’t pan out quite like I expected. Alas, that can happen with novels, experiments, and overlong articles. This will probably be my last ride for 2025 (the year end wrap is taking a bit longer than expected), so I wish everyone’s Christmas be merry and bright. Onward.
Satoshi, The Great and Powerful Part 1
I remember sitting down at my desk, watching the IMs (before the Slack age) go by in a security channel. My role had nothing to do with managing servers or reviewing network traffic, but a cyber incident was in flight. This wasn’t massive, nothing like the Chinese hacking every mobile phone in the US. Hard to say if there was even a threat or danger here. Those working the breach noticed older and seldom-used accounts quietly being reset, a swath of dormant users changing passwords. A team member working the incident wondered why go through the trouble, speculating that if the attacker gained enough surface area, they’d be able to assert control over the entire system. A networking viewpoint somewhat like the spoils system in the United States—if you can gain fifty-one percent of the electorate, absolute power reigns at your fingertips.
The customer support teams, trying to solve the challenge with limited tools and rudimentary access, eventually cried for help. Now, if you put on your modern-day technical hat, you’d just reset the user’s password and move on. But that comes with its own complications inside older systems. How many dead Instagram accounts exist in purgatory because of a burnt password and no email to fall back on? A reset locks out the user, leaving pictures and articles to waste, leading to more downstream recovery work, if that’s even possible. Applications are delicate ecosystems based on access and use. What are the long-term effects on DAU (Daily Active Usage) with any downtime?
The fight continued.
The hacker gained more accounts, quickly approaching the magical threshold.
Until, finally, the system admin showed and swatted away the pesky villain with god-like control. The ordeal was all over except the cheering, in moments, and I had to put down the popcorn and return to my day job—kidding, there is always room for extra butter over holiday movie season.
In Wicked, there is this scene where Elphaba turns to the Wizard and accuses him of not having any real power, no magic at his disposal like the system admin. If he did, the spies and his monkey army wouldn’t be necessary.
His reply, “Exactly.”
It’s a brilliant line; my favorite part of the movie that subverts the kind caretaker of Oz. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t wield power. Heads of State, startup founders, that central figure all have controls with system access, payroll, taxes, or military might. However, the power they wield is based on an illusion measured in degrees. As companies and governments and nonprofits grow, central authority turns brittle. The corner office suite only possesses so much power, which is why decentralized systems often are more lasting. Think Rome versus Napoleon’s France. In technology, Linux has been on a steady march since the early 2000s despite legal and market threats from patent trolls and Microsoft. Remember, “Linux is free like a puppy is free?”
And, of course, there is the decentralized system that keeps going in Bitcoin.
Satoshi Anonymous Rex
Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator, introduced the first viable decentralized digital currency before his last public comment in April, 2011. In doing so, the figure left behind the original codebase, early forum discussions, and roughly 1.1 million bitcoins—sitting across various accounts untouched, only identified through the hash used by the initial miner.
The world likes to believe in the one magical founder; it’s a story we tell ourselves. But the reality is that digital concurrency had been refined and developed for years. I suppose true innovation happens when existing elements combine into a new structure. My GPT-style models using Torch RNN in 2018 babbled awful old English Shakespeare. Then, OpenAI stacked scale, compute, and data in a way that made that baby become the caretaker of our innermost secrets. Here, Bitcoin’s novelty wasn’t proof-of-work (that was Adam Back) or digital cash (Chaum)—it was connecting them into a trustless, timestamped ledger.
The genius isn’t always creation; sometimes, it’s fielding a series of ideas that others couldn’t quite see how to merge. That’s the beauty of being human, really. There are a number of brilliant people in this world. People tinker on all sorts of stuff, the curious minds, well they stumble into things.
Somehow Satoshi made these various elements click.
So much, that I saw a Reddit user highlight the creator’s net worth, assuming the coins weren’t burnt, at approximately 100 billion. Those 1.1 million coins have soared in value. Yet, they’ve never moved. It’s a compelling story, with a more compelling question, “Why let all that cash sit there?”
Which brings me to the question I couldn’t shake: Who did this, and why did they disappear?
Unmasking the Creator
Despite years of investigation by journalists, researchers, and internet sleuths (money draws a crowd), the identity remains unconfirmed. Though there are theories including a cryptology black ops team to foreign governments (we’ll table these hypotheses for now). There are also two cryptographers. The first, Hal Finney, stands out due to his technical expertise, early involvement, and deep alignment with the protocol’s design.
