I Think I Know Who Satoshi Is

Ted Nelson believes that Mochizuki is the real Satoshi behind Bitcoin, because of the way both projects were dumped into the world's lap. I just saw his video last night: ▶ this video

Ted Nelson created a YouTube series, Computers for Cynics, which is his history of modern computing technology. link In one amusing video, he proposes that Satoshi Nakomoto, the creator of Bitcoin, is a pseudonym used by Shinichi Mochizuki, the mathematician who found a proof for the abc conjecture with his inter-universal geometry. ▶ this video link link

The video: ▶ this video If he had wanted to speak to the man directly, he could have cryptographically done so. Tell the world that you know who he is, but not reveal the name, then publish a cryptographic hash of his name. That probably catches the real guy's attention (regardless of whether Ted got it right or not).

Ted Nelson is very quotable and I would highly recommend reading at least the freely available excerpt [1] from his seminal 1974 book Computer Lib / Dream Machines to anyone who frequents HN. For those who don't know, his most famous invention is the term "hypertext" and he also appears to have invented, though is lest often acknowledged for, the history stack with its accompanying "back" button in Web browsers. Nelson's writings have a different sensibility from the mainstream of both his fellow computing pioneers of the 1970s and the hackers of today. An example of his thinking from before even UNIX was a household name is that Nelson decried hierarchy as a form of organization for data (e.g., in a computer's file system), instead emphasizing association [2], which he thought closer to how humans actually organize knowledge. He also argued that instead of dialogue-based computer instruction that was taking off at the time the best method to use a computer for learning would be to "motivate the user and let him loose in a wonderful place", that place being a hypertext knowledge base (see [1], p. 313). It is disappointing that in spite of Nelson's books being incredibly influential (to the point where they were reprinted by Microsoft Press because of the company's fondness for the author) most of his ideas never saw a complete implementation in a popular product. I'd love to read a doctoral thesis/book on the history of Project Xanadu -- a hypertext Web project started in 196