http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/study-suggests-link-between-dread-pirate-roberts-and-satoshi-nakamoto/After Mr. Ulbricht was arrested last month, the scientists used public information to begin tracing Silk Road-related transactions. Among their discoveries was a particular transfer to an account controlled by Mr. Ulbricht from another that had been created in January 2009, during the very earliest days of the bitcoin network, which was set up the previous year.
In tracing various transactions made to and from Mr. Ulbrichts account, the authors found an intriguing one involving the transfer of 1,000 bitcoin, which would have been worth $60,000 when it was made on March 20 of this year, but is now worth roughly $847,000.
Proof that Satoshi was DPR wouldn't be a bad thing for Bitcoin; there's way too many people in this community who treat every word and every decision made by Satoshi as gospel rather than evaluating ideas on their own merits.
Having said that, if you had as many Bitcoins as Satoshi probably has $60k wouldn't be that much money to you; laundering it through the Silk Road as a starting point might make a lot of sense if you were still trying to stay anonymous and wanted to retain access to your funds.
EDIT: Academic paper's been posted:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/839348/silk-road-paper.pdfI'm not overly impressed... Given the suspicion is that the FBI confiscated the Silk Road "hot wallets", it sounds very plausible to me that this link is simply Satoshi (or some other very early adopter) making use of the Silk Road as a mixing service - they haven't at all ruled out that possibility.