He was a software engineer at PGP Corporation and early cypherpunk. Before Bitcoin existed, he developed a reusable proof-of-work system foreshadowing the mechanics Satoshi later refined. He also, famously, became the first person to ever receive a Bitcoin transaction when Satoshi sent him 10 BTC, a moment immortalized by that now-legendary 2009 tweet: “Running Bitcoin.”
Coincidence? Or testing his own creation?
There are arguments against Finney being Satoshi. He denied it. And you can’t be in two places at once. Yes, people have filtered through timing and location of anyone who could be “that guy.” Although evidence like activity timestamps during a race (Finney was an avid runner) could be explained away by scripting or a team of collaborators, his deep technical background and proximity make him an obvious choice. Sadly, he died after being diagnosed with ALS in 2014 so maybe we’ll never know.
But there is always another door, take Nick Szabo. He created the concept of “Bit Gold” a decade before Bitcoin, which was a direct, conceptual precursor. While others like Hal Finney were crucial early collaborators and technically proficient developers, Szabo possesses the foundational, philosophical, and economic framework that appears to have been the driving force behind the design of Bitcoin. Yes, to quote the great V from Vendetta, Ideas are bulletproof. More so, his numerous papers scream of an intelligence far beyond my comprehension. On weekends, I’m thinking about the latest movie and the new Mexican restaurant that opened nearby. Szabo is defining the future of human organization. There are few who think at this level.
And, if I had to choose one person to take off the Satoshi mask, this is my guy.
But how does one prove a theory? Well, I recently built a writing desk and had an idea.
Enter Stylometry
This is the quantitative study of writing using mathematical, statistical, and computational methods to identify patterns invisible to casual reading. Instead of focusing on content or meaning, stylometry measures rhythm, structure, function words, sentence patterns, vocabulary distributions, and other subtle linguistic markers that tend to be remarkably consistent within an individual. Think lexical diversity combined with a touch of spice, embeddings and what-nots.
We all have our fingerprints.
Charta Has Style
This tool I recently built creates embeddings and proximity scores over every single post I’ve written. It does this sequentially. And then, it creates a fingerprint analysis of everything me. I use this data for analytics, primarily for search and to identify my own mistakes (anything to gain an edge). It’s ridiculously overengineered for my use case. But when this dumb reddit post talked about Satoshi’s coin volume, well, I thought, let’s run a few articles through the gauntlet. Yeah, it’s just a baffling thing, someone starts a digital currency that’s worth more than the GDP of France, operating completely independently, and vanishes. I digress.
So I decided to run a test.
The problem is that if someone is playing a part, they will write differently. My style fluctuates in writing fiction, newsletter posts, and just the random email. Except, for those fingerprints. Turns out, stop-words can provide a clean window into the unconscious linguistic behavior of each writer. What’s a stop word, exactly? Well, we use these all the time: the, of, to, and, in, a, (among others). These are extremely difficult to manipulate intentionally and remain remarkably stable across topic, tone, and genre. Although my word frequency and sentence structure vary between individual posts, these word distributions stay relatively consistent.
The issue is that Satoshi, outside of answering questions and a few forum posts, doesn’t have much of a writing footprint, except for that one famous paper some have had tattooed on their chest. We’ll call this the pseudonym’s proudest work. I then compared this to what I felt were both Finney and Szabo’s crowning written achievements—RPOW and Bitgold. Then, I took these bundles of text and built a fingerprint.
The function-word distributions for Finney, Szabo, and Satoshi possess a consistent structure. Finney stands apart immediately: his writing includes first-person pronouns such as I and my, a higher-entropy distribution that shifts across contexts. In contrast, both Szabo and Satoshi present impersonal, article-heavy, technically oriented stop-word profiles. This makes them the only two candidates occupying what I’d call the same stylometric “neighborhood.”
And, as I stared at the data I felt I was getting somewhere. I had my guy, a mystery might be solved. Note, others have gone down similar paths, I’m not doing anything new yet outside of the counter intuitive approach of limiting the sample size to ensure authorship. You wouldn’t contract out your proudest work, would you?
Then, I built a program to examine these two fingerprints in even more detail—cosine similarity, Jensen-Shannon divergence, and what’s called the Burrows’s Delta. I know, I kept telling myself that my statistics grade in college didn’t matter. I could do this. Again, Szabo and Satoshi scored close to 0.93, a high correlation indicating extremely close proximity. Not definitive, but I knew, deep down, that my idea was about to pay off bigly.
My theory, the samples I chose, seemed sound. I read Szabo, his work is fascinating. Of everyone walking this earth, he might be “the smartest guy in the room.” In many ways, he worked in this space long before Satoshi emerged out of the cornfield, Field of Dreams style.
