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Notes -
Hal Finley is the Bruce Kent to Satoshi's Masculine Mongoose. He's the subject of (and a willing participant in) an elaborate frame-job that links him to Satoshi, which provides investigators a convenient excuse to stop looking.
I don’t think Masculine Mongoose fully works. If I’m understanding it correct Masculine Mongoose and Bruce Kent really are different people.
This would fail with Hal because the naming of Satoshi seems to have come from a neighbor of Hal. Which implies he was involved before Satoshi was even created and in fact named Satoshi. Which gets to a point where it sounds like a small group had someone created the final code, someone ran the code and do first mining, and then worked together to create a mythological founder most likely so no one would take the heat if used for criminal purposes or so no one person would be the creator of the money.
I feel like this train of thought only moves Hal from sole creator to a co-creator. I think it’s tough to deny he had some role in creating the Satoshi character. The real code creator would have had to been talking to Hal, had Hal review the code and say this is it, then together work on creating the founding story.
I'm suddenly reminded of scenario in the Moon is a Harsh Mistress where the alleged founder and public-face of the lunar Independence movement is actually an AI-generated amalgam of multiple people.
"Adam Selene" does ring a lot like "Satoshi Nakamoto" as an obvious archetypal pseudonym.
The Bourbaki option is tempting, but if you read through Satoshi's correspondence he maintains a style and demeanor that I think precludes the possibility of there being multiple people behind his online presence. Multiple people behind the work is a possibility, but there was a Satoshi.
Though it strikes me that with the advent of LLMs, it would be a lot easier now to make a synthetic person.
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