“Le Roux built software very similar to Bitcoin,” observed Evan Ratliff, as he began to riff on the commonalities shared by the enigmatic duo. He then spoke of the code review he had Core developer Gregory Maxwell perform of the Bitcoin source code and Le Roux’s E4M encryption software. The results were inconclusive, but didn’t exclude the possibility that the two codebases, composed a decade apart, were the work of the same individual. “I think in terms of how the software’s released, there are a lot of parallels,” said Ratliff, noting how Satoshi’s initial email to Adam Back reads remarkably similar to those Le Roux sent to sources he intended to cite in the E4M documentation. Ratliff continued:

Le Roux, motivationally, lines up extremely well. He’s anti-government, obviously … he had complaints about banks going back to before he was involved in crime.

Because Le Roux worked on software for major Dutch and Australian banks, “he had an intimate knowledge of the banking system.” In addition, “there’s a lot of little writing things you can match up that kinda fit [but] there’s some that don’t,” said Ratliff. In his Wired article on the matter, published on July 16, Ratliff confesses to having “obsessively catalogued” Le Roux’s early life, concluding in his subsequent biography, “I wasted countless hours trying to determine if there was any connection” between Le Roux and Satoshi. “As far as I could tell, there wasn’t.”

In 2019, in light of new evidence ostensibly connecting the two, sparked by an unredacted footnote in a document from the Kleiman v. Wright lawsuit, Ratliff returned to his trove of documents on Le Roux, discovering “surprising correlations I’d missed or discounted the first time.” After a month down the Satoshi rabbit hole, he wrote:

I was able to convince a colleague with deep cryptocurrency knowledge, someone who’d followed every twist and turn of the Satoshi saga, that Le Roux was the odds-on solution to the mystery of who created bitcoin.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: news.bitcoin.com