The one theory I've seen that makes it make sense is that Dave Kleiman was the real Satoshi Nakamoto. Kleiman died in 2013. Wright is trying to set up a claim on hundreds of millions of dollars of bitcoins, if they can ever be recovered from Kleiman's effects.
Someone posted on his P2P Foundation account back in March 2014 during the Dorian Nakamoto fiasco. I'd think it's very unlikely at best that Kleiman is Satoshi based on that alone.
That would be Wright's second choice for what to get you to believe. But as I see it, Kleiman doesn't have nearly the credentials to be Sakamoto. He was well-informed on cryptography - for a policeman, which is what he was.
There are only a handful of people in the world who can reliably design crypto protocols and have them not fail disastrously in practice. It's not something you do correctly at first try, so you can limit your search to academics who have published research on digital cash systems. You can count those people on one hand (and rule out most).
Dave Kleiman isn't one of them, he only wrote stuff on forensics (hard drive wiping and stuff).
I've read the original bitcoin paper, as well as thousands of academic papers, and written a few myself. The author of the bitcoin paper was clearly not an academic. They have an understanding of the form and style of academic writing. But they do things like include in the the source code for a c++ program to carry out an auxilary calculation. An academic would not have included that.
Kleiman has a plausible background for this. He was an obsessive self-learner, collecting professional certifications like baseball cards. He was familiar with academic writing but not an academic, familiar with programming but not a professional developer. He was active on many security and crpytography oriented mailing lists, including the metzdowd list where bitcoin was introduced.
Yes, it is pretty amazing, if Kleiman is the guy, that his first and only shot at introducing a cryptosystem had no major flaws. But that part would be amazing from just about anyone.
I find it a lot more plausible that someone can adapt their style to their audience. Satoshi wasn't selling an academic idea, but a practical implementation which he hoped people would use. It's a lot more natural to include source in such a thing.
But that part would be amazing from just about anyone.
Thing is, you don't have to assume it if you posit that Nick Szabo, Wei Dai, or Hal Finney - or some combination of them - wrote it. They were working on a very closely related concept, Bit gold. Szabo's Bit gold paper may be the academic counterpart to Satoshi's technical white paper directed at the crypto mailing list community.
It's also plausible, but more farfetched, that a senior cryptographer like David Chaum could have done it. This would still be impressive, since they would have had to have done the groundwork in secret (unlike if it's Szabo and friends, in which case it would be in public in the form of the Bit Gold stuff). But someone like Kleiman - no.
