Monero Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for developers and users of the secure, private and untraceable cryptocurrency Monero. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
What if anything is conclusively known about Nicolas van Saberhagen?
Are there any educated guesses about who this person or group may be (similar to how there are guesses about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto) based on available clues? For example is it likely that this person or group is an academic or cryptographer based solely on the level of knowledge required to draft the CryptoNote white paper?
Reasonably, we have no real idea. This person or group is currently unknown just like Satoshi Nakamoto. The text in this Wikipedia article sums up some thoughts in the community about the creator(s) of CryptoNote:
The author of the white paper went by the name Nicolas van Saberhagen, although like Satoshi Nakamoto (the author of the bitcoin white paper) that name is likely a pseudonym. Saberhagen's true identity and location remains unknown. Some have claimed that the real creator is someone in the bitcoin community. Adam Back, Nick Szabo and even Satoshi Nakamoto himself have been floated as possible suspects, but there is little to no evidence actually supporting those claims.
Stanford Bitcoin Group’s possible involvement in creation of the CryptoNote protocol has also been discussed. Prior to CryptoNote cryptocurrency protocol, the domain cryptonote.org hosted an encrypted message application also named CryptoNote. This application was developed by the members of the Stanford Bitcoin Group but had not received wide recognition. This website currently hosts the CryptoNote technology.
Further reading:
http://bytecoiner.org/bytecoin-source-of-origin/
https://medium.com/@AckermanRonald/stanford-wide-gate-steep-steps-ad95cfccca21
