In an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph during Virtual Blockchain Week, privacy coin advocate, fugitive, and self-proclaimed candidate for the president of the United States, John McAfee, asserted that he knows the identity of Satoshi Nakmoto with 99% certainty.

The discussion came following an eventful discussion at the conference, with McAfee rejecting COVID-19 as a government conspiracy and brandishing his AK-47 on camera.

McAfee is 99% certain he knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is

Speaking to Cointelegraph, McAfee described the popular belief that an individual named Satoshi designed Bitcoin as “nonsense,” stating: “It was a team of eleven people over a period of five years, that came up, eventually, with [Bitcoin].

“How they decided who would write the paper, I don’t know. But anybody who wants to know who it is — I mean, you know who the options are, you’ve got Craig Wright possibly, I’m not going to name everyone else otherwise you’ll figure out who it is, but somebody wrote the whitepaper,” he continued. 

McAfee identifies clues in Bitcoin whitepaper

McAfee asserts that linguistic analysis of the whitepaper, also known as stylometry, is all that is needed to uncover Satoshi’s identity.

“If you read the whitepaper, number one, it's totally clear he’s English — every single word that has a different spelling in English and American is English,” McAfee asserts.

“Number two, he left tells. There is only five percent of the population that has two spaces after a period — everything has two spaces after a period. And, the format of the document was identical to documents that he had published professionally,” he adds.

“If you buy a two-hundred dollar authorship program, and you take the whitepaper and you run it through, and you take any one of the papers that he’s published — all of these people wrote papers by the way, only one comes out with ninety-nine percent probability it's him.”

McAfee backs down on plan to out Satoshi

McAfee recounts that he had previously planned to publicly reveal Satoshi’s identity, before deciding against such after a phone call with the individual.

“I have spoken to him on the phone, I was actually going to divulge who he was. Why? Because all of this nonsense was just stupid, people wasting time over nothing — I was going to say, ‘listen, it was this guy,’” McAfee said.

“And you know what he told me? Very smart motherf*****, he said ‘Ok, what if you’re wrong?’ He goes, ‘if you’re right, then Satoshi is going to have to hire fifty security guards and change his life,  or else he will die.’ Why? Everyone is going to want a piece of him, including the governments that demand that he pay taxes.”

“He said, ‘Ok, if you’re right, then that person has the ability to do something. But what if you’re wrong? You will end up destroying an innocent man’s life forever, and probably cause his death,’” continued McAfee.

“At that moment, I said ‘I understand, I won’t say no more, and your name will never leave my lips.’ And that is why I never continued past Craig Wright, because the name would have to leave my lips.”

“But if you want to know, figure it out yourself, it's easy.“