Presumably Wei is referring to how the Bitcoin codebase appeared to emerge fully-formed, from out of nowhere, with no obvious precipitating discoveries or breakthroughs; and even now in 2013, perhaps 5 years after the first mentions of Bitcoin, Nakamoto’s pseudonymity remains intact: we do not know who Nakamoto is, where he worked or lived, what his training might be, what affiliations he has, what he is doing now, and having spent a bit of time over the last week investigating all of Nakamoto’s traces and looking at previous investigations like The New Yorker’s, this condition seems likely to persist*. (Unless of course Wei is Nakamoto, for which there’s not terrible evidence, in which case he knows all that but the evidential value is still there for us.)
Its subsequent uptake may have vaguely startup-like characteristics, but that is because the Bitcoin codebase is not sapient or intelligent and cannot act on its own...
* I think Nakamoto is probably not Japanese (Austrian libertarianism having zero exponents in Japan, basically, as makes sense given their own deflationary currency and deflationary spiral, and the complete absence of any Japaneseness in his writings) but beyond that he did a great job concealing any real-world aspects of himself, and so the only viable approach is to compile a large corpus from possible suspects such as every poster to the Cryptography ML, do the best stylometrics possible, weight the rankings by known aspects of Nakamoto such as C++ fluency, and then maybe do some active attacks. Even then this might fail since it relies on Nakamoto being present on the ML to a sufficient extent previously under another name.
Presumably Wei is referring to how the Bitcoin codebase appeared to emerge fully-formed, from out of nowhere, with no obvious precipitating discoveries or breakthroughs; and even now in 2013, perhaps 5 years after the first mentions of Bitcoin, Nakamoto’s pseudonymity remains intact: we do not know who Nakamoto is, where he worked or lived, what his training might be, what affiliations he has, what he is doing now, and having spent a bit of time over the last week investigating all of Nakamoto’s traces and looking at previous investigations like The New Yorker’s, this condition seems likely to persist*. (Unless of course Wei is Nakamoto, for which there’s not terrible evidence, in which case he knows all that but the evidential value is still there for us.)
Its subsequent uptake may have vaguely startup-like characteristics, but that is because the Bitcoin codebase is not sapient or intelligent and cannot act on its own...
* I think Nakamoto is probably not Japanese (Austrian libertarianism having zero exponents in Japan, basically, as makes sense given their own deflationary currency and deflationary spiral, and the complete absence of any Japaneseness in his writings) but beyond that he did a great job concealing any real-world aspects of himself, and so the only viable approach is to compile a large corpus from possible suspects such as every poster to the Cryptography ML, do the best stylometrics possible, weight the rankings by known aspects of Nakamoto such as C++ fluency, and then maybe do some active attacks. Even then this might fail since it relies on Nakamoto being present on the ML to a sufficient extent previously under another name.