I scoured over the data, going further.
But then, my heart sank. A divergence in the force appeared, and all this work started to spin down a swirling drain. The Jensen—Shannon divergence, which measures how different two probability distributions are, placed Szabo—Satoshi at 0.091 (not quite close enough). And the Burrows’s Delta, a canonical stylometric measure comparing the average standardized difference across function words, again showed Szabo—Satoshi as a closer pair than Finney—Satoshi, roughly 1.49.
Szabo is demonstrably the closest stylistic neighbor to Satoshi. And, if you’re curious, I threw my style into the mix, which isn’t even in the ballpark.
Yet, the distances matter, and they point away from identity rather than toward it. True same-author scenarios would be closer. Szabo and Satoshi share structural similarity that includes pronoun suppression, heavy reliance on the and of, and lower-entropy grammatical patterns, which aligns with a certain expectation. People who think similarly and work in the same conceptual spaces often develop similar rhetorical habits in prose. We are who we hang out with in degrees. So yes, they share a bias toward precision, definitional statements, and decomposed logical structures.
But they aren’t the same. My data, taken together with other studies, notes that the “smartest guy in the room” isn’t necessarily “Satoshi Nakamoto.”
Well, damn. All that work, and the mystery continues. Not that I thought I could reach a definitive conclusion. I never thought I’d end up anywhere close.
The Wizard Meets Keyser Sosez
My mind then rushed toward the typical conspiracy theories. What about a black ops coding team? The Russians? That darn question kept coming back to me: No sane individual would do this work, unless they were the smartest person in the room, and just walk.
Satoshi had to be a fictional avatar.
You see, Bitcoin required a founder who was more symbol than person—a Wizard of Oz figure who could guide the early network with authority yet vanish before becoming a liability, a single point of control. A real, identifiable creator could have been influenced through political pressure, legal vulnerability, and the corruption of power’s centralization. All of this would have undermined a system designed to eliminate trust in individuals. This is Bitcoin’s magic. Sure, you can slap World Liberty Financial on a token, but would everyone trust just any cohort hiding behind a brand with your hard-earned, um, cash?
The wizard was necessary but only as far as the pomp and circumstance will allow. Once the system stood on its own, the illusion had to fly away in a balloon. Or in this case sign off on a public forum, ensuring that no one could ever reach behind the curtain and rewrite the rules by having a controlling share. There can’t be a system administrator that wishes the bad guys away either. The system doesn’t work that way.
The smartest guy in the room foresaw this scenario.
In my defeat, I pored over Satoshi’s data fingerprint again. Rigid. And precise. But then I noticed, the data doesn’t drift. Satoshi’s rhythm, despite my smaller sample, is stable. A collaboration would show otherwise with peaks and valleys. No, this wasn’t a team or CIA intervention. Also, Szabo and Finney weren’t in on anything together. Toss out the grand conspiracy.
As I stared at the data and Satoshi’s white paper, it hit me. I almost dropped my coffee cup, breaking it on my hardwood floor, right out of the movie The Usual Suspects. Yes, the data showed what I never thought could be true because it doesn’t make any sense. Nobody, outside of George Washington, just walks away. Still, I couldn’t shake that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was proving to the world he didn’t exist.
But something still nagged. It was that darned White Paper. I had never read it before, not even a passing glance, but I noticed the style. Every IBMer would immediately recognize it with that standard cover, sitting next to its peers. This reads like an old-fashioned Redbook.
The author obviously read these, learned in an era defined by scarcity—scarcity of memory, scarcity of compute, scarcity of trust in software behaving correctly unless every assumption was nailed down. Bitcoin’s original structure is more reminiscent of mainframe discipline than the C++ culture of the era. This reads like the work of a developer who once lived inside environments where corruption turned out to be catastrophic and recoverability proved a fantasy. It’s a flashback to IMS-ledger worlds or DB2 for z/OS backed life insurance systems. The code’s creator would know that someone might have to reconcile one record with another twenty-five years in the future.
This is an append-only world where nothing can ever be erased, rewritten, or patched later. Only someone who spent a career watching ledgers malfunction or spent hours on downstream changes would think to construct something like this. They knew what a botched mainframe upgrade looked like, especially if the mathematical floating points changed. I’ve seen that happen; not pretty. The balance in your ATM adjusts, if you’re curious.
