+1 to Adam Back. Who is more likely to build ontop of some obscure code base called "Hash Cash"? Some random people that trolled the same forums or the original creator of it?

Imo this "secret" is known by many people as I have seen so many censorship and misdirection campaigns throughout the years if people mention Adam being the one.

Him being Satoshi also makes bitcoin core seem more legitimate. He can guide his creation without being formally known as satoshi.

It is obvious. Especially if you have ever been a solo dev for an extended period of time (like adam was)

There is a ton more evidence but seems like no one really wants to dig into Adam.

Adam literally stopped updating hash cash and a year later Bitcoin is released... check his website on archive.org.

Its ok. I like that there is still conversation as to who it is. It gives protection to him since there likely wont be anything concrete (if hopefully he was slick enough)

Canadian English isn't that far off, especially in a lot of the spelling...

The forum is/was public, so there is no reason to create an account until you're planning to post something or send a private message.

Why is this my first post on bitcoin-dev: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2011... ?

I'm sure you've heard the adage, "It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it."

But online when you're silent you're not thought of as a fool-- you just don't even exist at all. Many of us whose contribution to world is primarily our knowledge and insight often prefer to self-educate to an advanced level on a subject before commenting on it at all.

My first bitcoin-dev post wasn't actually my first public comments on Bitcoin, but I'd read the entire bitcoin code base before ever saying anything about it...

It's not surprising to see Bitcoin developer people emerge from nowhere somewhat well informed, even back then (though to be fair fairly few people really understood txn internals).

I've known Peter and Adam for a very long time. Both have resting smirkface. Petertodd grins like he ate the canary any time he says something even the slightest bit clever. Adam too, now that I say it, though the clever threshold is a bit higher. That combined with talented editing can probably make either of them look guilty of whatever you want, or at least anything that they enjoy talking about.

Both are flagged

I said to him, ‘What disguise will hide me from the world? What can I find more respectable than bishops and majors?’ He looked at me with his large but indecipherable face. ‘You want a safe disguise, do you? You want a dress which will guarantee you harmless; a dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb?’ I nodded. He suddenly lifted his lion’s voice. ‘Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you fool!’ he roared so that the room shook. ‘Nobody will ever expect you to do anything dangerous then.’ And he turned his broad back on me without another word. I took his advice, and have never regretted it. I preached blood and murder to those women day and night, and—by God!—they would let me wheel their perambulators.”

What kind of edge does such intel give? Their work (bitcoin) spawned thousands and thousands of people who have taken the foundational technology and made many improvements to it. It seems like trying to figure out who they are incentivizes hobbyists to figure it out rather than state sponsors.

The genesis block has a message from a relatively obscure British newspaper in it (The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks). Not something I would expect a frontier Canadian in their 20s to be sourcing from.

That and various other evidence (coding style, british-english spelling) has suggested to me for a long time that it's an older gentleman from the UK, likely with an academic background in economics or related distributed systems. I don't know either way, but it seems borderline libel to suggest without much more substantial evidence that it's Peter Todd.