Q: Why all the research?
A: Understanding the history and origins of cryptography, e-cash, cryptocurrency and Bitcoin was an interesting journey that spanned over 20 years. Finding the details and information of the key players that made 'Today' and the 'Tomorrow' possible was invaluable. Often one must understand the past to build the future.
This topic is pure gold! Thank you OP for spending so much time for bringing all these precious links. I am also very passionate about Bitcoin and its ancestors history (you can read here my 1000th post:
Bitcoin: The dream of Cypherpunks, libertarians and crypto-anarchists; at its bottom you can find more historical writings of mine).
Obviously, your topic and your work went undermerited, as people are more interested about
panem et circenses, therefore I sent you a 50 merits bomb (this being the second time I'm doing this) but not for your OP: it was for your first post in the topic, the one with all these valuable links. Another unfortunate aspect is that from all old forum members, only BitcoinFX appeared here...
I would have merited also the OP with 50 merits, but the forum allows to send only 50 merits in 30 days to a particular user. However, I believe you should change OP title a bit, as it is misleading now: "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Solved!". The subject is not solved...and maybe it will never be solved.
I'll come back in 30 days from now on to merit OP as well, but the "Solved" part should be changed.
Thank you once again for this very entertaining reading and for providing all these details!