> It’s actually very likely in my opinion that Todd could easily figure out where he was that specific day and there would be corroborating evidence of that.

Yet you can't produce it for yourself, you don't see the issue here? I know I absolutely cannot prove anything about my whereabouts on most random days in 2009, I might be able to reason out where I was on some days but even that wouldn't result in transferable proof. Like I can say, 2009 was before I retired from Juniper and the tenth was a saturday-- so maybe I was home which wouldn't leave any evidence. Or maybe I was on a work trip. But if I was I wouldn't have any evidence of it, and even if I did it quite possibly would have been to California (though not socal, thankfully for my kidnapping risk).

Maybe some people can, if you could then I'd have to argue that just because you can it's no reason to assume everyone can, but it seems you can't prove where you were on that day.

So I guess you're Satoshi! Glad we settled it. :D

> It seems pretty clear the IP in the debug.log file is Satoshi’s node and IRC connection

Why do you believe these is clear?

> I know that. However you and him I believe have a long history together.

Sure, but that doesn't extend to knowing what usernames he used where back before I met him, except by chance.

> didn’t Hal actually know retep for a long time?

As far as I can tell the people on the bluesky list were sort of the expected fallout from the dying cypherpunks lists. But I communicated with Hal extensively in 2004-ish about RPOW, am I suddenly Satoshi?

My SO interacted with him due to the extropians list, I guess she's Satoshi now too?

> isn’t retep remarkably skilled for his age in 2009 and earlier?

Petertodd was 24 in 2009. Here is a wired article about a project of mine in 1997, when I was 18: https://archive.is/UT9NE

When I was 20 I helped crack the cryptography underlying CSS, addressing the risk of player key cancellation wack-a-mole. https://web.archive.org/web/20000226011228/http://www.emedia... (not specifically on the crack however)

It's always fun to talk about myself, but also I could give similar or better examples from other early Bitcoin developers, but I don't want to say anything that would drive this sort of bad logic to accusing them of being Satoshi... but an example:

Another early Bitcoin developer created a novel kind of arithmetic coder as a teenager, starting a line of development that eventually became JPEG-XL.

> for instance claiming to he a poor C++ coder?

He is, as am I. (I'm competent in _C_ however).

The standard for claiming proficiency when you are 18 and clueless is different than when you're 40 and competent. C++ has also evolved significantly over the time. While I can't speak for him, after working and Mozilla and with some of the other Bitcoin developers my idea of what qualifies as a good level of skill in C++ has changed radically.

Petertodd's about being poor re-C++ were specifically related to the Bitcoin codebase. And he like me would generally needs to get someone else to explain varrious fancy C++ features in it these days.

> he worked professionally on a C++ large codebase at 17!

I'm missing the context for this, his webpage from around that age says things like " A mass and springs physics sim I wrote in C++ I didn't manage to finish it though, the physics and math proved too difficult for me. :( The code is more messy then I'd like, I didn't have a good mental picture of what I was working on and my usual good commenting and clear style was hurt because of that." and "I was working on a nice large C++ TradeWars like game called Corporate Raiders. However I got bored of it and stopped work around June 2000. The last thing I did for it was make a compiler which I did manage to get working. Oh well, good learning experience. :) "

I don't think this supports what you're saying? But so what?

We may be suffering from a disconnect about the caliber of people that contributed to Bitcoin early on. Every one of them was weird, every one was exceptional. Bitcoin was the most interesting and radical new thing at least since P2P file trading.

But beyond that there are over three hundred million people in North America, so even if you're looking for one-in-a-million people there are hundreds of them, plenty to have a few show up in Bitcoin development, or even in a particularly interesting HN thread.