Adam Back

And I'm probably as reasonable a candidate as any of the other

top 20 that, let's say, people have looked at.

But we don't have a reason to suppose that Satoshi would be participating at conferences, participating in documentary films, taking interviews and that kind of thing.

And from that point of view, it seems more plausible that Satoshi is one of the many clever people who've worked on internet technology, but don't have really a public profile, for example.

It's kind of hypothetical to me, right?

Because I'm not, but...

I have seen a number of people in interview settings being asked that question and saying they wouldn't say or something like that, right?

Yeah, I think that's the common answer and it sounds logical to me.

Well, I mean, I think my assumption is Satoshi simply would decline to participate or, you know, be hard to identify even as a candidate to try to contact or bring into an interview.

I mean, I guess it's coincidence, unless there is some kind of link in the sense that he did read my paper.

Some of the things we're talking about hyphenating are...

sort of niche technical terms like proof of work.

And so there, there are probably likely to be similarities because for somebody to be, you know, fluent in cryptography and the technology, they would have read certain things, learnt certain programming languages or ideas, and so have some common technical language, let's say.

Yeah, I mean, I can only tell you that it's not me.

People who know me are pretty convinced that's the case.

Yeah, so I think it's more about the perception of Bitcoin.

Well, there's Bitcoin as a digital commodity, as a discovery rather than invention, and systems that have a vocal founder

then it gets viewed as more a company's product or a project, whereas Bitcoin is actually very chaotic and decentralized.

There are hundreds of individual developers, thousands of companies, different service providers, any one of which or dozens of which could leave and rejoin, and it wouldn't have much bearing on Bitcoin.

So from the point of view of both Bitcoin being seen as a neutral digital commodity and