Yesterday, the following question was posed here on SN:
Link to the conversation: #710037
Do most lay people know who Satoshi is lol
That's a fair question. Since my curiosity was piqued, and since I knew I'd be able to interact with several people today, I figured I'd just go ahead and do an informal poll.

Methodology

There were a few groups of people I surveyed. Each group <u>received only one of the two questions</u>. (Asking one question would contaminate the results of the other, Hawthorne Effect style, so, only one question was asked per group.)
The questions were:
  1. What is Satoshi Nakamoto famous for? (open ended question)
  2. Who started bitcoin? (multiple choice question, options below) Wei Dai Nick Szabo Hal Finney Satoshi Nakamoto Vitalik Buterin
For the second question, I originally wanted to include made up names rather than real ones. But, I was running late, in a hurry and just did what I could do. Originally I had Adam Back in there, but I wanted a varied "look" to the names so I put Vitalik in at the end. Maybe I shouldn't have used bitcoin (or ETH) related names...someone might truly think one of them actually is Satoshi and therefore indeed started bitcoin. But, my thinking was that if they're that much in the ballgame, they'll get it and say something.
As far as methods, I just gave a piece of paper, showed the question, let them write an answer, picked up the replies. For question 1, I did say, "If you don't know, just write that you don't know."

Stats and responses

Below is my notepad scratched out stat sheet.
The top half was in response to question 1., "What is Satoshi Nakamoto famous for?"
The bottom half are the tallies in response to question 2., "Who started bitcoin?"
And below are the responses to the question, "What is Satoshi Nakamoto famous for?"

Analysis

Question 1: What is Satoshi Nakamoto famous for?
The takeaway here is that only 3.5% of the people could look at the name Satoshi Nakamoto and place it with bitcoin. In the chat linked above, another person thought the number would be over 50%. I had guessed 20%. My data today was 3.5%.
We're still early.
Almost all of the answers were "I don't know." There were nine other answers, or guesses, though. The thing I found most intriguing was that three of the nine had to do with automobiles. The responses were "make vehicles," "car brand," and "a car guy." I want one! Other fun answers were "karate," "samurai," and "creator of Dragonball Z R.I.P."
Question 2: Who started bitcoin?
Given a list of names to choose from, Satoshi Nakamoto was identified as the bitcoin creator 41% of the time. Okay, the masses got the plurality correct, although still not at a 50% majority. What I found interesting was the spread of the other answers. If they didn't know about Satoshi, why did they choose the names they chose? "Szabo" must just have that bitcoin-coder name thing going on to garner 28%. And Hal Finney? That name just sounds friendly to me.
And that response in the bottom right in the image...that person has a future.

Satoshi car

Somebody help me out. I now need an A.I. mashup image of what a Satoshi Motors Company automobile would look like. Please post. Wen Satoshi car?

pinging @Bell_curve because you asked the question and @ZezzebbulTheMysterious because you wanted see the results.
#ai Made with multimodalart/FLUX.1-merged Prompt: A High Quality EV dealership. A Sign that says "Satoshi Nakamoto Motors" with the Bitcoin Logo. 16 Steps, Seed: 471489027
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Fascinating! Thank you for writing this experiment up and sharing your results. This is very repeatable now, and it will be interesting to see how this changes over time!
I am quite surprised at your results in Q1, and Q2 was possibly slight below our predictions! I was way off for Satoshi->Bitcoin recognition!
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Thanks for sharing!
Japanese names are more western friendly than Chinese.
People must have heard his name even if they can’t remember or pronounce it
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People must have heard his name even if they can’t remember or pronounce it
I think this is 100% right
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Any chance we can get a hint of the democraphics of the two groups?
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Age 16-18. 72% Hispanic, 15% white, 13% black.
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I’m impressed by the age range of the respondents
Median age in USA is almost 40 years. My guess is older folks know less about bitcoin. Teenagers, most have heard of bitcoin. More speculation
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Thanks!
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Taft 4 Oct
An excellent post!
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Yeah, when some people in that thread were saying that 30-40% would know who Satoshi was, I thought that was way too high.
It's easy to underestimate how uninformed most people are.
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Yeah, I think it's easy for us bitcoin geeks especially to forget this. Checking the drama in this space, pretty much daily and for years, it seems stunning. But, gotta remember, we (I) can forget that other people aren't necessarily interested in the same things.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Sirkay 5 Oct
Nice experiment. The question may not be totally new to some, but it somewhat got one thinking beyond the usual.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @senf 5 Oct
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How big was the sample?
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57 in q1 group, 39 in q2
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stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.