Ethereum Co-Founder: Finding Satoshi Is Similar to Finding a Malware Author

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder and founder of Cardano (ADA) Charles Hoskinson proposes leveraging stylometric methods to find Satoshi Nakamoto, but there are several important points to consider.

Stylometrics

In an April 5 interview Charles Hoskinson noted that one of the most effective ways to find the person or team responsible for developing Bitcoin (BTC) is to use stylometric methods.

Stylometry is the application of the study of linguistic style, usually to written language. This method had been earlier applied to Satoshi Nakamoto’s writing, but no conclusive result was obtained.

Use the code instead

Ethereum co-founder proposed researching Satoshi Nakamoto’s code instead of his writing. He explained why he considers such move to be more effective:

“Yes dramatically more efficient. Code stylometry is much more accurate. Here’s a paper on the topic https://usenix.org/node/190845. It’s commonly done to track malware authors and usually is very effective”.

Hoskinson builds Satoshi’s profile

In the same interview, Hoskinson profiled Satoshi:

“They’re now in their fifties or sixties, were educated in the 1980s or early nineties, and brought up in a very particular school of computer science. Bitcoin script, alone, gives you a lot of indication of where that person was trained because it was based on a language called Forth, which is a very uncommon language, but it was used mostly in computer science pedagogy, especially in England and in the Eastern United States during that time period.”

Hoskinson concluded by noting that he has never used stylometric methods to analyze Satoshi’s code and that:

“It’s never been an interest to me because, frankly, that person left the ecosystem and doesn’t want to be doxed and Bitcoin has operated just fine since 2012. It’s been eight years now and we haven’t had any issues. So why do we need to bring the founder back?”

Perhaps the enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto will never be solved.