Coindesk put out an article today that I really enjoyed reading. It was about Satoshi's birthday being today, April 5. I think the question, "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?" is the biggest question this century has brought us, so I was intrigued.
The article offers its evidence as to why April 5 may be the date, and the year 1975 to be exact. Read the article, but the upshot of the evidence is this:
- The P2P Foundation bulletin board has Satoshi's profile age as 38 on April 4, 2014 when it was crawled by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
- Then, the board has Satoshi's age at 40 on April 5, 2015.
- The logic then: Satoshi's birthdate must be set in his profile as April 5, 1975.
It's been a few years since I've dug into Satoshi's words on bulletin boards. While editing "Kicking the Hornet's Nest," I plodded through everything. (All links here.) The "birthday" was news to me today, however...guess I missed the profile.
This alleged "birthday" raises questions. Is there another possibility aside as to why that age pops up on his profile? Wayback crawl mechanism? Satoshi just entering a random date? Others?
I'm very skeptical about April 5th as truly being Satoshi's birthdate. For someone as privacy minded as Satoshi, I simply feel there's no way he puts his real birthday in the profile.
To the author's (George Kaloudis) credit, he offers a plausible "other" option. He posits that maybe Satoshi is just punking us all. Again, read the article, but April 5 is evidently when President Franklin Roosevelt forbade the ownership of over $100 in gold via executive order. Again, there's something I didn't know. It certainly feels like something Satoshi would scoff at. Also, evidently President Ford canceled FDR's April 5 executive order with his own order, making January 1, 1975 the year that people could again own gold without government obtrusion.
To me, the Ford allusion is a bit of a stretch. I think of youngsters way-back-when churning vinyl records backwards listening for hidden messages. When you search for something, you tend to find something.
As a case-in-point...see the image below.
The author of the Coindesk article lists off the usual suspects for being Satoshi, and they're good suspects. I was particularly glad to see John Nash listed, not because I think Nash was Satoshi, but just because I'm a fan.
In the Kicking book's preface, I wrote a little speculation about Satoshi. I was trying to piece together clues that were left through his writing and via my interpretation, such as:
- He is polite.
- A clear communicator.
- A fantastic thinker.
- More to the date issue, his affinity to use double-spaces after sentences, I feel, is not frivolous. Rather, I see it placing him in a time window of keyboarding instruction.
In part, this leads me to further question the 1975 birth year. I suppose he still would have been learning to type/keyboard before the year 2000, so that does fit well enough. Yet, and I alluded to this in the preface of "Kicking", the revolutionary nature of Satoshi's work, the world-changing work first dropped October 31, 2008, would put him at age 33. That would mean the bulk of his work took place, let's say, in his early 30s.
That seems early, but, this is certainly possible. Revolutionary ideas, truly world-shaking ideas, do emerge (Newton with calculus at age 24, Einstein's annus mirabilis at age 26). Yet, my gut tells me older in Bitcoin's case. There needed to be time to learn to code. That's not the most convincing to me, though. More telling to me is Satoshi's demeanor in his writing...in my view, the tenor is that of a more mature person. I can't pin it down precisely, but to me, he just reads older. In the preface, I guessed 1968 as the birth year, thus about 40 when the whitepaper came out. Who knows?
The Satoshi guessing game never gets old.
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