The thread. When CFB relayed BCNext’s technical essays, he prefaced each with a remarkable line:
“I paraphrase it in my own words to protect BCNext’s real identity against text style analysis (as was agreed).”
Points toward Satoshi
Recall the 2000 article: the young Ivancheglo wrote about detecting hidden authorship through text-style analysis — stylometry. In 2013 he is openly defeating that exact technique to protect an identity. He plays both sides of his own paper: the hider and the seeker.
This matters enormously for the whole question. Stylometry is the standard method used to unmask Satoshi. CFB is one of the very few people who (a) understood it before Bitcoin and (b) is on record deliberately beating it. If he were Satoshi, he’d be uniquely equipped to stay hidden from the usual method — and we have him doing exactly that.
Points against
It cuts both ways: a man this fluent in anti-attribution can be made to seem connected to anything, by design. And defeating stylometry for BCNext doesn’t prove he did it for Satoshi.
Weight
Important context rather than direct evidence. It explains why a stylometric “gotcha” may never come — for or against.