A British news site Zy Crypto wants to have revealed the secret to Satoshi Nakamoto by stylometry analysis. Behind the pseudonym, which is responsible for the basic Bitcoin white paper, is the developer Gavin Andresen.

Since an anonymous author published the Bitcoin White Paper in 2009, the question is who is behind it. No wonder, because in the nine-page document entitled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System , the principle of blockchain, the foundation of most cryptocurrencies and decentralized technologies, is explained for the first time. Is the author someone who has since renounced and isolated himself from his invention? Is the pseudonym a group of developers who co-authored the paper? Or is the Bitcoin inventor hiding in the forefront of the crypto scene? If we want to believe the latest revelations, the latter is most likely.

Is Gavin Andresen Satoshi Nakamoto?

Gavin Andresen is a Massachusetts software developer and has been involved in Bitcoin since the beginning. In 2010, the person behind Satoshi Nakamoto appointed him chief developer over the reference implementation of Bitcoin software. Andresen was responsible for programming and maintaining the core code for several years. In 2014, he gave up this post and devoted himself less to the codec and more work in the co-founded by him Bitcoin Foundation .

He himself has “unmasked” Satoshi Nakamoto once: in 2016, he named Australian computer scientist Craig Steven Wright as the true Bitcoin founder. In retrospect, however, he regretted having participated in the “who-is-satoshi-game”. The assumption that he himself is behind the ideas of Blockchain and Bitcoin is therefore at least plausible.

How does the stylometry analysis work?

Stylometry is a set of methods used to identify an unknown author by using word statistics based on his writing style. It has been used for over a hundred years, for example, to identify anonymous authors of literary masterpieces. The approaches have always evolved with technology.

The magazine ZyCrypto, which claims to have accomplished the latest revelation, has used the so-called “Eder’s bootstrapped stylometry method”. In this method, which is described in detail in the article , the analysts compared the White Paper with verified e-mails and forum posts from Satoshi and other texts by the first Bitcoin authors. Thus, the White Paper textually most resembles the mails of Satoshi. This was to be foreseen. However, the similarity between Gavin Andresen’s GitHub texts from that period and the White Paper is greater than the similarity between Satoshi’s forums and the White Paper. Andresen surpasses Satoshi in terms of textual affinity. The analysts see this as evidence for the assumption that he and Satoshi are one and the same person.

And what does Gavin Andresen say about the revelations? On Twitter, he volunteered the statement that his opinion on the reliability of stylometry had deteriorated significantly after reading the analysis. So the guesswork around Satoshi Nakamto continues.