There are ~8 billion people. Sounds big, but it's only 2^33. Ie if you can find 33 things about the text which halve the number of possible writers, you have narrowed it down to 1 person.

Just a couple more things and you can accommodate some of your things being mistaken/wrong/uncertain too.

It worked on me, and I would be shocked if my blog (dmd.3e.org) has more than a dozen readers. I am stunned.

Sure the cardinality is high, but the model isn't using a uniform prior. What do you suppose all the the values in each of the terms are, P(Text sample | Kelsey Piper) * P(Text sample) / P(Kelsey Piper)?

Maybe it just says all writing is Kelsey Piper.

Yes as long as a large enough corpus exists of your writing attached to your name somehow it’s fair to say that posting on the internet in a public forum using your own stylistic choices now can no longer be anonymous. To your point though, perhaps it’s possible to confound such systems defensively as well. Though IMO destroying your tone kind of destroys how you actually communicate with people and I wouldn’t find interacting with people like that appealing.

To be fair though, already this has been happening before LLM at a much more limited scale. Someone made a tool for HN several years ago that allows you to put your HN username in and identifies other users that write the most similarly to you. I find that interesting from the perspective of being able to interact with and discover people who think the same. It could be an interesting discovery feature of a well managed social network. Sadly probably there will be much more negative impacts of having this ability than positive ones.

One "solution" would be to have an AI rewrite your posts into a neutral style (I hate the idea of this though...)

I assume that there will be tools to refactor text to communicate the same intent but scramble the style. Using an LLM of course...

It's a hard stylometric challenge, just because of its format. The forum posts are probably better for comparison, but what I don't see people doing that I wish they would is comparing what the different Satoshi suspects have written since the forum posts and whitepaper.

Everybody's going to get more similar in terms of topic. Bitcoin actually exists now. There's more to say about it than there was at launch. But does anyone still sound like Satoshi? Or sound more like Satoshi than they did before?

The slight wrench in the works is that it's hard to do this with my personal favorite Satoshi candidate. He stopped writing altogether in 2014, and lost capacity from shortly after the whitepaper came out until he was writing with his eyes by the time he had his head frozen.

He's also the only candidate who seems more likely to me over time, though. The longer things go, the less likely a living person stays tight-lipped.

Problem is that it's been heavily contaminated with people speculating about who the author is. It would probably be difficult to get an unbiased answer out of it (although who knows - it's crazy that it can do this at all).

The whitepaper states the author, so…