Absolutely zero surprise here, do you have a link to the paper?
I haven't finished it yet, it'll be my diploma thesis next year. But I'll be sure to share it here then just not sure how much of it will be available in English, I might have to translate it then. If I get any interesting findings, it might be worth it to do that.
On that note I have a question for all of you who've been following this thread. Does anyone here have access to the Discord server where the screenshots of CSW's messages come from? I will need a pretty big sample of texts written by him -- I've been using his website's blog for now but more sources would be a great help.
So, I don't know if anyone still cares, but my paper is finished. I haven't defended yet so I don't want o post it until it's approved by my supervisor and oponent, but it was a really interesting rabbit hole to go down. The people I uncluded in this research were: Satoshi, CSW, Nick Szabo, Mike Hearn, Hal Finney, and Gavin Andresen.
Couple thoughts:
- First, it's a real shame that Wright only started his Twitter account after I started working, since that would be a much better source of writings. In style, tweets are more similar to forum posts than website blog posts, which is what I ended up using. Same was the case with Nick Szabo, and both of these authors clustered quite far away from the others in 2 out of 3 of my analyses. The sentences are longer, the language more academic, it's just not quite the same. That being said, we still would have seen some kind of clustering or similarities if Wright were Nakamoto. One of the analysis methods I used was not affected by these stylistic differences and Wright still appeared really far away from Nakamoto.
- Second, only after last month's release of that 'Finding Satoshi Nakamoto' book (which is also the tytle of my paper, ugh) did I hear about Bilal Khalid for the first time. Quite a shame, might have been interesting to include him in this. Any thoughts on Khalid's claims?
Conclusion:
I will be defending my thesis in August and was invited to give a speech at a conference in Budapest in September, so it will be out there soon. You will be able to see all the data, methods, graphs, and a list of links to all the forum posts / blog posts I used as material. Aside from Satoshi and the six candidates, we also had two control authors, both users of this forum.
Now, the results are not the most groundbreaking, we mostly just ruled out a couple of people with relative confidence (CSW lol). We also more or less ruled out the possibility of Satoshi being multiple people (or, more accurately, that the 'satoshi' account on here was most likely managed by one person.) His samples would simply not cluster so consistently across all 44 analyses, 40 of which utilized 5,000 randomly selected tokens out of each author's texts.
There was no match I can say with confidence as being 'most likely Nakamoto' and I would hesitate to even say someone is 'likely' to be Nakamoto, but I will mention that the closest to him out of everyone was Hal Finney. Neither Andresen nor Hearn particularly stood out.
Link to the paper?
I will link it here at the end of August once it's reviewed
Looking forward to it.
You should probably start a new thread when you do.