In April 2014, the Aston University Centre for Forensic Linguistics (Birmingham, UK) released the results of “Project Bitcoin” — a stylometric study led by Dr. Jack Grieve, then Lecturer in Forensic Linguistics, with a team of 40 final-year forensic linguistics students. The study identified Nick Szabo as the most likely author of the Bitcoin whitepaper out of 11 candidates examined. The result was reported by CoinDesk on April 16, 2014 and picked up by ScienceDaily, Slate, Sci.News, Phys.org, and Cointelegraph in the days that followed.
The study compared several candidates for Satoshi Nakamoto’s authorship at once. It came after the December 2013 Skye Grey LikeInAMirror investigation, arrived at the same leading candidate (Szabo), and was subsequently cited in Nathaniel Popper’s 2015 New York Times investigation and Digital Gold book.
The candidate set
The press release named all eleven people the team compared with the whitepaper, described as individuals “regularly referred to as possible authors”: Dorian S. Nakamoto, Vili Lehdonvirta, Michael Clear, Shinichi Mochizuki, Gavin Andresen, Nick Szabo, Jed McCaleb, Dustin D. Trammell, Hal Finney, Wei Dai, and the trio Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry, counted as one.
In total the team considered hundreds of documents written by the eleven, including over 40 academic papers on Szabo’s personal website.
Methodology
The Aston study applied forensic linguistic / stylometric analysis — the same family of methods used in document examination cases for litigation, threat-attribution, and historical authorship disputes. The traits the release names as appearing in both the Bitcoin paper and Szabo’s writing:
| Kind | Traits named in the release |
|---|---|
| Phrases | ”chain of…,” “trusted third parties,” “for our purposes,” “need for…,” “still,” “of course,” “as long as,” “such as” and “only,” used numerous times |
| Punctuation and sentences | Commas before “and” and “but”; fragmented sentences following colons |
| Word forms | Contractions, hyphenation, “-ly” adverbs, reflexive (-self) pronouns |
| Pronouns | ”We” and “our” in papers by a single author |
The release also questioned why the paper’s most-cited textual feature was its double spaces after full stops: the paper was drafted in LaTeX, it said, and without the .tex source the spacing could not be traced to the author. The whitepaper PDF itself names OpenOffice.org 2.4 as its producer.
The reported conclusion
The reported summary statement at release:
Jack Grieve (ScienceDaily article, April 17, 2014)The number of linguistic similarities between Szabo’s writing and the Bitcoin paper is uncanny, none of the other possible authors were anywhere near as good of a match. We are pretty confident that out of the list of people regularly referred to as possibilities, Nick Szabo is the main author of the paper, though we can’t rule out the possibility that others contributed.
The hedge in the second sentence is methodologically important: Grieve does not assert sole authorship, and explicitly leaves open the possibility of multi-author contribution while naming Szabo as the principal match.
Methodological caveats noted at release
A spokesman for Aston University told Slate that the report had not been peer reviewed and was not set to be in the near future. The release links no research output; David Gerard later described the study as an exercise Grieve had given his final-year students.
Subsequent critical follow-up
The methodological constraints of “Project Bitcoin” — class-project sample size, fixed candidate set drawn from prior speculation, no peer review, no released numerical data — have been the subject of subsequent critical commentary. One critique is David Gerard’s December 2018 piece “No, Nick Szabo wasn’t Satoshi Nakamoto in 2014 either”, which argues that stylometric analyses on candidate sets pre-selected by topical overlap (writers who wrote about digital cash, P2P networks, or cryptography) inherently confound shared subject-matter vocabulary with shared individual style.
This methodological observation parallels — and predates — the same caveat raised by Florian Cafiero about the 2026 Carreyrou New York Times investigation and the limitations explicitly cataloged by Bas van Dorst’s 2024 ‘Where is Satoshi?’ open-source corpus — namely that stylometric attribution is sensitive to candidate pre-selection, distance metric, and corpus boundaries in ways that affect which name comes out at the top.
Position in the stylometric record on Satoshi authorship
| Study | Date | Candidate scope | Top match | Numerical data public |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Skye Grey | December 2013 | Szabo (single-hypothesis) | Szabo | No (narrative phrase list) |
| Aston University | April 2014 | 11 candidates | Szabo | No (results in press releases) |
| van Dorst | April 2024 | 75,000+ | Not named | Yes (XLSX/CSV release) |
| Cafiero / Carreyrou NYT | April 2026 | 12 (focus); 620 (broader) | Adam Back (Hal Finney near tie) | No (results summarized in NYT article) |
The Aston study sits historically between Skye Grey’s single-candidate test and the van Dorst corpus release. Its place in the record is foundational rather than dispositive: subsequent stylometric work has expanded the candidate pool and produced different leading candidates depending on methodology.
For the analytical treatment of the Nick Szabo = Satoshi hypothesis (this study’s evidence weighed against the April 2008 Unenumerated blog comment asking for Bit Gold implementation help, the May 2011 third-person framing, Szabo’s continued Unenumerated visibility throughout 2007–2008, and his repeated denials), see the Nick Szabo = Satoshi identity hypothesis entry.
In the Nick Szabo identity hypothesis, this study serves as the quantitative corroboration that is independent of Skye Grey’s 2013 work and that ranked Szabo highest among the eleven candidates.
