Hunt for the mysterious creator of bitcoin continues. Recently, one more would-be Satoshi was found. However, the investigator dropped his arguments when Paweł Pszona wrote he was certainly not Satoshi.

In a series of blog posts, user Bounty Hunter told about his search for Satoshi Nakamoto. After giving a list of “usual suspects” including Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, Craig Wright and others, he concluded that they denied being Satoshi Nakamoto precisely because they were not. After analyzing what was said about Satoshi by his early collaborators such as Adam Back, Jeff Garzik and Gavin Andresen, he came to the conclusion that Satoshi was the Polish programmer Paweł Pszona who created bitcoin either on his own or with the help from his professor Grzegorz Stachowiak.

The key evidence, from his point of view, was that in 2007, Pszona, then a student, co-authored an article with his professor, “Unlinkable Divisible Digital Cash without Trusted Third Party.” The article was based on Pszona’s Master thesis. In the bibliography list of the article, Bounty Hunter found Toru Nakanishi and Tatsuaki Okamoto, two Japanese cryptographers who worked on digital money. He believes that their names served as a source for the pseudonym taken by Pszona, “Nakamoto”, while picking a random Japanese first name “Satoshi”.

However, both Pszona and Stachowiak denied having anything to do with the creation of bitcoin. Pszona wrote in an email to the Bounty Hunter: “Sorry to disappoint you, but it's certainly not me who you're after.” Stachowiak, who teaches computer algorithms in Wrocław, Poland, told journalists he felt honored to be included in the list of suspects and hoped he would get a mention in Wikipedia but urged them “not to believe anything written in the Web.” He also pointed out to the fact that bitcoin has nothing to do with the e-money solution envisioned by Polish scientists.

After receiving the email from Pszona, the Bounty Hunter chose to drop his arguments pointing at him and deleted the last of his blog posts (“Satoshi Nakamoto unmasked”). However, BitcoinTalk users pointed to the fact that his change of heart was absurd because a real Satoshi would surely do his best to deny his real identity. Others were angry at the very fact somebody was still hunting for a person willing to remain anonymous. Many users remarked that the real identity of bitcoin creator was not important at all.

Mike Hearn, while agreeing with some points of the investigation (namely, that Satoshi was not a professional or academically trained cryptographer), told that the new “unmasking” is completely absurd because “digital cash papers have… always been a hot topic of research in the field of cryptography” and “you could pick almost any time in any year and find some e-cash paper like that one.”

Alexey Tereshchenko