Satoshi Nakamoto’s Cryptography Encyclopedia Discovered - Claim Godfather's of Block Chain - Scott Stornetta & Stuart Haber

Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta are two of the Godfathers behind modern cryptographic timestamping or “Block Chain”. Their contributions to Bitcoin are showcased by three academic works referenced in the Bitcoin Whitepaper References section.

These two legends have laid as much of Bitcoin’s groundwork as giants like Adam Back, Wei Dai and Hal Finney. In a recent interview, Stornetta repeated a theory about Satoshi that originated from his colleague, Stuart Haber.

The Theory: when talking about Satoshi, “...we’re talking about one person, who was professionally a software engineer, and was really dabbling more with the cryptology as well as with the economic incentives...There’s one thing that I haven't seen anyone analyze, and that is the structure of the (Whitepaper) footnotes.” These suggest Satoshi was a “non-professional cryptologist” who “discovered this thing (Block Chain) by reading about it in the Encyclopedia of Cryptology.” - Scott Stornetta

This characterization of Satoshi is not much of a ground breaking take. It is consistent with many others who have suggested that Satoshi was an individual polymath coder, not a group.

But the detail about the Whitepaper footnotes and a mysterious book are interesting.

What are the clues that relate the structure of the Whitepaper footnotes to this mystery encyclopedia? Has no one looked at this angle involving the Whitepaper footnotes before?

The Satoshi Times went down this rabbit hole to see what could be found, and the details are fun.

We found that there is an Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security that was published in 2005 by Henk C. A. van Tilborg via Springer, that matches the description given by Stornetta. This pre-dates Bitcoin (2007-2008), and thus could have been a primary resource used by Satoshi Nakamoto in his invention of Bitcoin.

Continued on https://satoshitimes.com/encyclopedia/