Satoshi communicates like a highly competent engineer who has spent a lifetime explaining systems to peers and business partners inside rigid hierarchies brimming with insurance line managers, auditors, compliance teams, or senior architects who demand justification for every design choice or resource. The formal tone is full of clarifications, caveats, and a desire to avoid misunderstanding.
There is no swagger, no academic ornamentation, no hacker bravado or any hint of tech bro culture. The author’s explanation posts occur at hours suggesting a day job, with Bitcoin development work happening at odd times, and little activity on weekends. There are soccer games or movies to see. Or poker nights.
This isn’t Szabo the theorist, or Finney the visionary engineer, or some celebrity cryptographer.
The avatar is not a Bond villain, or any three-letter agency boogeyman. Nor do they belong to a think tank. They haven’t fast-failed three startups either.
The bitcoin story is otherworldly because it wasn’t created from the set of people who we attribute, often wrongly, to shaping the world. No Henry Ford. Or Elon Musk. Or Thomas Edison. Sometimes, invention comes from a person no one sees, in a room newspapers reporters don’t think about, writing code no one expects to matter.
I know Satoshi, maybe. A customer I’ve called on once upon a time. Or my next-door neighbor.
And we’re all better off. This is a story worth telling, a tale worthy of celebration as all those Bitcoins stoically remain in place.
Always running.
Footnotes
The picture is The Taylor Swift castle, located outside of Nashville. Sadly, Wicked’s castle wasn’t available for this newsletter.
I initially attributed a quote in this piece to Steve Ballmer, he said it frequently, making it famous. But it’s an offshoot of Linux and Unix culture. Linus Torvalds often said, “Linux is free only if your time has no value.”
The notes on wealth are attributed to multiple articles, including CoinDesk. The famous Genesis block was created on January 3, 2009. It’s unusual because the 50 BTC reward can’t be used. And it carries an embedded message, The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. Later, Satoshi’s mining is attributed to what’s called the Patoshi fingerprint, a statistical pattern in early block nonces and extra nonce increments revealing a single dominant miner. One could make the argument that this is less mining and more testing under the hood, nothing magical just an engineer reusing patterns.
And this article in New York magazine touches every theory, including a Black ops team. And maybe, just maybe, the inventor was a jerk.
The Part 2 of this article will live inside this footnote, at least for now. I want to give one last nod to the movie. Yes, many have pored over Satoshi’s emails statistically, perhaps looking for further hints. If there is an encrypted message in the first block, why not go down the Taylor Swift path and place a few more? And yes, some truly believe the writing fingerprint belongs to Szabo, and I can understand. However, I built my platform to compare more than just stop words. Heck, I can compare comma distribution. For myself, I write differently between novels and short prose, but the variance, even if I’m playing around, is minimal. One can’t fake a full authorial fingerprint. So, based on my limited sample size, I don’t see Satoshi as a group or Finney or Szabo. As much as I’d like to force an outcome, revealing the creator through story, I can’t really do that here.
Be Cool, Pass The JPLA On …
Scrooged (What I’m Watching):
I love this Bill Murray movie, remember seeing it in the theater oh so long ago. It falls on my annual Christmas watching list, including It’s a Wonderful Life, Love Actually, Christmas Vacation, Elf (amongst others). But I couldn’t find it this year on Hulu or Netflix or choose your service of choice and ended up pulling the trigger on the Apple Movie version for less than a five spot.
And something felt off… the scenes had odd transitions. A connective tissue was missing, or it wasn’t there at all. I may need to dig into this more, buying the VHS version and playing it back scene by scene with two televisions side by side. Until then, my recommendation is to watch this on cable TV, letting the networks shoulder the burden and guesswork that they’ve taken away a small piece of Richard Donner’s work.
Nate Silver, NBA Betting (What I’m Reading):
I’m working on my year-end wrap, this was almost my story of the year. Easy betting and NIL money will put pressure on sports in the years ahead. Sure, we can draft like kings now. But what have we lost?
AI Prompt Song Tinkering (What I Was Tinkering With Edition):
I’m still catching up on my backlog of podcasts; listened to the Vergecast on vibe writing a country hit. I’m sold on AI as a tool, not necessarily to replace the writers. So says the writer. I digress.
I’ve been tinkering around with AI to build out a new running list, there are just so few songs that fit the Rocky Balboa Gonna Fly Now lane. You know, that true go-to closing song for the last half mile. Turns out, it’s hard to pull off. The pacing. Phrasing. Emphasis. This year, Sia’s Unstoppable fit the bill. Next year, I’m turning to Heavens to Betsy by Jackson Dean. Special runner-up: Time by Hans Zimmer.
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Digital Currency Edition:
