Do we have enough writing from Satoshi to try to correlate language/linguistic patterns against known actors in the field of cryptography?

Yes; we have a number of emails from the p2presearch ML, the cryptography ML, the Bitcoin ML, his Bitcoin forum posts, his whitepaper, and source code revisions & comments. This amounts to easily 80k of text, which should be more than enough to run stylometric techniques on him.

The real trouble would actually be getting enough text from all the 'known actors' you might want to compare him against (for example, one Redditor thinks Satoshi is Mike Reiter, but almost all of Reiter's papers are co-authored and he doesn't seem to have any other online presence, so what would you use as your Reiter corpus?).

Regardless of the comparison with other actors, is it possible to run an analysis over Satoshi's corpus to determine if its internally consistent or likely written by multiple individuals?

I haven't actually seen any mentions of stylometric techniques or analyses which look into that question, although I'm sure it's been done. (The only example I can think of, the Federalist papers, was known to have been done by two people with large pre-existing corpuses to go on, and so the question was simply assigning responsibility.)

I actually have read a paper once on stylometric authorship attribution, part of which was oriented at detecting whether it was a single or multiple authors. I think "authorship attribution" were keywords in the title, but that's all I remember. So I don't have anything more to go on :)

I'm not sure if a professional forensic study has been done but check out the bitcoin wiki page linked in my post. It contains links to his crypto mailing List posts and a couple of journalists who have tried tracking him down.

The original bitcoin pdf suggests a British education but some of his other writing uses American spelling. And he probably isn't Japanese. The plot thickens.

Thanks for summing up the story till now so succinctly.

What an incredible story. Money, technology, mystery, criminals. this would make a great book.

Satoshi's story is just the tip of the iceberg. In the last few years there have been many fascinating technical developments (CPU->GPU->FPGA->ASIC mining), grand heists, price manipulation schemes and even some unexplained events.*

I think the future analysis of the blockchain (all Bitcoin transactions are public record) will be a ripe area for economic research. Aside from the technical stuff, watching the growth and mistakes of the economic system is fascinating - like seeing 2000 years of banking/currency evolution packed into a few years. There is also the question of intrinsic worth and how to value a bitcoin - most online debates descend into chaos but the theoretical basis for projecting valuation is a real mind bender. There is no precedent.

I'm personally interested in what, if any, nation state involvment there has been with Bitcoin. Regardless of Bitcoin thriving or dying, the system has unequivocally demonstrated that cryptographic systems relying on decentralised trust can work. The theoretical underpinnings of Bitcoin solve the Byzantine's Generals' Problem. And it doesnt just apply to money, it can apply to anything. There is already a decentralised DNS (NameCoin) based on the same protocol.

I would have thought this type of system would be of keen interest to many nation states, as it could potentially undermine their own authority or be used as a weapon against other nation states.

So yeah, a book would be interesting :) I strongly believe the decentralisation technology underpinning Bitcoin will be a notable part of history.

*In 2011 a 'msytery miner' nearly doubled the total network's computing power for a short period only to disappear within a couple of days. The theories are this miner was a clever botnet utilising host GPUs,a supercomputer, or someone testing very early stage ASIC hardware, despite none of the known ASIC producers having working hardware at that point in time. http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mysteryminer.html

BTC doesn't solve Byzantine Generals, as it is trivially hackable by the 51% attack.

I strongly disagree.

Currently the bitcoin network is running around 70,000 Ghash/second. Are you aware of what kind of resources are required to perform this 'trivial' hack? If it was so trivial, why hasnt the 51% attack happened already? Its a $1B system - clearly the prize is worth the effort.

The beauty of Bitcoin is that if you somehow had access to such computing power to perform the attack, you'd probably be better off just being an honest node. You'd make a shiteload of legit money without all the hassle associated with splitting the block chain.

So yes, I'll stick with the argument that Bitcoin does solve the Byzantine Generals problem.

Theoretically speaking, even if the 51% attack did occur, it just reinforces that Bitcoin does solve the Byzantine Generals problem! If 51% of generals act in a certain manner in a decentralised network - you want this to be the truth! The decentralised network is correctly picking the majority vote!

So can you explain your reasoning? It seems by every criteria, Bitcoin meets the requirements of the BG problem.