It ain't hard to believe that people who lived in the US for DECADES don't speak English all that well. Geez, have you guys ever been to California??? I lived there for 15 years (oops there goes my future anonymity, luckily I will never be a reclusive billionaire genius) and if you want to go to Little Tokyo in LA or even Sawtelle you can find lots of older Japanese-Americans who don't speak very good English. And never mind Hispanic Americans. There is basically multiculturalism and there are enclaves where people speak mostly their own language. Plus I went to a major University in Cali and I knew lots of people with advanced degrees that can barely write English and needed to have all their work proofread and corrected for this reason. I also worked with people who had been there most of their lives and whose written English was terrible. It also depends on the person, I saw a lecture by Chomsky where he said that he is horrible at languages and can't learn foreign languages no matter how long he stays in a foreign country or how long he studies it. I myself have been living in a foreign country for the last 7 years and when I write in the local language it is FULL of basic errors of grammar and spelling.

Obviously it is possible that Satoshi, when he posted here, had someone correct every line of his posts so they were in almost-perfect colloquial American. But that is not a very credible explanation given the complex and conversational nature of his posts.

Personally I find this idea--that Satoshi wrote letters on local issues and wrote Amazon reviews in rather atrocious English DELIBERATELY as a "back up plan" to be used in the future after bitcoin became successful and he was found out--to be a rather absurd conspiracy theory.

I mean let's try to use Ockham's Razor here. Isn't it more likely, and a far simpler explanation, to think that perhaps NewsWeek, desperate for a HUGE scoop to re-launch it's first print issue after being online-only, carried out their investigation in a manner that would AVOID DISPROVING that this Dorian Nakamoto is Satoshi while presenting a list of reasons that he COULD THEORETICALLY be Satoshi without actually proving anything???

I must point out that, though WE can not be sure of the quality of Dorian Nakamoto's English, there ARE MANY PEOPLE who are very sure of how exactly he speaks and writes English. Those being his friends, former colleagues, fellow hobbyists and family. Those people KNOW at this moment whether he is capable of writing Satoshi's posts. Another person who probably knows is the journalist, but I wouldn't expect her to be extremely forthcoming on this point at this stage.

In any case, my point is that it is almost guaranteed that the truth will come out quite soon. I expect it will be proven that this is not Satoshi. But I would be amused and happy to be wrong. What a great story it would be for a normal person like Dorian Nakamoto to invent a disruptive technology that would disturb and fascinate the global private and gov't financial order, while providing hope of an alternative to their system to millions of other normal people. As for fears about the effect on Bitcoin's acceptance or value, Bitcoin is and will remain what we know it to be: an open source, transparent, distributed currency and store of value with a public ledger.

It's funny why family do that. Any time I show some family member some cool new tech their first question is "Did YOU make that?" and then I have to disappoint them.

Yeah and use your real name.
This makes perfect sense, smart.

Then again, obfuscating one's identity by using your true name is not